Abstract

This work explores the relationship between linguistic structures and socially constructed meanings in a text. It employs the transitivity framework of Halliday in order to expose the ideological position and power relations in a classic literary work, especially from a systemic functional perspective. It also tries to find common ground between systemic functional grammar and a narrative. The presence of certain recurring linguistic features in a literary text gives insights into how such linguistic features create meanings and effects. The grammatical structures in a literary work are suggestive of some special meanings and effects. Consequently, in-depth analyses of these grammatical structures in this classic literary work lead to a more realistic understanding of the conventional gender role assigned to the two main characters (the heroin and the protagonist) of Jane Austen's last finished novel Persuasion.

Key Words

Gender Role/Representation, Transitivity Framework, Systemic Functional Grammar, Narrative

Introduction

Narrative: A Linguistically Constructed World

Sapir (1956), Whorf (1956) and Volosinov (1973) all talk about a linguistically constructed world. This simply means that ‘reality’ can be expressed through alternative ways and that people’s decisions about the expression of ‘reality’ both for their own selves and others vary. This also demonstrates that we have the potential both to deconstruct and then reconstruct realities to a considerable extent. It is a fact that human beings customarily put their experiences, thoughts and perceptions about the world or their society into narratives/stories. A narrative denotes the act of storytelling which, in fact, creates a world of its own by means of employing many different linguistic resources. In other words, a narrative can also be viewed as a small world of how individuals in a community act, think, and feel. Also, the world of a narrative shows what people perceive as valuable either as an individual member of a society or as part of a specific group of people or an institution. A narrative can be analysed with the help of various methods and theories of which one of the most extensively used is that of Labov and Waletsky's method (1967), which propounded the widely accepted structural stages of narrative analysis such as “Abstract, Orientation, Complicating Action, Evaluation, Results/Resolution, and Coda” (p. 301). The organisation, order and control of the ways of the structural stages of narrative/plot are significant and worth noting because they are used as a means to encoding the ideological underpinnings, as well as imparting some of the thoughts and ideas. This is specifically true of narrative representation realised in the fourth part, also known as the evaluation stage, where the artists generally employ and manipulate many linguistic strategies. So Davies is right in his perception that “the ability to narrate has to be seen as a creative artefact and therefore not necessarily a representation…of actual events” (2005, p.99).

Fairclough (1989, 1995), Fowler (1977, 1986), and Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew (1979) have adopted several linguistic-based analyses such as transitivity and modality in order to lay bare the implicit and hidden ideas and evaluations in different genres and texts. They have attempted to make public that the events in these different genres are actually not objective accounts of objective facts; instead, they are socially and ideologically situated retellings. 

Literature Review

This section reviews the previous literature regarding some of the ground-breaking works of linguistic and stylistic analyses of literary texts that exemplify how language patterns reflect power relations as well as conventional or nonconventional attitudes held towards life. As a pioneering and revolutionary exemplar of nonstandard language usage that expresses a specific point of view, Halliday’s seminal work (1971) “Linguistic function and literary style: An inquiry into the language of William Golding’s The Inheritors” serves as a significant example. In this article, Halliday has discussed the transitivity patterns, the different Participants, Processes, and Circumstances involved in a linguistic construction (these terms are clarified in the subsequent part) that happen in clauses or sentences of the narrative. He illustrates how Golding uses the clause or sentences of the narrative to entail the “cognitive limitation”, or a decreased sense of causation of the Neanderthal man. Halliday also attempts to demonstrate how the world is being controlled by human beings in connection with the experiences of the narrative protagonist, Lok is a Neanderthal man, and his world is controlled by people who come from a more ‘civilised’ and ‘advanced’ world. 

Similarly, Kennedy (1982), in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, analyses the Processes (verbs) employed in a particular scene of this work. Iwamoto opines that he examines to prove "why the sequential murder scene in the story gives the impression of distance and detachment as if the murderer were not responsible for what she was doing” (n.d, p. 64). Kies’s (1992) "The uses of passivity: Suppressing agency in Nineteen eighty-four,” an analysis of major linguistic features of Orwell's most important work, exposes the ways through which the power and control of the state render a man’s thoughts and actions in an oppressive state submissive, passive and helpless. 

Next, Burton (1982) discloses the asymmetrical and uneven relationship of power amongst the medical staff, the doctor, the nurse, and the female patient in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Thus he tries to exhibit that the helpless patient is not able to affect anything with respect to either communication; on the other hand, both the doctor and the nurse had a dynamic influence on everything that was taking place there.




Transitivity Theory

Halliday’s (1985) theory of transitivity offers an important and valuable linguistic framework/model for the obvious purpose of revealing paramount linguistic features of any text in general but of a literary text in particular. The present paper principally uses Halliday’s model (1985) for transitivity analysis and its major application to literary text and discourse. 




Transitivity (Ideational Function of Language)

According to Halliday, transitivity is an essential part of the ideational function of the clause, and it is essentially related to the "transmission of ideas." One of its major functions includes the representation of ‘processes’ or ‘experiences’: “actions, events, processes of consciousness and relations” (1985, p.53). Halliday asserts that the word ‘process’ in Systemic Functional Grammar “cover all phenomena…and anything that can be expressed by a verb: event (whether physical or not), state, or relation” (1976, p.159). Furthermore, he remarks that “processes” realised by means of language are actually the result of one’s perception of the world. According to him, the largest part of humans’ perception of reality does consist of "goings-on," i.e. doing, happening, feeling, etc. These different forms of the goings-on are structured in and are part of the semantic system conveyed through the grammar of the clause in a language. Halliday (1985) remarks that the "Transitivity system identifies the different categories of processes (verbs) that are realised in language and the various structures through which they are expressed" (p.101).

The semantic system realised by a clause structure has potentially three major constituents:

1. The Process itself is conveyed by a verb phrase in a clause.

2. The Participants, referring to many different roles of entities (objects/individuals). They are directly involved in the process in the role of Actor or Agent who is involved in doing, behaving or saying or in the role of passive to whom something is done or said. Halliday says that it is not essential that the term Participant involves humans or even living beings; instead, the expression "participant entities" sounds precise and exact (1976, p. 160). The Participants are typically instantiated via a noun phrase, such as A Process is realised by a verb phrase. 

3. The Circumstances accompanying the Processes are characteristically exemplified by an adverbial phrase or a prepositional phrase (Halliday 1985, pp.101-102) or sometimes by both simultaneously in a clause. 

According to Fowler, Transitivity is a significant semantic model in the demonstration and illustration of reality because of its characteristic feature of analysing and representing one or the same experience and state of affairs in quite diverse ways. The transitivity model is also helpful in specifying specific perspectives or worldviews “framed by the authorial ideology” in literary discourses (1986, p. 138). The transitivity model serves as a useful resource for ascertaining how particular linguistic structures, more particularly in a literary text, tend to encode a specific ideological stance of readers/speakers. Fowler (1986) says that reality is not neutrally reflected by linguistic codes; they construe, systematise, and categorise the subjects of discourse. So, different choices in a transitivity system indicate diverse mindsets containing both conventional and extraordinary mindsets echoed in the language of the text.

The first major principle in analysis based on the Transitivity framework is finding out who or what is doing what and to whom, and it focuses on the link and correlations that exist between the action performed by an Actor/Agent and its effect generally felt by the entities known as the Goal or Theme in a clause. In traditional grammar, it may simply be identified with subject/object analysis. However, unlike traditional grammar, the term transitivity (according to Halliday) is more a semantic concept rather than a simple syntactic account. In traditional grammar, the focus tends to be on a syntactic description, such as whether a particular verb is followed by an obligatory Object or an optional adverbial; in that case, the former is described as a transitive verb and the latter as intransitive. On the other hand, in a transitivity analysis, Halliday (1985) states that the central question relates to whether the animate entity (Actor/Agent) consciously and intentionally does the action to another entity (Goal).

Various social and cultural dynamics along with individual mindsets determine transitivity patterns in the sense that different communities and their value systems entail unusual transitivity patterns. So for getting a true representation of what is going on from the vantage point of personal and subjective reality embedded in a text or narrative, the following procedure outlined by Burton (1982) is helpful. 

First of all, separate all the Processes, then decide the Participant (who or what) does to each of the Processes. Secondly, define the different types of Processes and then explain a particular Participant who is involved in a particular Process type. Lastly, identify who or what is being affected or likely to be affected by a particular Process type.




The Transitivity Model

In the following sections, the transitivity model, along with its major Process types, the sub-classifications, and different Participant roles directly involved in these Process types, is introduced.




Types of Processes

In Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), the Process types are grouped into Material, Mental, Behavioral, Verbal, Relational, and Existential types, dependent on the fact whether these types exemplify the phenomena of doing, sensing, being, saying, behaving, or existing, respectively. 




Material Processes

The first major type, represent actual doings and actions that are physically visible in the concrete physical world. Generally, these Processes consist of two essential and inherent participants known as the Actor (an obligatory element) expressing the doer of the action and the Goal (an optional element) expressing persons or entities both animate/inanimate somewhat affected by the process, besides these two intrinsic Participant roles, another element known as Circumstance providing extra information about time, place, manner, and reason of the process as needed. Meanings conveyed through circumstantial elements are not realised in noun phrases. Instead, they are realised through either adverbials or prepositional phrases and of secondary value or status to the process. Additional information related to aspects like temporality, spatiality, intensity, manner, condition, instruments etc., are expressed through Circumstance. The following table will illustrate these constructions.

Table 1.

Actor/Agent	Process type	Goal	Circumstance
Alan (animate)	hit  (Material)	a boy
Robert  (animate)	hit  (Material)	a girl	Gently (Manner)
The helicopter (inanimate)	Hovered (Material)		In the air. (Place)

 

In the case of passive construction, there is a possibility of reversal of Actor and Goal, as illustrated in table 2.

Table 2.                                                                

Goal	Process Type	Actor
The baby	was hit	by Allan

 




Material process types are also further sub-classified on the basis of whether a particular process type is executed consciously or unconsciously and whether by an animate/inanimate Actor. (Berry, 1977a, Halliday, 1976).

 

Mental Processes

Are, in essence, Processes (verbs) of sensing and realise the meanings such as 'feeling', 'perceiving' or 'thinking'. Contrary to Material Processes, having their source in the material, concrete, and physical world, the Mental Processes originate in and is a reflection of the world of consciousness. According to Simpson (1993), they are "internalised" (p. 91), and according to Halliday, they are subdivided into 'cognition’ (realised in verbs like believing or thinking), ‘affection’ (such as loving or detesting) and ‘perception’ (such as seeing or noticing etc.) (1994). Two essential Participant roles connected with this type are the Sensor and the Phenomenon. The Sensor is one consciously involved in the action (process) of sense. On the other hand, an entity sensed, felt, thought or seen by the Sensor is known as the Phenomenon. Three key types of mental processes are illustrated in table 3.




 

Table 3.                                                                                

Sensor	Process Type	Phenomenon
John	Appreciated (cognition)	The speech.
Anne	Saw (perception)	An old man.
Caroline	Abhors (affection)	Herbs

 




The Participant roles of Sensor and Phenomenon solely belong to Mental Processes. It is to keep in mind that the entity which is ‘sensed’ in a ‘Mental Process’ is not directly influenced by the Process (as is the case in the material process), and this feature renders it a bit different from the Participant role of Goal in a Material Process.

 

Behavioural Process

Is a type of process which stands somewhat at the border between the first two, i.e. they are neither completely Material nor wholly Mental rather, they belong to either at the same time. They refer to Processes representing physiological and psychological behaviour simultaneously. Halliday (1994) states that Behavioral processes “represent outer manifestations of inner workings, the acting out of processes of consciousness and physiological states” ( p. 107). These processes represent physiological behaviours of ‘breathing’ or ‘coughing’, but sometimes, they also describe ‘states of mind’ as realised in verb forms like ‘groan’, ‘yell’ or ‘laugh’. The key and usually exclusive Participant in Behavioural Processes is Behaver, the conscious entity involved in behaving. Examples in table 4 illustrate the Behavioural Process.




 

Table 4.                                                                                

Behaver	Process Type	Circumstance
Lissa	is weeping (behavioural)
He	frowned (behavioural)	at the clutter




The Participant role of Behaver is more like a Senser, just like in a Mental Process, whereas the Behavioral Process, per se, seems grammatically more akin to a Material Process. So it represents a Process type which involves the actions of ‘sensing’ as well as ‘doing’ simultaneously.

The next category, known as Verbal Processes (the processes of verbalisation), is close in meaning to mental processes because they also express conscious thoughts and feelings. Halliday (1994) says, "The verbal processes express the relationships between the ideas constructed in human consciousness and the ideas enacted in the form of language" (p. 107). These Processes are actually related to saying and involve the Participant roles of the Sayer, the Receiver (also known as Target), and the Verbiage. The Sayer refers to the producer of speech (saying), the Receiver refers to the being to whom speech is directed, and the Verbiage simply means the speech itself or what is said. Table 5 explains examples of Verbal Processes.




 

Table 5.                                                                                                                                

Sayer	Process type	Receiver	Verbiage
The Jury	announced (Verbal)		that the accused is innocent.
She	told	Me	how to prepare pizza.
The Alarm clock	says		it’s seven pm.
He	said	to her	“we are happy”. (Direct quotation)
He	said that		they were happy. (Indirect narration)

 




Some other examples of Verbal Processes are: Jammima said she is glad. The proctor calls for the assembly. The alarm clock says it is seven pm. The notices said keep silent.

An interesting fact about the processes of “saying” is that they are used in quite an extended sense and need to be interpreted somewhat broadly. This also demonstrates that the “Speaker or Sayer” is not necessarily an animate and conscious being, but it can even be an inanimate Sayer, as in the example "The pamphlet tells you how to find the place". It is also to be kept in mind that the part in which “what is said” can be either a direct quotation or indirect narration, as is shown in the last two examples in table 5. Another category, an important and complex one, is called Relational Processes. They are called so because they establish relationships between the entities associated with that particular process. They are classified in many ways, but generally, three main types exist. First, the Intensive Relational Process establishes a relationship between the subject and subject complement, as in: 'Elain's performance is elegant’ or ‘Conrad is a Polish novelist'. Secondly, the Possessive Relational Process establishes the relationship between the possessor and the possession, as in ‘Sam had a lot of money’ or ‘Tracy owns a large house in Mexico. Lastly, the relationship engendered by circumstantial relational processes is wide-ranging such as 'x is at/is in/is on/is with/y' type structures. These are realised in such constructions as ‘The ritual was on for the entire week’, ‘His teacher was in class.

The apparently simple tripartite classification of relational processes is made somewhat complicated by the fact that each one of the three types happens to be instantiated in two different ways, i.e. attributive and identifying, resulting in six categories in all. Examples in table 6 will help sum up this classification.




 

Table 6.                                                               

Type	Mode (attributive)	Mode (identifying)
Intensive	Elain’s performance is elegant.	Conrad is a renowned Polish novelist. A renowned Polish novelist is Conrad.
Possessive	Sam had a lot of money.	The Alpha Rome was Treacy’s. Tracy’s was the Alpha Rome
Identifying	The ritual was on for the entire week.	His teacher was in class. In class was his teacher.

 




In terms of Participant roles in the case of Attributive mode, the objects, individuals or ideas that are being described are known as the “Carrier", whereas the quality attributed to that Carrier fulfils the role of "Attribute". The Attribute, therefore, answers questions such as: what is the Carrier? what is it like? where is it? what does it own ? and so on.

Identifying mode, on the other hand, characteristically identifies one role by reference to another,

so the two parts of the clause regularly denote one and the same thing. It indicates that, contrary to the feature of Attributive Processes, all Identifying Processes show the quality of being reversible, as examples in table 6 indicate. In terms of Participant roles, the entity known as “the Identifier” defines or describes the entity known as “the Identified”. For example, in the sentence, ‘Andrew is the best storyteller’, the construction 'the best story writer' has the function of identifying 'Andrew'. The alternative pattern of ‘the best storyteller is Andrew' merely reverses the arrangement in respect of the two entities involved in the clause.

The final Process type of transitivity system is called Existential processes. They are quite close in a sense and meaning to the immediately preceding relational processes. This process type, in essence, asserts the existence, occurrence and subsistence of something. They characteristically have a 'be’ form of a verb preceded by the expression 'there', which functions merely as a dummy subject with no representational function at all, such as in the sentences ‘There was a nip’ or ‘Has there been a meeting?’ Existential processes typically comprise only one participant role, known as "the Existent", which is encoded in the preceding examples by the expressions ‘a nip’ and ‘a meeting’ respectively. In Existential processes, the entity, event, or happening that exist is known as Existent, which can be anything, including an article, an individual, an entity, an organisation, an idea, an action, an event etc.

Alternatively, this process type also turns precisely back to the first process type known as a material process, a category with which appraisal of this transitivity model/system was initiated.

So, either type of the process can put up questions like 'what happened?', and importantly, the answer to which can possibly result in two different patterns. For example, both “X nipped Y” and “there was a nip” are the possible choices of response to this supposed question. However, there is a marked difference in the selection of the process type, and it has far-reaching repercussions. For instance, in Existential Process, Existent is the only role specified and identified with none else specified and identified. Moreover, the role of Existent is filled by a nominalised constituent which is the result of nominalisation from a Verbal Process.

In the above-detailed discussion of the transitivity model, the various patterns of ideational realisation have been evaluated from a semantico-grammatical perspective: i. e. from the vantage point of both structural and semantic relationships within the clause. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the realisation of ideation is not entirely dependent on the structural pattern, i.e. it is not the only way for ideational realisation. As Martin (1992) articulates that ideational contents (contents that are expressed by transitivity patterns) are also "realised by lexical items rather than structures" (pp. 277-8) (also Berry, 1977b, p. 62; Fawcett 1980, pp. 153-218). Halliday (1994) says that sometimes “the ideational content is densely packed in nominal constructions” (p. 352). For instance, a structure such as ‘the flyovers was made of brickwork and had several curves appeared in them’ can be rephrased nominally to 'brickwork flyovers with several curves'. There is no need to provide a complex and detailed analysis of this aspect in this study. It is worth noting that ideational content can also be encoded in lexis besides the grammatical relations.

Vocabulary can be classified into two types: objective and subjective, even though the demarcation between them is often not very clear. On the one hand, there are lexical items such as red, striped, shiny, etc. expressing an impersonal/objective value of an entity or situation, whereas in contrast to these are expressions signifying the writer/speaker’s personal and subjective approach and attitude towards a being, thing or situation and arousing a precise image in the mind of a reader/hearer. Examples of such expressions are vocabulary items like beautiful, striking, strange, prosperous, valuable, futile etc. The latter kind of vocabulary is termed by Halliday as ‘Attitudinal Epithets’, expressive of an “interpersonal element” and serving an “attitudinal function” along with the ideational function (Halliday, 1984, p. 184). These expressions can also be named emotive terms, which may be either positive or negative. Adjectives constitute the major bulk of these emotive terms, but some adverbs and nouns can also sometimes stimulate the same effects, e.g. charmingly, humbly, rapidly, scarcity, ailment, victory, motivation, etc. These emotive terms are, in fact, linked with specific images of weakness, limitations, disadvantages, and rough, violent and untidy life or contrary to it. Some of these and other similar terms are manipulated for special purposes in the narrative of the novel to be analysed in the following section. Some of the essential elements discussed and explained in the transitivity model, such as the different Process types and the associated Participant roles, are used in the depiction of the two main characters of the novel Persuasion.

Analysis

Using Halliday’s transitivity framework, an in-

depth explanation can be provided about the process types through which either of the two main characters (Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth) in Persuasion is portrayed. Only selected clauses of the text have been examined semantically employing Halliday’s transitivity framework, in which Participant functions and detailed Process types are clearly demarcated and explained. The following table (table 7) classifies the occurrence of each Participant function in respect of Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth.

Figure 1



Table 7. The Occurrence of Participant Functions of Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth

Participant Function	Anne Eliot	Captain Wentworth
Initiator/Agent in Material Processes (Goal-directed)	0	3
Actor in Material Processes (non-Goal-directed)	3	3
The goal of Material Processes	13	1
Sayer in Verbal Processes	3	5
The sensor in Mental Processes	9	3
Behaver in Behavioural Processes	1	0
Carrier/Token in Relational Processes	7	7

 




The above statistical analysis is quite revealing in the sense that it plainly demonstrates that Captain Wentworth acts primarily as an Agent in Goal-directed Material Processes. This means that he affects and controls what is happening, e.g., “letting her do and think what she wants." At the same time, Anne Eliot has never appeared as an Agent in Goal-directed Material Processes. Mr Eliot, another major character in the novel, performs the participant role of Sayer in verbal processes more often than is the case with Miss Anne, e. g. “Well, he said gently in his lightly accented voice." The Participant role of Sayer in the Verbal Process is significant because one can voice one's opinion and can influence others, but unfortunately, Anne Eliot, the heroin in the role of Sayer, is only present when she is forced to respond rather than initiate a saying. By contrast, Anne is predominantly accorded the participant role of Goal in Material Processes, e. g., “She persuaded Anne not to marry Captain Wentworth” or “they convinced her (Anne) that the engagement was a wrong thing”. She appears predominantly in the Participant role of Senser in Mental Processes, e.g. “She (Anne) knew that Lady Russel would not be happy with this” or “she felt that the man was looking at her”. Anne also appears in the Participant role of Behaver in Behavioral Processes, such as "just stood there, staring at him…" and "blushed furiously," or “Anne looked down to hide her smile”, and Carrier in relational processes, such as “she had feelings for the tender, spirit for the gay…..”. or “Anne is too delicate for them”. Importantly, the processes that Anne is involved in are frequently in passive construction (passivised) and have no effect on external events or do not affect the other participants, at least externally. For instance, "she was persuaded to believe that the engagement is hardly capable of success," or "she had been made to think at nineteen", or "she had been forced into prudence".

Lexical choices used for the male character (Captain Wentworth) and female character (Miss Anne Eliot) in the text of Persuasion also contribute to the images invoked. Emotive terms that express or are suggestive of weakness and femininity are mostly used in the description of female characters but more particularly for the heroin Anne, e.g. Anne Eliot…." to be snatched off by a stranger, or rather sunk by him”. “Such opposition…..was more than Anne could combat”. “Anne fully submitted in deep mortification”. “She could not take revenge”. So the phrases that introduce Anne especially symbolise her weak, passive, and socially lower status. By contrast, the phrases and words employed for the male characters and especially Wentworth suggest masculinity, independence, power, confidence etc. For example, "he (Captain Wentworth) had been lucky in his profession”. “He was confident that and was full of life and ardour”. “His sanguine temper, his fearless mind......" So, unlike the female character of Anne (the heroin), who is depicted as weak, coward and dependent, the male character of Wentworth (the protagonist) is depicted as the one reflecting and symbolising hope, power, independence, authority etc. Thus the sharp contrast between Captain Wentworth and Anne Eliot, the two main characters in the novel Persuasion, very clearly depicts and exposes the gender relations and the embedded ideologies stereotypically represented and constructed in English society of the early nineteen century or Austen era.

Discussion

Carter’s comment upon the function of language in a text, "language is not a neutral entity," challenges those who are of the opinion that language is merely an objective and independent means for the conveyance of thoughts and ideas. In line with Halliday and other functionalists, Carter also believes that “language always relates to specific texts and contexts and usually to a context determined by social and sociocultural factors.” Furthermore, he strongly argues about the use/manipulation of language that it is never free “from the power of those who use it or control its use or enforce its use on others” (1997, p. 12). Keeping in views Carter, Sapir, Whorf and Volosinov’s ideas about language, it is worth noting how different patterns of language and some lexical items associated with the male and female characters in the text of Persuasion reflect gender relations.

It can be noticed that the transitive verbs are primarily related to the male character (Captain Wentworth), e.g., "he had not forgiven her," "he took her out," and "he let her go." Against this, the intransitive verbs are predominantly related to the female character (Anne Eliot), e.g. “just stood there silently”; “she blushed mildly”. The frequently used intransitive verbs used in Persuasion are all associated with the female character Anne, the heroin of the novel. For example, she smiles with her head down; she sighs deeply. Whereas Mr Wentworth is the actor/agent, Sayer etc., taking actions and initiatives; the distribution of Miss Anne in clause structure is such that things are done to her, and she is generally relegated to a constrained position and presented in a passive and helpless role with passive constructions, e.g. “she was persuaded to believe” and “she was forced to believe…..” Carter is right in saying that “the syntactic choices encode a conventional gender positioning of men and women” (1997, p.13).

Conclusion

This paper particularly aims to probe the correlations that exist between linguistic constructions and socially constructed meanings in a classic literary text. An attempt is made to reveal this by means of some of the Process types (Material, Mental, and Relational Processes) and Participant roles(Actor, Goal, Sensor, Carrier etc.) in Halliday's transitivity framework. The above analysis reveals that certain patterns/structures can be found within the text of Persuasion that offers a disinterested yet linguistic-based interpretation of the said text. This shows that the transitivity resources and the different lexical choices connected with the portrayal of characters in a literary text are exploited by authors/readers to ascertain the representation of conventional gender relations. Linguistic choices employed for the representation of each of the characters in the text of Persuasion may not have necessarily been used consciously; instead, it can be the result of “semantic pressure” (Halliday 1994, p.24). It is hoped that this study will prove helpful in establishing and gaining a good understanding of how linguistic analyses of literary texts are used for knowing the relationships between structures and meanings through transitivity analysis. The analytical method is applicable equally to all sorts of texts and can be employed fruitfully in both literary and non-literary texts, including newspaper reports, articles, or advertisements. 

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