The Problems of Transitivity Studies and  Its Solution

Wang, Huijing

doi:10.4236/jss.2015.310023

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Halliday’s [ 72 ] concept of transitivity supplements the differentiation between transitive and nontransitive verbs. This differentiation depends on the presence or absence of an object that completes the process meaning [ 72 ]. Through the choices in the transitivity system, the speaker construes their experiences of the external world and the internal world of their consciousness.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Analysis of Patient Cues in Asynchronous Health Interactions: Pilot Study Combining Empathy Appraisal and Systemic Functional Linguistics

et al. 2022

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Background Lifestyle-related diseases are among the leading causes of death and disability. Their rapid increase worldwide has called for low-cost, scalable solutions to promote health behavior changes. Digital health coaching has proved to be effective in delivering affordable, scalable programs to support lifestyle change. This approach increasingly relies on asynchronous text-based interventions to motivate and support behavior change. Although we know that empathy is a core element for a successful coach-user relationship and positive patient outcomes, we lack research on how this is realized in text-based interactions. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a linguistic theory that may support the identification of empathy opportunities (EOs) in text-based interactions, as well as the reasoning behind patients' linguistic choices in their formulation. Objective This study aims to determine whether empathy and SFL approaches correspond and complement each other satisfactorily to study text-based communication in a health coaching context. We sought to explore whether combining empathic assessment with SFL categories can provide a means to understand client-coach interactions in asynchronous text-based coaching interactions. Methods We retrieved 148 text messages sent by 29 women who participated in a randomized trial of telecoaching for the prevention of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and postnatal weight loss. We conducted a pilot study to identify users' explicit and implicit EOs and further investigated these statements using the SFL approach, focusing on the analysis of transitivity and thematic analysis. Results We identified 164 EOs present in 42.37% (3478/8209) of the word count in the corpus. These were mainly negative (n=90, 54.88%) and implicit (n=55, 60.00%). We distinguished opening, content and closing messages structures. Most of the wording was found in the content (n=7077, 86.21%) with a declarative structure (n=7084, 86.30%). Processes represented 22.4% (n=1839) of the corpus, with half being material (n=876, 10.67%) and mostly related to food and diet (n=196, 54.92%), physical activity (n=96, 26.89%), and lifestyle goals (n=40, 11.20%). Conclusions Our findings show that empathy and SFL approaches are compatible. The results from our transitivity analysis reveal novel insights into the meanings of the users’ EOs, such as their seek for help or praise, often missed by health care professionals (HCPs), and on the coach-user relationship. The absence of explicit EOs and direct questions could be attributed to low trust on or information about the coach’s abilities. In the future, we will conduct further research to explore additional linguistic features and code coach messages. Trial Registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) ACTRN12620001240932; https://www.anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?id=380020

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Patient Cues in Asynchronous Health Interactions: Pilot Study Combining Empathy Appraisal and Systemic Functional Linguistics

et al. 2022

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“…Transitivity in Halliday's systematic functional theory is referred to as 'a system for describing the whole clause, rather than just the verb and the object' (Huijing, 2015) as in traditional grammar. To Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), transitivity represents our experience "which consists of 'going-on, happening, doing, sensing, meaning, and being and becoming'.…”

Section: Systemic Functional Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is a system of the clause, affecting not only the verb serving as process but participants and circumstances (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). As well as being a mode of action, of giving and demanding goods and services and information, the clause is a mode of reflection, of imposing order on the endless variation and flow of events (Huijing, 2015) people construe the complex world on the basis of transitivity system which helps to sort out experiences and divide them into a manageable set of process types. The semantic processes expressed by clauses have three components:…”

Section: Systemic Functional Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transitivity Analysis of Proverbs in Achebe’s A Man of the People

Nkeiruka¹

2021

IJEL

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The language of literary texts is adorned with proverbs, a cultural element which to some extent has become significant in the growth and development of African literature and in the portrayal of meaning assigned by the writer. This paper explores the relationship between linguistic structures and culturally constructed meaning in Chinua Achebe’s novel A Man of the people by critically examining the transitivity of proverbs used in the work. This study is anchored on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. The analysis reveals that Achebe uses more material processes, followed by mental processes and then relational and verbal processes. Furthermore, the types of transitivity process, participants, circumstatials contribute towards the construction of themes reflected in the novel. Based on the results, the paper concludes that Achebe uses a variety of transitivity processes as proposed by M.A.K. Halliday with the exception of existential and behaviour. He uses actors, sensers, carriers, identifiers, to convey message of his novel. Achebe mostly uses circumstances of extent, location, and manner to show that the actions take place in a certain place, time, and at a certain frequency. The paper concludes that Achebe’s use of varieties of processes, participants and circumstances has made his novel interesting and readable.

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English tough-constructions and their analogues in French and Russian

Tsikulina,

Tayalati,

Soroli

2024

LiC

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Evaluative constructions involving tough-predicates (e.g., This hill is difficult to climb) present atypical structure-to-meaning mappings and vary across languages: in some languages (e.g., English/French), speakers typically use so-called tough-constructions (TCs) in which the syntactic subject of the matrix sentence is logically the missing object of the infinitive; in others (e.g., Russian), speakers opt for a variety of functional analogues (e.g., passive, impersonal constructions). The aim of this paper is to explore English TCs involving difficult and easy adjectives, compare them to French and Russian analogues based on a parallel-corpus, and investigate how specific semantic properties (animacy, transitivity, adjective scope) relate to specific (more or less compact) configurations. The results show that French and Russian have similar functional analogues and only partially share the structural properties of English TCs. The findings support a multidimensional account based on the inherent semantic properties of evaluative constructions and their degree of compactness.

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The Problems of Transitivity Studies and Its Solution

Cited by 4 publications

References 4 publications

Analysis of Patient Cues in Asynchronous Health Interactions: Pilot Study Combining Empathy Appraisal and Systemic Functional Linguistics

Analysis of Patient Cues in Asynchronous Health Interactions: Pilot Study Combining Empathy Appraisal and Systemic Functional Linguistics

Transitivity Analysis of Proverbs in Achebe’s A Man of the People

English tough-constructions and their analogues in French and Russian

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