The Transitivity Analysis of Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’: A Corpus Based Study

Abstract

The current study was based on the theory of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
(2014), which seeks language and its grammar as a meaning-making resource. Halliday (2014)
distinguished three metafunctions, one of them is the ideational function which further involved
transitivity system. Transitivity is specifically known as one of the methods of clause analysis
which involved three components; participant, process, and circumstance. The research was
confined to analyse the participants, process with their sub-types, and circumstances that occur in
the clauses as well as to determine the dominant elements of transitivity. The purpose of the
research was to explore the ideational or experiential meanings and it was delimited to corpusbased transitivity analysis to unfold human experiences and world view of personas in the
narrative text of ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919; 1921) by Virginia Woolf. The study aimed to explore the
literary style of narrative text written in stream of consciousness (SOC) technique by Woolf.
Moreover, the research was based on corpus-based methodology. Quantitative data included the
statistics, frequencies and percentages while qualitative data involved the interpretation of the
results and facts. Corpus collection included the narrative fiction ‘Kew Gardens’. The analysis
was conducted with the use of UAM corpus tool developed by O’Donnell (2009). The text file
was first incorporated and then analysed through the tool by creating the annotation layer. The
tool represented the statistics after annotation of the text. The total number of segments was
1214, words in segment were 7680, and tokens in segment were 8408. The result of analysis was
quite significant. The research will be substantial for stylisticians and language researchers to
analyse and interpret literary styles of different genres in literature.