Text Formation in the Poetry of Robin S. Ngangom and Mamang Dai: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Comparative Study

Abstract

Being an active field for the interplay of diverse linguistic processes such as condensation, displacement, substitution and ellipsis manifested through a wide variety of literary devices in the pursuit to expand the semantic possibilities of language and communicate the experiential and interpersonal meanings aesthetically, the language of poetry and the unique ways by which different linguistic elements in it are structured and sequenced has always been a matter of curiosity among the linguists (Levin 1963a, Baker 1967, Landon 1968, Jakobson 1968, Cable 1970, Cureton 1981, Muller 1981). Expanding the scope of this linguistic enquiry to the poetry of North-East India, the present paper by the use of SFL model of taxis explores the text construction strategies in the poems of two hitherto linguistically unexplored North-East Indian poets Robin S. Ngangom and Mamang Dai in an endeavor to ascertain the most frequently used structures in the poems of these two poets, the tactic relations in the clause complexes in their poems, the use of embedding in their structures and the similarities or variations in the poetry of these two poets on account of the usage of taxis and embedding.