The Stylistic Study of a Contemporary Persian Story from Halliday's Functional Approach

There are three metafunctions in systemic functional linguistics named, textual, experiential and interpersonal metafunctions. According to Halliday these metafunctions are considered as three different semantic levels in which clauses can be analyzed. One of this analysis results is stylistics. The purpose of the present article is to analyze a contemporary short story of Zoya Pirzad named “the opposite bench” according to the said metafunctions of systemic functional linguistics, to determine stylistic patterns of the said short story. It is necessary to note that there is not complete overlap between stylistic concept in literature on the one hand and linguistic or functional approach on the other. But they are relatively coincident in some general and basic cases. The short story which is analyzed clause by clause based on the said theory in this paper, consists of 233 clauses but because of paper size limitations, we just mentioned 19 clauses which are the most important ones. We conclude that in most clauses the chief character of the story (hero) is considered as the departure point and the story focuses on him and his affairs. Plenty usage of declarative modality and past tense clauses is the result of the story style which is narrative. Using positive clauses here sustains the validity of clause based on the writer’s opinion. The existence of modal adjuncts in clauses shows the writer’s confidence and approach. Meanwhile the number of material processes indicates the different events in the story.