The Contributions of Systemic Functional Linguistics to Literary Text Analysis

Abstract

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) refers to some kind of text analysis, including an analysis of literary language. Some research has verified the study of the literary text using this linguistic apparatus; however the use of SFL in literary text analysis is relatively rare. Therefore, this study investigated the contributions of SFL to literary text analysis. The data of the study were 20 scientific articles focusing on literary text analysis using SFL. The analysis used content analysis to expose the segments of the story analyzed and the components of SFL to analyze them. The findings showed that the method of analysis using SFL on the literary text has brought new perspectives to the researchers, and provided some possible future studies in literary works. Moreover, the study of literary texts is regarded not merely as interpretative practices but as explanatory categories for each segment of a literary text.