Exploring the impact of aging through transitivity: A Systemic Functional approach to Chinese elders' narratives

The research applies transitivity of Systemic Functional Theory (SFT) to examine age impact on picture-elicited narratives of elderly Chinese participants. The choice of using SFT is that SFT studies language through "context of situation" and reveals meaning potential in the context. Transitivity of SFT is compatible with Chinese language, and it provides a solution to the problem raised by Makoni, Lin and Schrauf who argue that the analysis is complicated because it is difficult to use Western views when analyzing Chinese texts. Transitivity and its 6 processes uncover subtle aspects of participants' performances in picture-elicited narratives, and thus they provide a detailed understanding of age impact which cannot be obtained otherwise. The research uses 60 Chinese participants whose age range is from 50 to 79 years old. The participants are equally divided into three age groups: A (50-59 years old), B (60-69 years old) and C (70-79 years old) with 10 males and 10 females in each group. The elicited narratives are secondary data from Paradis. In the present research, the narratives are encoded by two separate raters according to the coding system developed by the author who gives a great consideration to Paradis' stimuli and the six processes of transitivity. The present study uses General Linear Model in ANOVA to analyze the encoded data to find age impact on the participants' transitivity performances so that the participants' factors, levels and the interactions of factors and levels are taken into account. The results indicate that age can statistically have a significant impact on the participants' transitivity performances. The points of the participants' performances increased from group A to group B, and the points of participants' performances decreased from group B to group C. Education and gender do not have a significant impact. The significance of the present study is that it reveals the age impact on participants' transitivity performances in detail, and that it revises the previous researchers' general assertion. Finally the author critically evaluates the strength and limitation of the present and suggests directions for future research.