Transitivity - 6 views
started by virginiacammi on 22 Nov 14
started by virginiacammi on 22 Nov 14
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started by virginiacammi on 22 Nov 14
Transitivity refers to the way meaning is represented in a clause. The
choices made in the system of transitivity indicate the way the writer sees
the world around her/him. As transitivity is concerned with the representation
of the mental picture that a writer has of the world, it involves the transmission
of ideas and therefore belongs to the ideational function (Halliday 1985).
Transitivity realizes the ideational function by expressing processes. According
to Halliday (1973:134), "transitivity is the set of options whereby the speaker
encodes his experience of the process of the external world, and of the
internal world of his own consciousness, together with the participants in
these processes and their attendant circumstances (...)". Transitivity thus
focuses on how a writer represents who acts (who is agent) and who is
acted upon (who is affected by the actions of others). Since transitivity, as
part of the ideational function, portrays the writer's world-view, many critical
analysts have investigated it as a means of uncovering the links between
language and ideology, and which meanings are fore grounded, back grounded
or not included in a text.
Transitivity refers to three basic elements present in a clause. The
first is a process (the semantic nucleus of the clause), consisting of an
obligatory verb or adjective; it involves the event or state of affairs described
in the clause. This process is combined with one or more nouns or noun
phrases which indicate the participants in the event or the state of affairs.
The process may also be accompanied by one or more circumstances. In
terms of participants, the doer of the action is called agent, and the persons
or objects acted upon are called affected participants, or patients.
Circumstances, the third element in the system of transitivity, are expressions
which indicate the time, place or manner of the event described in the clause
(Fowler 1991:73-6).
Halliday divides the processes expressed by transitivity into different
categories, according to what they represent. So, actions are classified as
material processes, or processes of doing; speech is classified as verbal
process, or process of saying; states of mind are called mental processes
or processes of sensing; and states of being are called relational processes
or processes of being (Simpson 1993).
When expressing in texts the events that go on around and within
them, writers can choose between different processes and participants, and
between which of these participants will act or be acted upon; the choices
made will be reflected in the syntax of the text. So, the basic principle of
transitivity can be expressed by a question: who or what does what to
whom or what? The analysis of transitivity choices, as Mills argues, "is
primarily concerned with the roles of human participants" (1995:143). The
main insight that the notion of transitivity offers is that every text could have
been produced differently, and these different versions would have
represented alternative points of view.
A process may be expressed linguistically in a number of ways, each
of them signifying a different way of seeing. In the scope of critical discourse
analysis, an investigation of transitivity aims at assessing which cultural,
ideological, political or theoretical factors have influenced the way a process
is expressed in a particular text (Fairclough 1992). A very important concern
in analysing transitivity is whether agency, causality and responsibility are
made clear or not in the text.
Transitivity and Critical linguistics as theory and method
Critical Linguistics emerges from the work of Fowler et al in 1979 in their book Language and Control. According to Fowler (1991), the aim of critical linguistics is most importantly to formulate a linguistic analysis of public discourse designed to get at the ideology coded implicitly behind overt prepositions, to examine them particularly in the context of social formations. In the aspect of the press and news-making, this aim is much more germane.
Hodge (1979) sees newspapers as providing only a partial version of the world. They select, reorganize, transform, distort and suppress realities with a view to underscoring their ideological interests. News is as such thought of to be socially constructed rather than a value-free capturing of events and people. Fowler (1991) maintains that "news" is more of "ideas", "propositions", "values", "ideologies" etc. The social construction of reality or news entails a subjective ontological interpretation of issues, people and events passed as the reality of things. He argues that news is socially constructed due to the following points. First, newspapers select what to report or what constitutes news among other occurrences. This selection is itself not done value-free as this may involve the exclusion of other issues that may be news worthy. Closely related to this is the issue of news values which mostly pander to arbitrary interests. He also argues that newspapers operate with stereotypes which help in creating 'socially constructed mental pigeonhole' into which people and events are sorted. Our discussion earlier of the orientalist perception of the Arabs falls into this category. Fourthly, there is also the consideration of socio-economic values associated with the press which may influence their reportage.
These constraints identified by Fowler would hamper any objective reportage of the press. So Critical Linguistics seeks " by studying the minute details of linguistic structure in the light of the social and historical situation of the text, to display to consciousness the patterns of belief and value which are encoded in the language - and which are below the threshold of notice for anyone who accepts the discourse as natural" (Fowler1991, 67).
The linguistic facility that best serves as the analytical tool kit for CL is transitivity (Fowler 1991). As Simpson (1993, 104) also puts "the transitivity model provides one means of investigating how a reader's or listener's perception of the meaning of a text is pushed in a particular direction and how the linguistic structure of a text is pushed in a particular direction and how the linguistic structure of a text effectively encodes a particular worldview"
Transitivity is better understood in the context of general clausal functions developed by MAK Halliday. Halliday (1994) maintains that the clause is a multifunctional construct consisting of three metafunctional lines of meaning. This notion is a departure from traditional grammar that only studies and analyzes a clause structurally. The three metafunctions of a clause involve the textual (clause as message), the interpersonal (clause as exchange) and the experiential (clause as representation). These three metafunctions conflate or map into each other in a single clause providing a tripartite dimensions of meaning. Our basic concern, in this thesis, is the "experiential" also called the "ideational" clause. In this clause, our experiences are chunked into quanta of change by the grammar of the clause, and each quantum of change as a figure (of happening, doing, sensing, saying, being or having). All figures involve a process unfolding through time and participants being directly involved in this process in some way; and in addition there may be circumstances of time, space, cause, manner etc. All such figures are sorted out in the grammar of the clause. The clause here is thus a mode of reflection, of imposing order on the endless variation and flow of events. The grammatical system by which this is achieved is the Transitivity System. Transitivity, in essence, construes the world of experience into a manageable set of "process types" with each process providing its own schema for construing a particular domain of experience as a figure of a particular kind. The process types here are six as outlined by Halliday (1994). They are material, behavioural, mental, verbal, relational and existential. The three main processes are the material, mental and relational, while the other categories are found at the boundaries of these processes. However, the processes that are most germane to this research are the material, verbal and relational which mostly are used by journalists in reporting about events, issues and happenings. It is important to note also that the concept of transitivity in functional grammar involves the process, the participants in the process, and the circumstance associated with the process. The process is realized by a verbal group, the participants usually by a nominal group and the circumstance by an adverbial or prepositional group. The participants are further realized by more iconic names. The participants in transitivity are not just "subjects" or "objects" as obtained in traditional grammar, but as entities with particular forms of functions. In the material clause that does with "happenings" and "doings", for instance, we have the agents, the goal, the beneficiary or the affected all depending on the sort of activity and valency represented. In traditional grammar, a verb is determined as transitive or intransitive depending on the construction of the action.
Invariably, the concept of transitivity relates to "ergativity" in material clauses. Halliday (1994), states that all transitivity systems in all languages are some synthesis of these two semantic models of processes, the transitive and the ergative. According to Downing and Locke (2005), ergative pair also called (anti-causative) occurs when the affected object of a transitive clause is the same as the affected subject of an intransitive clause. In this example:
I rang the bell
"The bell" is the affected participant, but in: "The bell rang" we have a state where "the bell" is the subject of the process "rang". Ergatively, "the bell" is only the medium through which the process is actualized, and the agent initiator is backgrounded. The test for recognizing an ergative pair is that the causative-transitive, two participant structure must always allow for the corresponding one participant, anti causative structure (as in "I rang the bell' and 'The bell rang"). Halliday (1994) maintains that by interpreting processes ergatively and transitively, we will be able to understand many features of English grammar which otherwise remain arbitrary or obscure. The ergative system will certainly be crucial in the analysis of our data as a beneficial supplement, providing an extra perspective to the transitivity interpretation and reconstructing, as it were, the backgrounded elements in our textual analysis.
In these two headlines in my data: Israeli Troops Mass Along Border and Gaza Hospital Fills up, we would see how the agents in both clauses are obscured using an ergative analysis. "Israeli troops" is here only a medium because the troops do not have the power to simply "amass" themselves without a powerful agent i.e. the Israeli Government telling them to do so. So the reconstructed version should probably be Israel Masses Troops Along Border. In the other example,
Gaza Hospital Fills Up the Agent, Gaza Hospital is a medium of a process with an agent. The "hospital" cannot just fill itself up! So the reconstructed larger picture is perhaps Patients/wounded civilians fill up Gaza Hospital.
From the little explanation above, we can see how and why the use of both Critical Linguistics and Transitivity can help in trying to relate news reports to their social and ideological contexts.
Method of Analysis
Having and following a method of analysis is essential in CDA, since "it is not possible to 'read off' ideologies from the text" (Fairclough 1995a, p.71). I would like, in this study, to follow Halliday's transitivity system (1985), since one of the most prominent theorists of text and context relationship regarding the development of CDA has been M.A.K. Halliday.
One of the dominant components of Halliday's ideational function is transitivity. Halliday (1985) maintained that there is a set of interrelated systems in the general framework of linguistic system: transitivity, mood and theme. He also suggested two approaches to the analysis of the clause in terms of participants and processes. The first one is transitivity system in which he distinguishes six kinds of processes and their specifically associated participants, each with its own grammatical relations. The second is ergative interpretation in which we indicate, "the process may happen by itself or be caused to happen" (Thompson 2004, p.135). That means asking about agency and affected participants or who or what is affected or benefits from the process.
Clauses in language represent events and processes of various kinds and transitivity aims to make clear and show these processes which they represent. How the action is performed, by whom and on what, are all encoded in the clause by various syntactic mechanism, in a general system of transitivity.
In the interrelated linguistic systems, the structure of a clause is not arbitrary, and can not be determined in isolation from other clauses in the events, processes and participants represented and mentioned in the text. Based on the above explanations my hypothesis is that certain clauses have different functions in transmitting the information of the text and these functions are expressed or reflected in the syntactic structure of the clause. In other words, these clauses convey different ideologies of the media workers to the media users. The application area I chose to evaluate my hypothesis is that of analysis of the two selected printed media using the general theory of transitivity system. Based on the above discussion, transitivity is a fundamental concept in Hallidayan linguistics which could be used in the analysis of representation in the text and I also employ it throughout my methodology of this research.