A Reading of “The Picnic” Story from The Destroyed Book Story Collection by Aboutorab Khosravi from the Perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics at the Level of Ideational Metafunction

Halliday's theory of functional linguistics explores language and its structure in terms of the meaning of the text and shows how context and meaning organize the particular language of a text. The theory reveals the relationship between language, meaning, society and culture in three domains, namely ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction. Examining and analyzing the literary text from the perspective of each of the domains of this functional theory—ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions—leads to an objective and scientific interpretation of the text. In the present study, we have offered a reading of one of the stories from Aboutorab Khosravi's The Destroyed Book story collection, namely "The Picnic", focusing on the ideational metafunction in Halliday's systematic functional linguistics, and have shown how the author's narrative mindset and postmodernist discourse governing the story are represented through language and the transitive structure of clauses which are realized through verb processes, process participants, and circumstantial elements. The findings of the linguistic analysis of the text and the statistical data of the research were in line with the semantic system of the text and the ontological and postmodernist field of the narrative. We also analyzed the two circumstantial elements of time and place, due to their high frequency in the narrative, based on Bakhtin’s Chronotope Theory, and showed how these circumstantial elements that formed the temporal-spatial continuum of the narrative framed the conceptual and semantic system of the narrative and how the narrator's experience of reality and the world around him is represented through verb processes and transitive structures.