Transitivity Analysis Of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield, a most prestigious short story writer, occupies a pivotalposition in the literary history of the20thcentury. She is recognized as the founder ofwestern modern short stories. Although Katherine Mansfield died young, she is aproductive writer. She wrote88short stories during her lifetime. These storieswere edited into five collections.Katherine Mansfield makes an extraordinary contribution to thedevelopment of English short story and occupies an important position in the literaryworld. It is because of this that there has been constant interest in Katherine Mansfieldand her short stories in the literary world over the last hundred years. The previousstudies in this respect included:1’ biographical criticism;2’ text analysis;3’ feministcriticism;4’ interdisciplinary study. However, few studies have been made from theperspective of functional stylistics.Since1970s, functional stylistics has developed vigorously. Functional stylisticsis based on Systemic Functional Grammar, which was originally developed byMichael A. K. Halliday. The essence of Systemic Functional Grammar is the threemetafunctions of languages, namely the ideational function, the interpersonal functionand the textual function. The three metafunctions are realized by the correspondinggrammatical systems. To be specific, the ideational function is realized mainly by thetransitivity system; the interpersonal function is realized mainly by the mood systemand the modality system and the textual function is realized mainly by the thematicsystem. Systemic Functional Grammar can be applied in stylistic analysis, literarystylistic analysis in particular. That means to analyze language features of literarytexts in terms of the three metafunctions. To be more specific, it is to analyze thecorresponding grammatical systems which realizing the three metafunctions.Nowadays, transitivity analysis has become one of the stylistic analysis modeswhich are exceedingly familiar to and extensively applied by scholars. This thesis intends to make a detailed transitivity analysis of three representative short stories ofKatherine Mansfield.This study aims to explain how to express the theme of a work by choosing thetransitivity system and how to understand the theme of a work by analyzing thetransitivity system. To further prove that transitivity analysis is quite a useful andreliable device to understand literary works and to appreciate the writing style of theauthor is also the purpose of this study.This study provides a new perspective to understand the works of KatherineMansfield and to appreciate her writing style. Through analysis, two strikingcharacteristics of Katherine Mansfield’s choices of transitivity systems are revealed:one is the motivated prominence of some transitivity structures, the other one is theuse of contrast. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that transitivity analysis is quite auseful and reliable device to understand and appreciate literary works.