Construction of the transitivity system of Myanmar

Abstract

Abstract A number of studies on transitivity systems of languages have been conducted in the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Different linguists have described the transitivity systems of English, French, German, Japanese, Tagalog, Chinese, Vietnamese, Telugu, and Pitjantjatjara, adopting an upward approach which is not effective enough for discourse analysis. So far, there has been no description of the transitivity system of Myanmar in literature. The purpose of this paper is to put forward a clear description of the transitivity system of Myanmar that functions as one of the clause analysis methods from the experiential perspective. To construct a workable transitivity system of Myanmar, the present study follows He’s (forthcoming) (He, Wei. forthcoming. Categorization of experience of the world and construction of transitivity system of Chinese) new description of the Chinese transitivity system containing 32 types of processes that represent our experience of the world. Unlike previous studies, He (forthcoming) proposes autonomous and influential processes of action, mental, and relational clauses with no description of ergativity hypothesized by Halliday (1985) (Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold) and Matthiessen (1995) (Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 1995. Lexicogrammatical cartography: English systems. Tokyo: International Language Sciences Publishers). This new model is more comprehensive and effective than previous ones because it adopts a downward approach which can smoothly be applied to discourse analysis. In this paper, the transitivity analysis of Myanmar clauses is performed in accordance with the theories put forward by He (forthcoming) and the semantic configurations of 32 processes in Myanmar transitivity system are illustrated with authentic examples. Findings show that the proposed transitivity system of Myanmar can analyze clauses effectively and it is compatible with the discourse analysis of Myanmar. These findings will make an important contribution to further study of the systemic functional grammar of Myanmar.