Persuasive Style and its Realization Through Transitivity Analysis: A SFL Perspective

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Leech & Short (2007) claim that examining the language of a literary text can lead to a fuller understanding of the text and thus appreciation of the writer's artistic achievement. Accordingly, this paper explores the relationship between linguistic structures and socially constructed meaning in a literary text. Drawing on Halliday's transitivity framework rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the paper particularly attempts to reveal the persuasive style of the short story entitled ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell (1945) from a semantic-grammatical point of view. In effect, it seeks how the persuasive style is realized through the process types (material, mental, verbal, existential, relational, and behavioral) which are part of the ideational function. To this end, the verbal phrases (process types) of this story were analyzed and the results indicated that the material process was the most frequent one among the processes. The mental, verbal, existential, behavioral, and relational processes respectively followed the material process; although, as far as frequency was concerned, a drastic difference was observed between the material process and the rest of the processes. Following the persuasive style of this story, the characters were assumed to be convinced to choose some actions and avoid others. The high frequency of the material process types revealed that they certainly did what they were told to; in other words, their persuasion was expressed through acting upon what they were asked to. The conclusion drawn is that to persuade others, confronting them with the possibilities and expanding their understanding of themselves and their lives via asking them to act upon the advice and make the changes themselves (the material process) prove to be effective than involving their emotions (the mental process) and pushing certain words into their minds (the verbal process).