Analysing Meaning Potential in Verbal Art: A Discourse-functional Perspective on Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the construal of socio-political meanings in Faiz Ahmad Faiz with a focus on his artistry work titled ‘mujh se pahli si Mohabbat’ to help unfold higher patterns of organization at the level of transitivity choices to reflect the underlying perspective.Drawing on the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) for the transitivity analysis (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) the study highlights the meaning potential encoded through the process types. As referred above, the selected poem comprises twenty-nine clauses that were written originally in Urdu language but for the ease of the readership, the transliterated text is adopted from Hasan (2009). She (ibid) proposes a theory of verbal art that extends the higher level of linguistic patterns to encode sublime meaning potential. The analysis shows that apparently, the poem appears to express the plight of circumstances but it is a tragic tale of misery and despair propounded at the crossroad of love and revolution. The findings also reveal that the dominant process type in the poem is the existential one with the male protagonist narrating the tale of socio-cultural agonies and the subsequent is the material process type which posits the significant meaning potential regarding inflicting pain in apolitical turmoil.