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The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics Functionalist Stylistics This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 26 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics Michael Burke Functionalist stylistics Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315795331.ch3 Patricia Canning Published online on: 18 Feb 2014 How to cite :- Patricia Canning. 18 Feb 2014, Functionalist stylistics from: The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics Routledge Accessed on: 26 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315795331.ch3 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 Functionalist stylistics Patricia Canning Introduction In Shakespeare’s Macbeth the only certainty regarding the death of the reigning monarch, King Duncan, is that he was killed. This much is explicit in the play text (‘our royal master’s murdered!’ II.iii.83). Arguably, we pretty much ‘know’ that the eponymous hero did it, even though this information is merely implied (‘I have done the deed’ II.ii.14). However, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Canning 2010) it is not clear from the text of the play that Macbeth actually did anything to anyone. While not wishing to make an affective judgement on interpretation, how do we account for intuiting any knowledge from a text when events are not explicitly delineated in black and white, as it were? In Macbeth, as in every literary text, actions, events, states of being and the like are key aspects of the ‘story’ encoded therein. For example, consider your personal response to David in the following (very) short story: ‘While waiting for the bus, David idly kicked an old tin can.’ We might think David was a bit bored, but relatively harmless. We may even expect to fi nd the words ‘kicked’, ‘old’, ‘tin’ and ‘can’ in the same sentence. However, we might think differently about David if we read that, ‘While waiting for the bus, David viciously kicked an old tin can.’ The modifying adverb ‘viciously’ suggests a more insidious action which may negatively infl uence our opinion of David. But what if we replaced the object in the fi rst example, ‘an old tin can’, with ‘his little brother’? The more generous amongst us may deduce that David is impulsive or bored, while others may intuit or import some contextual clues (such as the nature of sibling relationships) and deduce that he has an axe to grind with his ‘victim’. If we remove the circumstantial adjunct (‘while waiting for the bus’), to leave ‘David kicked his little brother’, we may simply conclude (without any circumstantial indicators to ‘explain’ David’s behaviour) that David is downright horrible. The ‘story’ of David building in our minds is shaped by the linguistic formulations that tell it. However, it also relies on factors external to language – our perception of violence as socially unacceptable, for example, or 45 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 05:50 26 Sep 2021; For: 9781315795331, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315795331.ch3 Patricia Canning our understanding of functional (or dysfunctional) familial relationships, and so on. In other words, language does not function in a vacuum– it does not ‘do’ or mean everything in and of itself. Functionalist stylistics is concerned with the relationship between the forms of language as a system and the context or situation of its production, as well as the social, cultural and political (what we may collectively call ideological) factors that impact upon its construction and reception. In other words, functional stylistics deals with the connections between what Leech (2008, p. 104) calls ‘language and what is not language’. In what follows, I aim to develop these connections by exploring what it is that language can ‘do’. I begin with an outline of the historical background to functional stylistics as a discipline, before moving on to consider its functionality in real, practical terms. Historical perspectives Traditionally, functionalist stylistics has often been regarded as distinct from formalist linguistics (Saussure 1916, Chomsky 1957, 1986) insofar as the latter is concerned with (among other things) the semantic function of the formal properties of the language system, that is, its propositional meaning (see Burke and Evers, Chapter 2 in this volume). On the other hand, functionalist approaches (Halliday 1994, Halliday and Hasan 1976) are fundamentally concerned with the ways in which the formal properties of language are used pragmatically. Saussure developed the concept of language as a semiotic system which involved the simultaneous selection from a vertical axis of ‘choice’ (what he termed ‘paradigmatic relations’) and a horizontal axis of combination (‘syntagmatic relations’). Functionalists developed the structural model of language to account for the variety of uses of language, and in so doing they explored the motivations behind the selections and combinations that gave rise to their meaning potential. The distinction – or rather, the continuum that connects the two schools of thought – could be loosely understood as being along an axis of language and language use. For functionalists, the context of a language event is as important as the formal features of which it is comprised. Building on Malinowski’s (1923) work on the importance of situational context, and Firth’s ‘Personality in language and society’ (1950), Halliday (1971, 1985, 1994, 2004) has often been credited with developing the key concepts of functionalist stylistics. In his work An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1994), Halliday developed the idea that language has three primary roles or functions which intersect to make meaning. The example ‘David kicked an old tin can’ has three interrelated functions in Halliday’s terms (1994, p. 34): it contains a ‘message’ (the information about David and his action), it is an ‘exchange’ (‘a transaction between a speaker and a listener or writer and reader’), and it is a means of ‘representation’ (‘a construal of some process in ongoing human experience’). Thus, Halliday observes, language has a tripartite function, which can be broken down into three interconnecting ‘metafunctions’ as follows: a. Ideational – to express ideas and experience (clause as representation) b. Interpersonal – to mediate in the establishment of social relationships (clause as exchange) c. Textual – to provide the formal properties of language (clause as message) While all three metafunctions can be explored independently, it is important to note that each simultaneously informs the production and interpretation of meaning to differing degrees, so that, as Eggins (2004, p. 21) puts it, a text’s pivotal nature is the ‘meeting point of contextual 46 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 05:50 26 Sep 2021; For: 9781315795331, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315795331.ch3 Functionalist stylistics and linguistic expression’. The fact that these three metafunctions overlap means that any study of a text’s meaning potential can make good use of all of them, offering a more robust analysis than would otherwise be the case with one or another. Thus, I aim to explore the scope of functionalist linguistics through an application of some of the contiguous stylistic models through which the metafunctions are traditionally espoused. I am particularly interested in the ways in which they intersect to encode and express ideas, particularly ideas about race. Using H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines as a point of departure, I will explore the ways in which transitivity, a feature of the ideational metafunction, offers a way of reading behind Haggard’s text to uncover a colonial worldview. Firstly, however, drawing from Halliday and Hasan (1976), I will examine how cohesion, a feature of the textual metafunction, helps readers to ‘make sense’ – from a particular point of view – of the characters the text describes. My argument will be that cohesion helps structure our perceptions of the social relationships that obtain between characters. Moreover, the interpersonal metafunction offers a framework (modality) through which these relationships are reinforced and modulated. In short, I aim to show how the metafunctions of language intersect to take account of a text and the context of its production – what Malinowski (1923) calls the ‘context of situation’ – in a specifi c social and cultural milieu. Textual metafunction Each of the metafunctions of language can be elucidated through particular grammatical features or models. Part of the textual metafunction of language, cohesion (Halliday and Hasan 1976) refers to the way in which sentences are related or linked together in order to make sense. This ‘internal organisation’ (Eggins 2004, p. 29) is realised grammatically through a series of cohesive devices such as conjunction, ellipsis, substitution and reference, and relies on the reader’s ability to make the necessary linkages between the two (or more) elements that are semantically tied together. Cohesion is also realised lexically through the repetition of certain words or collocation (Firth 1957, Hoey 2005, Toolan 2009), which is to say words that would reasonably be expected to co-occur (like ‘old’, ‘tin’, and ‘can’ in the example above). Texts exhibiting a high number of cohesive ties will be processed much easier and faster than texts with less cohesion (compare Hemmingway with Joyce, for example) because less effort is required to make sense of the text.
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