Language Access Centre

The main theoretical construct used in the data analysis is transitivity. This construct finds its roots in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar7. Transitivity generally refers to how meaning is represented in the clause. It plays a role in showing how speakers encode in language their mental picture of reality and how they account for their experience of the world around them. Since transitivity is concerned with the transmission of ideas it is considered to fall within the realm of the ideational function of language8.

Linguistically, transitivity is concerned with propositional meanings and functions of syntactic elements. The representations that can be attested within a transitivity model are said to signal bias, manipulation and ideology in discourse. Coincidentally, a large amount of social impact of media has to do with how the media selectively represents the states of being, actions, events and situations concerning a given society.

Transitivity is part of the ideational function of language and is a fundamental and powerful semantic concept in Halliday, an essential tool in the analysis of representation9. Kress states that transitivity is the representation in language of processes, the participants therein, and the circumstantial features associated with them10, whereas Simpson asserts that transitivity refers generally to how meaning is represented in the clause11. Transitivity shows how speakers encode in language their mental picture of reality and how they account for their experience of the world around them.

The meaning of Halliday's transitivity differs from the sense of the term in traditional grammar. Traditionally there is a syntactic distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, depending on whether they take an object or not. But this syntactic distinction oversimplifies or neglects some important differences of meaning between various types of verbs, and, therefore various types of clauses. The differences concern what kind of process the verb designates: kick designates a kind of action, which has an effect on another entity, the ball; ran refers to an action, which affects only the actor(s). In Jane is tall, we find a quite different state of affairs encoded, namely, no action but a description of a physical state. Peter meditates refers to a mental process, not a physical action.

There are many more distinctions of meaning behind transitivity than the simple distinction expressed by transitive versus intransitive. A central insight of Halliday's is that transitivity is the foundation of representation; it is the way the clause is used to analyse events and situations as being of certain types. Transitivity also has the facility to analyse the same event in different ways, a facility which, as Fowler shows, is of great interest in newspaper analysis12. Since transitivity makes options available, some possibilities are always suppressed, so the choice a speaker makes or the choice made by the discourse indicates that the speaker's point of view is ideologically significant. Newspapers provide abundant examples of the ideological significance of transitivity.