The application of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyse literary texts has been a prevalent approach in the field of stylistics. However, previous studies have mainly focused on the three metafunctions, that is the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions, on the level of the clause, ignoring the logical metafunction on the level of the clause complex. Therefore, the present study seeks to examine the composition of clause complexes and explicate how clause complexing is related to the reader’s interpretation of literary meaning, especially that of characterisation. To achieve this, a comparative method is adopted to explain in what sense the author’s actual choices of clause complexes differ from alternatives that could have been chosen and also in what sense the choices shape into a coherent pattern throughout the text. My case study is James Joyce’s short story ‘Two Gallants’, a text that has already been successfully investigated from the Hallidayan approach. My main findings suggest that the deceptively simple style of clause complexing in Joyce’s text is in fact loaded with semantic density and incongruity that serve the purpose of characterisation. The study aims to show that we would miss many subtle details in the text in terms of characterisation if we skip the construction of clause complexes. Accordingly, the reading of nuances between the clauses might offer us a new perspective not just to interpret Joyce’s short story and but also to better understand his writing style.

Halliday的系统功能语言学在分析文学文本方面的应用一直是文体学领域的一种流行方法。但是，以前的研究主要集中在从句层面上的经验，人际和文本三个功能，即从句层面上的经验元功能，而忽略从句复杂层面上的逻辑元功能。因此，本研究试图检验从句复合词的构成，并阐明从句复合词与读者对文学意义，尤其是表征的理解之间的关系。为了达成这个，采用一种比较方法来解释作者在什么意义上对从句复合词的实际选择与本来可以选择的选择不同，并且在什么意义上选择在整个文本中形成了一个连贯的模式。我的案例研究是詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce）的短篇小说《两个勇敢者》（Two Gallants），该文本已通过哈里代扬（Hallidayan）方法成功地进行了研究。我的主要发现表明，乔伊斯文本中从句看似简单的子句复合风格实际上充满了语义密度和不一致，可用于表征。该研究旨在表明，如果我们跳过从句复合词的构造，那么在表征方面会错过许多细微的细节。因此，