Transitivity System on Building Character of Mr. Summers in the Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Abstract

<jats:p> The Lottery is one of the most famous American canonicals written by Shirley Jackson (1948) which is sensational. The theme brought triggers controversy to contemporary critics. The story exposed one of the darkest dualities of human nature in ‘the lottery’ carried out by the society in the story. The controversial character in the Lottery which evokes social culture issue is analyzed by investigating the process types related to the character. Types of process are essential in the building characters or characterization. Thus, this study analyzed the main character of a literary work “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1948) using transitivity system of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) approach. The data were all clauses related to Mr. Summers as the main character in this short story. They were analyzed using concept of transitivity system. The result shows that the author of the short story dominantly uses verbal process to construct the main character through his verbiage which is 52.63% of the total processes in clauses. In addition material process which also occupies high number (32.90%) after verbal process denotes that the character does activities in the domestic and physical domain. The relational process (7.89%) is used to characterize the characters explicitly. The mental process (5.26%) is used to depict the characters’ cognition while behavioural process (1.32%) is employed to a common activity.</jats:p>

The portrayal of female character in John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums: A stylistic analysis

“…A transitivity analysis in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery conducted by Nugraha & Mahdi (2020) shows that transitivity process could reveal the characterization of Mr Summers. Moreover, Nugraha & Mahdi (2020) stated that each types of transitivity process in the story is essential in developing both characters and characterization.…”

Adult Jokes in Sausage Party Movie: A Study of Multimodality

“…Therefore, language is a social semiotic aspect that refers to a system for making some meanings (Nugraha & Mahdi, 2020). Thus, any language is can be used in any text and it reflects the knowledge of the members from some communities since literature and language are the product of culture which has its function in relation to social environment and reality that portrayed in literary works (Wahyuni, 2014).…”

“…Ideational function is regarded by the existence of 'PARTICIPANT', 'PROCESS' and 'CIRCUMSTANCE' (Butt & Fahey, 2000). Then, the types of 'PROCESSES' are material process, verbal process, behavioral process, relational process, mental process and existential process (Butt & Fahey, 2000;Nugraha & Mahdi, 2020). Interpersonal function uses language to encode the interaction (Butt & Fahey, 2000), or the language is a piece of interaction between speaker and listener (Halliday & Hasan, 1989).…”

A Transitivity Analysis of Greta Thunberg’s 2019 Climate Action Summit Speech

“…Analysis employing Systemic Functional Grammar is not uncommon. Some researchers have used SFG to analyze a speech (Harwiyati & Siagianto, 2016;Zhao & Li, 2018;Zhu & Li, 2018), literary text (Darani, 2014;Nugraha & Mahdi, 2020), and analyze non-political speech (Haq, Indrayani, & Soemantri, 2020). Zhao and Li (2018) conducted a transitivity analysis study on the inaugural speech of Donald Trump, the American president.…”

“…An analysis of the transitivity system in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was done by Nugraha and Mahdi (2020) to discover Mr. Summers's representation, the main character, from the types of processes in clauses that related to him. Through a descriptive qualitative research design, the study finds that the verbal process dominates the text to construct Mr. Summers through verbiage.…”