Foregrounding Nature's Role: A Functionalist Ecostylistic Study of The Hungry Tide

Abstract

The study of language and ecology is a recent topic in linguistic studies. The current study investigates language patterns that are employed to describe the powerful role of nature. The main aims of this study are: to conduct an ecostylistic analysis of some selected extracts from Amitav Ghosh's novel, The Hungry Tide, by using a functional technique to examine the type of agency and transitivity processes that are presented in these extracts. Furthermore, it aims at highlighting the ecological linguistic traits in the data. The eclectic method is based on Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Zurru (2017). Stylistic tools aid to reveal the connection between human and non-human participants. The chosen extracts are ecostylistically examined to show the relationship that may be built between environmental studies and stylistics. The main contribution of this study is to link the importance of the environment and its issues to human existence in literary language. Moreover, ecological stylistic features and the author's word choices that portray the role of nature are identified in the literary text.