NOUN TAXONOMY IN LITERARY DISCOURSE: A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHILDREN'S VS. ADULT LITERATURE

Abstract

This study explores the distributional patterns and functional importance of noun and its kinds in children's and adult literature, adopting a corpus-based quantitative methodology supported by Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) analysis. The study  Analyzes 99,852 common nouns in children's literature in comparison with 98,597 common nouns in adult literature, beside, systematic differences in concrete, uncountable nouns, compound, collective and, this study finds  pedagogically important differentiation in discourse creation. The findings of the research investigate those children’s literature possess excessive usage of concrete and collective nouns (38,881 and 24,901 occurrences respectively), supporting intangible convenience and societal learning. On the contrary, adult literature displays high frequency of abstract nouns (12,671) and uncountable noun (3,769), which supports intricate ideational connotation. Systemic Functional Grammar investigation explores that these distributions of noun function evidently within transitivity systems, nominal groups, and theme-rheme structures, encoding different pedagogical rationale. The study is significant for to literacy pedagogy by signifying they way noun categorization constructs discourse registers particular to developmental readiness and cognitive intricacy, with proposition for curriculum planning, text selection, and unambiguous grammar teaching.