Transitivity Analysis of the Short Story “The Happy Prince” Written by Oscar Wilde

Abstract

The present study investigates how the writer has established different characters in the story with the choice of linguistic features. For this purpose the data were taken from the famous short story titled “The Happy Prince” written by an Irish writer Oscar Wilde. The researcher applied the systemic functional linguistic theory presented by Halliday for transitivity analysis of the text. The text was manually analysed by the researcher. All the processes, participants and circumstances were recognized from the whole text. They were arranged in the form of tables and charts. The results were discussed in the qualitative method of research. The results show that three types of process i.e. material (43.41%), relational (20.26%) and verbal (17.04%) were predominant in the whole text. The highest dominance of the material process shows that the writer has created dynamic and tangible actions in the text. Similarly circumstances of location i.e. place (52%) and time (20%) were dominant in the whole text. The significance of the study was also discussed in the educational perspective.