Transitivity in English Literary and Legal Texts: A Comparative Study | ||
| Journal of Tikrit University for the Humanities | ||
| Article 1, Volume 23, Issue 10, December 2016, Pages 556-592 | ||
| Author | ||
| Nawwaf Mohammed Abdulla Al-Mahjoob | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Transitivity is one of the most significant analytic tools in systemic functional grammar. This study investigates the relationship between linguistic structure and meaning in both literary and legal texts according to the notion of transitivity developed by Halliday in his Systemic Functional Grammar (1985) and (1994), and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) and (2014). Particularly, the study focuses on the analysis of transitivity according to the different process types in the experiential meaning, i.e., the material process, relational process, mental process, behavioural process, verbal process, and existential process. However, the notion of transitivity in systemic functional grammar is different from that in traditional grammar. As a matter of fact, it is because traditional grammar could not account for all types of transitivity that transitivity in its new uniform appeared. It is argued that since literary and legal texts belong to two different genres, they may exhibit significant differences with regard to the subject of the study. It is concluded, among other things, that the dominant process type in the literary text is the material process, whereas the dominant one in the legal text is the relational process. | ||
|
Statistics Article View: 106 PDF Download: 66 |
||