Abstract
Culture is manifested in many ways. Traditional song is one of the cultural manifestations representing a social life of an ethnic group. Culture recognition, such as understanding traditional song meanings, is believed to preserve cultural heritage. Accordingly, this study aimed at analyzing transitivity patterns used in 10 traditional song lyrics written by a famous Toba Batak traditional song writer, Nahum Situmorang, to find out the experiential meanings realized in his masterpiece. The method of the study is a quantitative descriptive. Transitivity analysis put forwarded by Halliday [1] under Systemic Functional Grammar served as the tool of data analysis. The result of the study yields two major findings as follows: 1). All of the six process types can be found in Nahum Situmorang’s traditional song lyrics, 2). Material process and mental process are the most frequently occurred process types in the traditional song lyrics. This indicates that his song lyrics are overwhelmed by emotional description of social phenomena.
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