Transitivity Analysis in Academic Writing: A Case Study of Feminist, Female, Feminine

Abstract

As one of the metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), experiential meaning plays a vital role in interpreting texts. The transitivity system identifies the experiential meaning and captures how reality is construed by manifold linguistics choices. Despite the widespread application of Holliday’s transitivity system, academic discourse receives far less attention than it deserves. In response, the study is set to analyze an extracted passage from the academic essay The Feminist Reader and to reveal the author’s underlying ideology of feminism by using the transitivity system as a theoretical framework. Among the six processes outlined in the framework, the study discovers that relational processes highly dominate writing, distantly followed by material, while verbal and mental processes respectively come third. Moreover, it is the genre and register of academic writing and the author’s writing intentions that contribute to different proportions of processes. In addition to exploring those hidden reasons, it is admitted that the transitivity choices the author makes are covert manifestations of her perspective on femininity.