Comparative Analysis of Majalis-i Sab'e and Makatib Based on Ideational Metafunction in Halliday's Functional Grammar

Functional linguistics is one of the most significant linguistic approaches of the 20th century, emphasizing the role of language and its structural units while examining structures beyond the sentence, namely, the text. The foundation of Halliday's Grammar relies on two attributes: Systemic and Functional. The semantic system encompasses the broadest functions of language; which Halliday calls metafunction. According to Halliday's Functional Grammar, there are six types of Ideational Metafunction: material, mental, relational, behavioral, existential, and verbal. This study employs a descriptive-analytical method to comparatively analyze these six processes in two of Mowlavi's prose works, Majalis-i Sab'e and Makatib. The aim is to answer the question of whether there is a relationship between the frequency of these process types and the textual and rhetorical structures that are considered prominent features of these works. This analysis seeks to shed light on these works’ stylistics based on ideational metafunction proposed in Halliday's Functional Grammar, thus providing insight into the author's worldview. The obtained results indicate that in Majalis-i Sab'e, the material process is more frequent, while in Makatib, the relational process has a higher frequency. This difference can be attributed to the nature of the discourse in each work. Majalis-i Sab'e consists of sermons and public speeches while Makatib comprises letters written by Mowlavi. Furthermore, among the nine peripheral elements, the spatial element has a high frequency in both works. Considering that the material process is the factor that raises transitivity and the relational process is the factor that lowers the transitivity of the text, low transitivity of Makatib has been compensated to some extent by the high frequency of the peripheral elements. This compensation allows the text to fulfill its intended purpose of teaching ethics and humanity.