Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

participant roles embodied in narrative discourse. Character may for instance be
determined by degree of influence on narrative incidents, by degree of active involve-
ment in the forward momentum of the plot. Alternatively, character may be
determined by detachment from narrative incident, by the positioning, say, of an
individual as a passive observer of the events that unfold around them. As noted here
and elsewhere, the linguistic framework which encompasses this aspect of narrative
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organisation is transitivity and this unit will review two of the various applications
this model has received in narrative stylistics.
Developments in the analysis of style and transitivity
Over the years, stylisticians have returned regularly to the transitivity model in their
analyses of text, and especially in their analyses of narrative text. One particular study,
recognised as one of the key early essays in modern stylistics, was conducted by the
eminent functional linguist M. A. K. Halliday (1971), architect of the very model of
transitivity which informs this strand. In that now classic paper, Halliday applies 
the framework to William Golding’s novel 
The Inheritors
and explores, amongst 
other things, the linguistic patterns which encode the ‘mind-styles’ of the various
Neanderthal peoples who inhabit the story. Whereas the bulk of the novel is narrated
from the perspective of Lok, one of a primitive group of Neanderthals, the later stages
of the book see Lok and his people supplanted by a more advanced tribe. Halliday
argues that choices in transitivity reflect this transition. The behaviour of Lok’s tribe
is depicted as discontinuous and rather aimless, where physical action rarely affects
objects in the immediate environment. In more explicitly experiential terms (see A6),
‘Lok language’ is marked consistently by material processes which realise an Actor
element but no Goal element, in clauses like: ‘A stick rose upright’ or ‘The bushes
twitched’. Significantly, these Goal-less processes make the action specified seem self-
engendered, even when it is clear from the narrative context that they are brought
about by the external agency of Lok’s enemies. Lok’s failure to see a ‘joined up’ world
of actions and events is therefore conveyed through systematic choices in transitivity,
although no such failure in understanding is embodied by the transitivity patterns
of the more advanced tribe whose way of configuring the world is, according to
Halliday, more like our own.
Halliday’s study is important in a number of respects. By using narrative discourse
as a test site for a particular model of language, it illustrates well the usefulness of 
stylistic analysis as a way of exploring both literature 
and
language. It also shows how
intuitions and hunches about a text (and yes, stylisticians rely on intuitions and
hunches) can be explored systematically and with rigour using a retrievable procedure
of analysis. That is not to say, however, that Halliday’s pioneering analysis was entirely
flawless in its design or uncontroversial with respect to the scholarly reception it
received. By suggesting that the text’s linguistic structure embodies its meaning as 
discourse, Halliday does make a very strongly ‘mimetic’ (see B4) claim about the
explanatory power of the transitivity model. He argues for instance in respect of ‘Lok
language’ that it is no doubt ‘a fair summary of the life of the Neanderthal man’ (1971:
350). The methods employed in his study, and this sentiment in particular, are what
stimulated Stanley Fish’s well-known critique of stylistics, facetiously entitled ‘What is
stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about it?’, which followed in the
wake of Halliday’s analysis (Fish 1981: 59–64). Although this is not the place to review
that debate in detail, Fish’s attack continues to attract rebuttals from stylisticians 
to the present day, and the polemic has proved important in helping shape the 
way stylisticians think about the connections between analysis and interpretation 
(see the further reading suggestion for this unit given at the end of the book).
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Several years after Halliday’s study, Kennedy used the transitivity model to explore
a key passage from Joseph Conrad’s novel