Ambiance of Ideational Meta-function in the Short Stories ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Necklace’

Abstract

This study is aimed at describing the ideational function in Edger Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and Guy De Maupassant’s The Necklace. It delves deep into exploring the lexico-grammatical strategies used in these short stories to convey the style of the author as his representation. The grammar of clauses as transitive patterns encodes ideational meanings about the participants’ role, experience, processes and circumstances. By finding transitive patterns in the clauses of the text, we can describe in detail how different fields of situations are being constructed. In this way, the researchers propose a reading demonstration/observation of the texts of the two writers from two different eras in the history of English literature. The researchers are intended to point out the patterns of ideational function pervading in the lexico-grammatical structures of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and Guy De Maupassant’s The Necklace to highlight authors’ techniques of foregrounding the ideational meta-function with varying styles and frequencies.