A Stylistic Study of Debate Processes Based on Halliday's Functional Linguistics Theory

The study of the prominent poetic debates in Persian literature can make significant contributions to genre and stylistic studies. Given the importance of debates in classical texts and their relation with public discourse, the present research studied eight prominent poetic debates from the fourth to the seventh centuries. Considering the situational context of the texts and the contexts in which they had been formed, Halliday's systemic functional approach was used to explain the debates. A descriptive-analytical method was adopted to study the debates in terms of the ideational metafunction: the process of actions. The findings of the research indicate that the analyzed poetic debates had undergone transformations with regard to the ideational metafunction. The material processes were the most frequent in the prominent debates of the fourth and seventh centuries but with a different function in each century.  Moreover, the relational processes had the highest frequency in the prominent debates of the fifth and sixth centuries. Such transformations show that from the fourth to the seventh centuries, the debates shifted away from objectivity and extroversion towards subjectivity and introversion. In other words, how to use debate processes considerably evolved over the four centuries.