Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Part of the impetus for the Simpson and Montgomery paper referred to above
came, like many publications in stylistics, from experience of teaching a text to
students. In this particular case, our work on the MacLaverty novel took the form
of a workshop on stylistics with thirty or so fluent speakers of English as an addi-
tional language. With respect to the idea of the transitivity profile, we were struck
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T R A N S I T I V I T Y , C H A R A C T E R I S A T I O N A N D L I T E R A R Y G E N R E
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by how quickly the participants, while reading a novel, came to intuit a kind of styl-
istic template for the delineation of character. Evidence for this template came in the
shape of an experiment involving pairs of related sentences, with one member of the
pair a real sentence in the novel and the other a fake. On the basis of the short passage
above, you may already be able to make reasonably strong predictions about which
of these sentences ‘fit’ the novel and which do not:
(1a) The big one grabbed Cal.
(1b) Cal grabbed the big one.
(2a) She noticed that Cal was crying.
(2b) Cal noticed that she was crying.
(3a) Crilly handed two photographs to Cal.
(3b) Cal handed two photographs to Crilly.
(4a) He [Cal] moved his mouth to smile and the muscles of his face responded
properly.
(4b) He [Cal] moved his mouth to smile but the muscles of his face would not
respond properly.
The actual 
Cal
sentences are 1a, 2b, 3a and 4b. Remarkably, the workshop partici-
pants, who had read the novel only once and without any accompanying stylistic
explication, were 
all
able to identify the correct sentences. (How did 
you
fare?). It is
not that the remaining sentences are ‘impossible’ or ‘wrong’ as such; it is more that
they come across as stylistically anomalous, as incongruent with the overall tenor of
characterisation in the novel. As suggested in A5, the relationship between transi-
tivity and characterisation is a close one, and the usefulness of a simple exercise like
this, where a set of actual patterns are paralleled by a set of variant patterns, is that
it can bring this relationship to the forefront of the analysis. The exercise can also
be replicated on any narrative text, and even on some non-narrative texts. What
happens is that over the course of a narrative, which may span many hundred of
pages of prose, certain elements are experientially foregrounded while others are
suppressed. While we cannot expect to remember every sentence in a story, we do
seem to develop a sense of a transitivity profile, a profile based on broad process and