A Functional Stylistic Analysis of The Old Man and the Sea: From the Perspective
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Abstract: This paper intends to render insight into the internal structure of Hemingway’s world-famous novel The Old Man and the Sea from a transitivity perspective, hoping to prove that the theories of SFG can be used to analyze literary works. This thesis attempts to place context of situation and modified transitivity into stylistic analysis and aims to offer a new insight into the novel from the functional perspective.
Key Words: transitivity； systemic functional linguistics； functional stylistics；The Old man and the Sea
中图分类号：I106.4文献标识码：A文章编号：1812-2485（2012）03-027-3
1 Introduction
The Old Man and the Sea is an exciting but tragic adventure story. Sustained by the pride of his calling, the only pride he has left, a broken old fisherman ventures far out into the Gulf Stream and there hooks the biggest marlin ever seen in those waters. It has been studied and analyzed by many literature lovers on the view of literary appreciation or literary criticism. But the aim of the present paper is to analyze the famous novel based on the functional stylistic approach and to explain the literary meaning of the novel within the Hallidian framework. The present paper will analyze the text by applying transitivity system and prove that functional stylistics is a very powerful tool and helps learners and translators get a deeper insight of the language and understand the language better.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Previous Research on Stylistics
Stylistic analysis is generally concerned with the uniqueness of text or what is peculiar to the uses of language in a literary text for delivering the message. The modern stylistics has experienced three stages. The first stage (1900s-1930s) is the period of birth. During this period, linguists turned their attention from diachronic study to synchronic study. The second stage (1930s-1950s) is the period of development. The representative scholars are L. Spitzer, E. Auerbach, J. marouzeau, M. Cressot, etc. Some of them put forward the “theory of choice”, defining style as deviance from the norm. The third stage (1950s-present) is the period of prosperity. The publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures brings about a revolution in the field of linguistics. At this stage, stylisticians apply different theories of linguistic analysis, such as structural linguistics, transformational generative Grammar, systemic functional grammar, speech act theory, conversational analysis theory, etc.
2.2 Functional Stylistics
Functional Stylistics is one important branch of stylistics which is based on the theories of systemic-functional grammar. It is proved that Systemic-Functional Grammar is more suitable for discourse analysis than any other theories. It consists of Systemic Grammar and Functional Grammar. Systemic Grammar claims that language is a systemic network of meaning potential or that it is a semiotic system. Functional Grammar is made to classify language function into three parts: ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction. (Halliday&Matthessen, 2004)
Ideational metafunction refers to the representation towards the happenings of the world around us and inside us, the related people, things as well as circumstantial elements such as time, place and so on. It is realized by transitivity which consists of six types of processes: material process, mental process, relational process, behavioral process, verbal process and existential process. Transitivity is concerned with understanding a particular domain of our experience as configurations of a process, the participants involved in it and the circumstances attendant on it.
3 Application of Ideational Function to The old man and the sea
3.1 Ideational Metafunction
The ideational metafunction refers to the kind of language function which expresses people’s material and metal experiences in the world. A fundamental property of language is that it enables human beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense to their experience of what goes on around them and inside them. And “this metafunction is what we call ideational function. To be more specific, it is viewed as the representation of different processes” (Halliday, 1985: 106).
Another term we should know is transitivity. According to Halliday (2004:170), “transitivity is an important part of ideational function, which represents patterns of experience.” “Transitivity is assumed as a universal property of human language.” (Hopper&Thompson,1980:251) By saying that a clause represents a process, Halliday means that our most powerful conception of reality is that it consists of “goings-on”: of doing, happening, feeling, being, saying and thinking. These goings-on are sorted out in the semantic system of the language, and expressed through the grammar of the clause. This system is called transitivity system, which expresses the reflective, experiential aspect of meaning. Transitivity specifies the different types of processes that are recognized in the language, and the structures by which they are expressed.
3.2 The Six processes of Transitivity
Firstly, material process is one of the most salient types of processes involving physical actions―driving, running, throwing, kicking, and so on. A traditional definition of a verb is “a doing word” and the process describes what is happening and being done in the external, material world. The process consists, in principles, of three components: (i) the process itself; (ii) participants in the process; (iii) circumstances related to the process.
The second process type is called mental process. There are apparent differences between going on in the external world and something that goes on in the internal world of mind, and there are many verbs which refer to these mental processes of imagining, dreaming, thinking, seeing, wanting, and so on so forth.
The third major process is named relational process. If we say material process is about doing, and mental process is concerned with sensing, then the relational process can be said to about being, relating a participant to its identity or description. The process is generally realized by linking verbs. Participants of the process are tokens (subject) and value.
The behavioral process is the process of physiological and psychological behavior, like breathing, dreaming, smiling and coughing. The basic framework is made up of behavior and process. In some clauses there may be another apparent participant (typically functioning as Complement): this is the Range, which is not a real participant but merely adds specification to the process.
Verbal processes are processes of saying, which cover any kind of symbolic exchange of meaning. They project the inner world by speech so that it becomes accessible. Like the sensor in a mental process there is speaker in a verbal process that it can put out a signal.
The existential process is the process representing something that exists or happens. What is happening with existential processes is that the speaker is renouncing the opportunity to represent the participant (the existent) as involved in any “going-on”; and the distinctive structural pattern provides an explicit signal of this renunciation. Existential processes are clearly related to relational processes, but they also have links with material processes of the “happen” type. There are still other verbs realizing this process such as exist, remain, follow, stand etc.
3.3 Transitivity analyses of the novel
Having studied the six processes, we are going to analyze the novel. However, it is impossible to make the transitivity analysis of The Old Man and the Sea page by page, sentence by sentence in this study. Certain amount of texts from the novel to be analyzed in detail will be selected, and the reference book is ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Old Man and the Sea, published in Beijing by World Publishing Corporation in 1989.
The following text which consists of 173 clauses is taken from the short story. It happened on the fourth day of the old man’s journey in the sea, from the marlin waking the old man by jerking the line to the old man successfully killed the marlin. It is the climax part of the novel. The following diagram will show the detailed transitivity analysis of the chosen text:
Table 1: the transitivity analysis of the text
Process Amount Frequency
Material 115 50%
Mental 63 27.4%
Verbal 19 8%
Relational 32 13.9%
Existential 1 0.004%
Behavioral 0
Total 230
We can see clearly from the diagram above that 230 transitivity processes are chosen from the text, there are 115 material processes, which take 50% of the total; there are 63 mental processes, which take 27.4% of the total; there are 19 verbal processes, which take 8% of the total; there are 32 relational processes, which take 13.9% of the total; besides, there is only one existential process among them.
From the ideational point of view, the narrative function is realized by the material process, descriptive function is realized by mental process and relation process. So in this text, 50% of the process belongs to material process, they betray that the main genre of the text is narrative, then it’s descriptive. Let’s notice that “who does what to whom”. It’s not difficult to find out that most participants in the text are “the old man”, “he”, and “I”. So it’s about the old man who is going to make the final battle with the fish. It is also noticeable that there are goals in the most material processes and there are phenomena in the most mental processes. We can summarize that the author uses quite a lot transitive verbs to describe the old man’s activities in the sea such as: jump, put, take, lean, drop, etc. On the other hand, the most actors of these transitive verbs refer to “the old man”; the goal of them is “the fish”. This shows that the author wants to emphasize the old man’s brave behavior in fighting against the fish.
Now let’s take a look at how the transitivity system helps to build the old man’s character in the novel. The fantastic final stage of the old man’s fight with the fish brings two thematic issues to the novel. The first concerns man’s place in nature, the second concerns nature itself. It is possible to interpret Santiago’s journey as a cautionary tale, a tragic lesson about what happens when man’s pride forces him beyond the boundaries of human place in the world. However, in fact, Santiago finds the place where he can find himself completely only by sailing out farther than he ever has before. Indeed, Santiago has not left his true place; he has found it. This suggests that man’s greatest potential can be found in his returned to natural world from which modern advancements have driven him. All the concepts are embodied during the process of his brave fight with the big fish. So I can employ material process as a dynamic linguistic tool to analyze the old man’s behavior. Material processes refer to doing, happening, creating and changing. So during the realization of himself, the old man not only fights with the fish, but also with himself at the same time.
In this text the old man repeatedly reminds himself that physical pain does not matter to a man, and he urges himself to keep his head clear by taking to himself. This is obviously realized by the verbal process within Halliday’s transitivity framework. Verbal processes are of the saying. In this text, most of the “targets” are the old man himself. That’s only because he had no other partner to talk with. So, in this way, he could keep his head clear enough to prepare the final battle with the fish.
4 Conclusion
In this paper, we analyze the climax part of the novel by the means of transitivity and it turns out that the analysis of transitivity is a dynamic linguistic tool to analyze the main character’s action and complex mental state in the novella. In this transitivity analysis of the text, we found that the material processes play a key role in portraying the fight between the old man and the fish, and the metal process are the main ones to tell the reader the inner world of the old man. From the analysis, we found that functional stylistics is a very powerful tool and helps learners and translators get a deeper insight of the language and understand the language better.
References
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2Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. An Introduction Functional Grammar. London: Edward,.
3 Hopper, P.I. & Thompson, S.A. 1980. Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse. Language, 56:51-99.
4 Hemingway, Ernest. 1989. The Old Man and the Sea. Beijing: World Publishing Corporation.
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