A Transitivity Study Of Characters’ Mental Changes In Lord Of The Flies

Halliday’s Transitivity System in Systemic Functional Grammar is an essential theory of linguistics, which specifies the different process types that are recognized in the language. There are six types of process included in transitivity patterning: material process, mental process, relational process, behavioral process, verbal process, and existential process. In the past few years, Transitivity System is applied to various discourse analyses, most of which have been restricted to the relationship between different social classes, the personality of characters, the language characteristics of different kinds of discourse. However, less attention has been paid to the appreciation of the relation between transitivity patterning and the inner changes of characters. Therefore, this dissertation conducts a tentative research in this field, aiming to show how transitivity analysis helps to reveal the mental changes of the characters.Lord of the Flies is a world famous novel by William Golding, which has been studied from various perspectives for several years. The novel is loved by many readers because of its compact plot and brief language. The changing of the boys from civilization to savagery is the overriding theme of the novel, but the existing studies are mainly conducted from literary angel, with little consideration to the analysis of the language using through the novel.This dissertation tries to apply Transitivity System to the study of the mental changes of the main characters in Lord of the Flies as well as the consequences of their changes by analyzing the chosen clauses in the novel. It is mainly based on the qualitative method because of the large amounts of clauses in the novel. According to the development of the plot, the novel will be divided into four parts, and the typical clauses that symbol characters’mental activities from each part will be analyzed with transitivity patterning. The analysis mainly contains three parts:the analysis of Ralph, the analysis of Jack, and the analysis of the consequences. According to the analysis, this dissertation illustrates how the mental activities of the two characters change during the process, and how nature is influenced by their changes.The analysis demonstrates that transitivity patterning can function as a useful tool of revealing the processes of characters’ mental changes, and furthermore, it may shed a fresh light on the new interpretation of the discourse.