The effect of Situational Context on the Semantics of Epithets in Mousavi’s and Sa‛ādah’s Poetry from the view of Halliday’s Functional Linguistics

As an effective instrument in functional linguistics for examining the factors affecting the inference of meanings, situational context probes the relationship of words and sentences to instances outside the language system. The study of this context leads to an understanding of the meanings of literary techniques, including epithets. epithets are the artistic use of adjectives in the speech that has different meanings in the context of literary speech. With a descriptive-analytical method and the American school of comparative literature, the study seeks to analyze the semantics of epithets in the poetry of Hafez Mousavi (1954), the contemporary Iranian poet, and Wadī‛ Sa‛ādah (1948), according to Halliday’s Functional Linguistics. The results showed that the meanings of the epithets in two poets’ poetry could be divided into two categories-- dark and light. The frequency of dark epithets was higher than light ones due to the depiction of social issues. However, there is often a glimmer of hope throughout their poetry. Narrativity and appropriate verbs are the most prominent features of the stylistic epithets in the two poets’ poetry. The poets’ choices as the prominent participants in the clauses caused their direct presence in the poetry space. The Notification mood is frequent in the clauses, inducing the concept of probability and commonality in the form of the dependency aspect element because the two poets choose epithets as an arena to express their biographies and societies.