Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Activity
✪
Activity
✪
D6

---

links between literary analysis and political standpoint can be articulated clearly
through systematic and principled methods of analysis – precisely the sorts of
methods that are offered by stylistics. Before you read Burton’s article, you should
refamiliarise yourself with the basic model of transitivity as outlined in A6.
One further note of contextualisation is necessary on the reading that follows.
When Burton wrote her paper, the transitivity framework was to some extent in its
infancy and in the intervening years the model has undergone various revisions and
refinements, a natural progression which has been reflected in subsequent work in
stylistics. One important revision was the addition of ‘behavioural processes’, a
category which, as noted in A6, sits at interface between material and mental
processes. Although this type of process does not feature in the version of the model
used by Burton, its absence is compensated for to some degree by an expanded inter-
pretation of material processes. This expanded category draws a primary distinction
between 
event
processes, where the Actor is inanimate (as in ‘The lake shimmered’),
and 
action
processes, which are performed by an animate Actor. Action processes
may themselves be further subdivided into 
intention
processes, where the Actor
performs the process of doing voluntarily and 
supervention
processes, where the
process of doing just happens. Thus, while a process like ‘Mary kissed Clare’ is clearly
material-action-intention, a process like the ‘The boy coughed loudly’ is (arguably)
accidental and would therefore be coded as material-action-supervention. Figure
D6.1 is a network which explains the way material processes are subdivided in
Burton’s study. Of course, the problem with a classification that relies on judgments
about ‘intention’ is that in the absence of full contextualisation we can never really
know whether or not a particular action was done accidentally or deliberately. For
this reason, these subdivisions for material processes dropped out of later versions
of the transitivity model, just as the category of behavioural processes came progres-
sively more to the fore.
Although I have not attempted to alter to the newer framework any of the orig-
inal classifications in Burton’s study, it is important to bear in mind that her study
draws on just one version of a theoretical model that has proved popular in stylistics.
Indeed, her study is a good exemplum of the ‘three Rs’ at work because it is 
rigorous
,
its methods are 
retrievable
and its analysis can be 
replicated
using different versions
of the same analytic model.
186
E X T E N S I O N