A Functional Analysis of Psalm 139 in the Bible

Researches and studies of discourse analysis have been thick and fast both domestically and internationally. Halliday points out that the aim of Systemic Functional Grammar has been to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English. Therefore, Systemic Functional Grammar has been widely used to analyze discourses of various fields, for example, science and technology, law, novels, poems, advertisements and English idioms, etc. However, as far as the author of this book knows, not much work has been done on psalms, a type of religious discourse, from the Systemic Functional perspective. Therefore, the current study will adopt Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical basis and analyze one psalm in the Bible. It is a functional discourse analysis as well as an attempt to apply Systemic Functional Grammar to the study of religious discourse, thus providing something enlightening to those who are interested in discourse analysis, especially religious discourse analysis.