Transitivity System of Halliday

Language is an expression of meaning. When a speaker or writer wants to convey something, he/ she utilizes specific patterns of language. This is called transitivity. Transitivity is one of Halliday’s three systematic functional grammar tenets. It is one of the effective ways to express actions, states. It refers to” how meaning is expressed in the clause” ( Simpson, 1993) Simpson clarifies transitivity more when he says” transitivity demonstrates how speakers encode their mental image of truth in language and account for their experience of the world around them”. Traditionally ,   transitivity is understood as a grammatical feature; that is; whether a verb takes a direct object or it doesn’t. Now transitivity is a part of ideational function of language or metafunction as Halliday calls it. What is important in transitivity is a meaningful grammatical unit called a clause. This clause conveys what is the action, what is felt, and what is the situation and so on. Let us illustrate this by giving two examples:

           1- Andi drinks avocado juice.

            2- Sally is sad today.

The speaker conveys his/ her reality utilizing transitivity and as Halliday (1985) says that language, a mental tool, is built out of an intricate system of co-dependent choices. The choice of one clause or another depends on social, cultural or political aspects of real world.  Thus, real situations or actions or even states are shown in linguistic structures using transitivity system. This means there is a link between grammar and reality in transitivity (Perez, 2007)

        More specifically, Halliday says that transitivity is employed to construe the world of experience into a manageable set of processes. In addition, there are two other components that form transitivity. These are participants and circumstances. These three components are shown by the following diagram:

This diagram shows that processes which are central to transitivity are realized by verbal groups, participants by nominal group, and circumstances are represented by adverbial group or prepositional phrase. It also shows transitivity includes six processes. These are stated by the following table:

Table 1: processes of Transitivity

This table illustrates that six processes of transitivity, each with its meaning and participants can be applied in different fields such as everyday conversation, political speeches, literary texts as the essence of transitivity is to explain   “who is doing what to whom” ( Richardson, 2007:54)