| المستخلص: |
The present paper attempts to examine the stylistic significance of transitivity patterns in Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea, with a particular focus on the presentation of the protagonist's inner thoughts and his conscious practices. Transitivity analysis, as Eggins (1994) states, "refers to the semantic processes realized by the verb type in the clause; the participants expressed by noun phrases; and the circumstances expressed by adverbial and prepositional phrases" (p. 12). To achieve the aim of the study, the following objectives have been set: (1)To show the relative frequency of transitive verbs in the text under analysis, (2) To investigate the role of transitivity model in analyzing the main character's actions (the fight between the old man and the giant marlin) and the complex mental states of the persona in the chosen text. This systemic-functional analysis attempts to find answers to the following questions: What sort of processes are most frequently used in the novella under question? From this main question, the following questions emerged: (1) Who/What participants are involved in these processes, (2) To what extent are the actions and events expressive of the character's mental picture of reality and the way his heroic figure is presented? Having conducted the transitivity analysis, data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively throughout the whole novella. The findings reveal that the material process is the most dominant process type, which individually accounts for more than half of the total number of the recorded clauses, with a total of 864 occurrences, accounting for 52.21 % of the total. Second to this is the relational process type, a total of 364 occurrences, accounting for 21.99 % of the total. The mental process type is also significant, altogether 308 occurrences, accounting for 18.61 % of the total. The behavioral and the existential process types are only minor ones, each respectively has fifty-six and sixty-three occurrences - contributing to 3.38 % and 3. 81 % of the total.
|
