Logical Function in Selected English Nursery Tales: Systemic Functional Perspective

This study investigated the logical function of clause complexes in two selected English nursery tales, Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Beanstalk, using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. The research focuses on the realization of clause interpendency through the taxis system (parataxis, hypotaxis, and taxis combination) and logico-semantic relations (elaboration, extension, enhancement, idea and locution). The method employed is qualitative content analysis based on Krippendorf involving processes such as unitizing, sampling, coding, reducing, interpreting, and narrating. From 1,048 clauses analyzed, 341 wereidentified as clause complexes. The findings show that enhancement is the most dominant logico-semantic relation (164 cases), followed by extension (123 cases), elaboration (100 cases), locution (57 cases), andidea (22 cases). The findings show that paratxis is the most dominant taxis in selected English nursery tales. While hypotaxis relations mostly realized in enhancement, while extension appeared dominantly in parataxis. These results reveal that although nursery tales are intended for children, they often employ complex grammatical structure, therefore, balancing narrative engagement and linguistic accessibility is crucial to support children’s language development and reading comprehension.