Stylistic Study of the Verbs in Gulistan: An Approach to Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar

Sa’di’s Gulistan has always been considered as one of the most important sublime masterpieces of Persian literature. Regarding to stylistic researches on Gulistan, one of the peculiarities of Sa’di’s artistic techniques is to select the verbs in such a way to reflect the influence of didactic qualities. In Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, the verb category is also considered as a process of transitivity system (grammatical ability for representation of experience in language), ideational and experiential meta-functions. The study of the types and frequencies of the processes leads to the achievement of the author’s mental status and style. In the stylistic study of texts, transitivity system makes it possible to select the processes systematically and to represent the author’s intentions. The goal of this article is to study the main components of masterpieces like Gulistan and to describe its features. To attain this goal, having explained the processes and its types, seven parts of Gulistan (the first seven Babs) and their frequencies are studied at the first step. The study reveals that Sa’di has paid attention to the selection of the processes and the capability of the simultaneous artistic repetitions besides meaning and rhythm. Since most Sadi’s examples are of behavioral nature, it is concluded that the main concentration of Gulistan is on humans, social relationship and the didactic principles.