文体学课件6.ppt

Lecture Six Transitivity Topics covered 1. Style and choice A. An introduction B. The system of transitivity C. Six types of processes 2. Style and transitivity A. An introduction B. Developments in the analysis of style and transitivity a. M.A.K. Halliday’s study b. Kennedy’s study 3. Transitivity and characterization: a study by paul Simpson and Martin Montgomery Style As Choice A brief introduction Much of our everyday experience is shaped and defined by actions and events, thoughts and perceptions, and it is an important function of the system of language that it is able to account for these various ‘goings on’ in world. This means encoding into the grammar of the clause a mechanism for capturing what we say, think and do. It also means accommodating in grammar a host of more abstract relations, such as those that relate between objects, circumstances and logical concepts. When language is used to represent the goings on of the physical or abstract world in this way, to represent patterns of experience in spoken and written texts, it fulfils the experiential function. The experiential function is an important marker of style, because it emphasizes the concept of style as choice. There are many ways of accounting in language for the various events that constitute our ‘mental picture of reality’ (Halliday 1994). What is of interest to stylisticians is why one type of structure should be preferred to another. Choices in style are motivated and these choices have a profound impact on the way texts are structured and interpreted. Transitivity system: The particular grammatical facility used for capturing experience in language is the system of transitivity. It refers to the way meanings are encoded in the clause and to the way different types of processes are represented in language. Transitivity normally picks out three key components of processes. 1) the process itself, realized in grammar by VP; 2) the participant(s), realized by NP; 3) circumstan