Transitivity And Deeper Thematic Significance In The Old Man And The Sea

Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) has proven to be both theoretically well-grounded and practically applicable to many fields, which gives rise to the quick development of functional discourse analysis. Transitivity system, an important part of ideational function of the metafunctions of SFG, has often been considered as a useful analytical model, and employed both in stylistics and critical linguistics. This thesis is an attempt to analyze, through transitivity analysis, the deeper thematic significance of Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea. Through the present study, the author will show how transitivity analysis helps to understand the deeper thematic significance of the novel, which will in turn prove the applicability of the system of transitivity in discourse analysis.According to Halliday, transitivity represents patterns of experience. By saying that a clause represents a process, Halliday means that our most powerful conception of reality is that it consists of 'goings-on': of doing, happening, feeling, being, saying and thinking. A process itself potentially consists of three components: the process itself, participants in the process, and circumstances associated with the process. Different processes can be classified according to the 'goings-on' and the choices of different processes are determined by different text patterns and different themes.At present, studies of the transitivity system in literary works are mainly confined to interpretation of such aspects as the personality of characters, the relationship between different social classes, and the character's mind style or the character's mental transformation. Less effort has been made to investigate the relation between transitivity patterning and deeper thematic significance of the literary works.This thesis attempts to offer a new insight into The Old Man and the Sea from the perspective of transitivity, hoping to prove that the theory of SFG can be used as an effective model to analyzing literary works. It first offers some background information to prepare the readers for the later discussion, and then analyzes the process types in detail. By analyzing these processes in this novel, it reveals some deeper themes that the writer intends to express beneath the surface. The approach further confirms that systemic-functional linguistic analysis is a very powerful tool in analyzing literary texts and it can provide us with a new perspective to appreciate and evaluate literary works.