ABSTRACT
For reasons examined and discussed in Nørgaard (2003), Halliday’s systemic functional approach to language (cf. Halliday 1994) has much to offer the literary critic who needs a consistent way of dealing with the linguistic construction of meaning in literature. Hallidayan linguistics invites analysts to consider how language simultaneously represents the world (experiential meaning), constructs interpersonal relations (interpersonal meaning) and creates text (textual meaning), and provides tools for describing how these meanings are constructed by linguistic means. This chapter presents Halliday’s three metafunctions of language, followed by analysis of the three types of meaning in the introductory passage of William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The analysis concludes by considering Faulkner’s text as a functional act of communication between author and reader. Unlike the chapters on typography, layout, images, book-cover designs and the materiality of the novel which follow, this chapter builds on a branch of stylistics that is already well established (cf. e.g. Toolan 1998; Nørgaard 2003; Lin 2016). The Hallidayan approach to literary analysis is presented as a backdrop to the treatment of other modes and their interaction with wording in subsequent chapters.
