Ujjal Jeet
Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, Punjab. ORCID: 0000-0003-1897-2142. Email: ujjal.eng@gndu.ac.in
Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.34
Abstract
This paper is a functional stylistic study of a selected passage from Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing. In the novel The Grass is Singing, a white woman in Rhodesia is killed by her black servant but surprisingly the murder instead of bringing a stir spreads a silence in the local white community. Further, the text on an intuitive reading seems to absolve the murderer of the crime which forms the research question of the paper. Thus, close and systematic textual analysis of the text representing the murder scene was conducted and it was found that the linguistic choices of the text does create a semantic universe where the murder and the murdered are allegorical figures representing nature and nurture in a mutual conflict. The methodology for linguistic analysis of the selected text is borrowed from Michael Halliday’s theoretical system Systemic Functional Linguistics. The text is analysed by means of transitivity system which provides the investigative tools to study the representational choices of the text.
Keywords: Functional Stylistics; Systemic Functional Linguistics; Transitivity; Ideational metafunction; Experiential Choices; Lessing Studies