Style and Transitivity

Writing about narrative, the American novelist Henry James once posed a pair of rhetorical
questions: ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the
illustration of character?’. The integration of ‘character’ and ‘incident’ may at first glance seem a
curious alignment, but closer scrutiny suggests that James’s formula serves very much as a
template for the analysis of transitivity in narrative.

A principal mode of narrative characterization is the transmission of ‘actions and events’. This
mode refers to the way character is developed through and by the semantic processes and
participant roles embodied in narrative discourse. Character may for instance be determined by
degree of influence on narrative incidents, by degree of active involvement in the forward
momentum of the plot.

Transitivity

 is a method classifying verbs and clauses with reference to the relationship of the verb
to the other structural elements.

 generally refers to how meaning is represented in the clause.

Intransitive Verbs

• does not have an object

• an intransitive construction is one in which the verb cannot take a direct object.

Examples:

They jumped.

The dog ran.

She grew up.

Two kinds of Intransitive verbs

1. Linking Verbs

 do not express action. They simply link the subject to the predicate. The most linking
verbs are all versions of the verb to be: am, is, are was, were, has, been, will be, etc.
Examples:

Edgardo is playing.

The car is green.

The baby was crying.

2. Action verb
 is a verb that expresses physical or mental action. The action verb tells us what the
subject of the clause or sentence is doing physically or mentally.
Examples:
I walked.
I work for a large firm in Paris.
They laughed uncontrollably.
We talked for hours.

Transitive verbs

• is one that is used with an object: a noun, phrase, or pronoun that refers to the person
or thing that is affected by the action of the verb.

• a transitive construction is one in which the verb is followed by a direct object

Example:

Jack threw the ball.

Lila conveyed the message.

Direct Object

 is the noun or pronoun receiving the action.

 A trick for identification is that the direct objects answer the question “whom or what?”

Example:

Jacob likes dog.

Rashida hates her classmates.

Indirect Object

 are nouns or pronouns that identify whom or for whom the action of the verb is
performed, as well as who is receiving the direct object.

 It answers the question “to whom” or “for whom”.

Example:

My friend gave his girlfriend a diamond ring.

Developments in the analysis of style and transitivity (Halliday's and Fisher's)

Transitivity: Stylistics Approaches. In M.A.K. Halliday's functional grammar, transitivity is the

system that is concerned with how entities and actions in a situation are coded in the language.

Example:

I drank bleach.

actor material process goal

 Over the years, stylisticians have returned regularly to the “transitivity model” in their
analyses of text, and especially in their analyses of narrative text.
 One particular study, recognized as one of the key early essays in modern stylistics, was
conducted by the eminent functional linguist M. A. K. Halliday (1971)
  M.A.K Halliday is the architect of the very model of transitivity which informs this
strand.
 Halliday applies the framework to William Golding’s novel The Inheritors whereas the
bulk of the novel is narrated from the perspective of Lok, one of a primitive group of
Neanderthals.
 ‘Lok language’ is marked consistently by material processes which realise an Actor
element but no Goal element, in clauses like: ‘A stick rose upright’ or ‘The bushes
twitched’.
 Lok’s failure to see a ‘joined up’ world of actions and events is therefore conveyed
through systematic choices in transitivity.
 Halliday’s study is important in a number of respects. By using narrative discourse as a
test site for a particular model of language:
 It illustrates well the usefulness of stylistic analysis as a way of exploring both literature
and language.
 It also shows how intuitions and hunches about a text (and yes, stylisticians rely on
intuitions and hunches) can be explored systematically and with rigor using a retrievable
procedure of analysis.
(A narrative discourse is a discourse that is an account of events, usually in the past, that
employs verbs of speech, motion, and action to describe a series of events that are contingent
one on another, and that typically focuses on one or more performers of actions)

 That is not to say, however, that Halliday’s pioneering analysis was entirely flawless in
its design or uncontroversial with respect to the scholarly reception it received. By
suggesting that the text’s linguistic structure embodies its meaning as discourse, Halliday
does make a very strongly ‘mimetic’ claim about the explanatory power of the transitivity
model.
 Halliday’s method in his study stimulated Stanley Fish’s well-known critique of stylistics
entitled “what is stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about it.
 A similar technique is the use pf passive which allows the deletion of any human actor.
For instance, “the carving knife had vanished.”
The knife was already planted in his breast” is again telling a sequence
 Conrad employs a further technique known as meronymic agency.
 Holonymic agency- participant role is occupied by a complete being.
 Meronymic agency-denotes a constituent part or a member of something.

Holonym Meronym

Album photograph

Atom electron, neutron, proton

Air conditioner blower, compressor, fan,

thermostat