2017
DOI: 10.1177/0957926517703222
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‘Mum, the pot broke’: Taking responsibility (or not) in language

Abstract: This article explores how we take responsibility for our past actions in language, using an ideational perspective. It focuses on the way we construe actions in transitive and ergative language patterns and from this develop a cline of responsibility, which has maximum responsibility at the one end and minimum responsibility at the other. The article examines a number of instances of language use from different genres and registers with this cline to determine the extent to which language users take responsibi… Show more

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Cited by 19 publications
(18 citation statements)
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“…mereka menemukan sesuatu yang berharga 'they discovered something valuable (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). In the middle voice construction, Process is seen as self-generated, and there is no agency feature in the grammatical slot (Dreyfus, 2017). This also occurs with the Process + Range structure; for example, in the clause, Bahasa Indonesia mengalami dominasi (the Indonesian language experienced dominations), 'dominations' is put in Range position.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…mereka menemukan sesuatu yang berharga 'they discovered something valuable (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). In the middle voice construction, Process is seen as self-generated, and there is no agency feature in the grammatical slot (Dreyfus, 2017). This also occurs with the Process + Range structure; for example, in the clause, Bahasa Indonesia mengalami dominasi (the Indonesian language experienced dominations), 'dominations' is put in Range position.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Quanto à percepção de responsabilidade, os julgamentos de plausibilidade e a emoção que o participante acreditava que seriam atribuídos à desculpa, a ausência de diferenças nos tipos de relacionamento e nos tipos de desculpa são indicativos sistemáticos de que os processos podem ser relativamente independentes dessas variações situacionais. Obviamente isso não pode ser concluído sem reconhecer limitações potenciais do estudo, que envolvem não somente a amostragem (alunos universitários), como as próprias situações utilizadas nos cenários experimentais ou mesmo a linguagem (Dreyfus, 2017).…”
Section: Discussionunclassified
“…Based on the combinatorial analysis of agency, voice, and theme, Dreyfus 2017proposes a cline of responsibility in English, as shown in Figure 2. Using this cline, Dreyfus (2017) shows that even her three-year-old son was capable of manipulating transitivity resources to construe the same reality, but one which minimises any responsibility attributed to himself as the do-er by saying The pot broke. Although the active voice and the passive voice (with Agent) both explicitly assign responsibility to the do-er, Dreyfus (2017) further argues that the active voice assigns higher responsibility by placing the do-er I in the initial, thematic position in the clause, therefore foregrounding the agentive role with textual prominence.…”
Section: Cline Of Responsibilitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The seminal work of Calzada-Peréz (2007), which inspires the present study, usefully deploys transitivity in relation to causation and voice for a corpus of European Parliament speeches and translations. However, while transitivity continues to attract new interest in discourse analysis (Chaemsaithong and Kim 2018;Dreyfus 2017;Lukin 2013), it has not drawn much recent attention in translation studies, except for Wu's studies (2016, 2018) of the English translation of Chinese Zen Buddhist texts and Chinese government reports.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%