COMBINING METONYMY AND SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR AS AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR POETRY

Abstract

The challenges faced by readers in their understanding of literary texts lies in the nature of the language resources that have been employed by their writers. Sometimes, this results in a gap between the reader’s expectations—being a result of the relationship between the wordings and their graphological realisations—and the writer’s intentions. What happens then?I have analysed the first 16 lines of a 40-line poem using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic framework to achieve functional groupings of the writer’s linguistic choices. Thereafter each functional grouping is analysed for the cognitive processes, specifically the Idealised Cognitive Models that the writer’s choices may work within With such a combination of the two linguistic sub-fields, an internally consistent interpretation and possible deep meanings of the literary texts are uncovered. This could become the basis for future pedagogical studies, teaching students to reach a consistent deep meaning of a literary text that may or may not include the array of literary techniques available to them.