Transitivity analysis (SFL)

[Dajana Zecic]

Dear Professor Laurence, dear fellow researchers,

I am trying to conduct a transitivity analysis (Halliday&Matthiessen 2014) on a corpus of selected media texts. I am wondering if there is a way to rank the frequency of processes in which a specific object of research (in my case "Britain", "UK", "United Kingdom") appears as a participant. I had my corpus tagged for POS, hoping I could rely on the verb tag(s) to extract the data for the relevant clauses in the corpus. My initial idea was to use the Collocation tool, and search "Britain", but through the "Advanced search" setting and verb tag as context. The problem is - I didn't figure out how to set "the formula". :)

I hope this plan of mine makes sense. If there is a different way, please suggest.

Looking forward to a response!

Kind regards,

Dajana

[Laurence Anthony]

Dear Dajana,

When you say that you want to count specific objects of research that appear as a participant, what exactly do you mean by 'objects' and 'participants'. If the objects and participants are not marked explicitly, then you cannot count them. Or, are you simply trying to count the occurrences of the words "Britain", "UK", and "United Kingdom"?

If you can explain what you want to do with an example, that might help.

Regards,

Laurence.

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Laurence ANTHONY, Ph.D.
Professor of Applied Linguistics
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University
3-4-1 Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan
E-mail: antho...@gmail.com
WWW: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/
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[Dajana Zecic]

Dear Professor Laurence,

following the SFL theory, I want to see in which processes, i.e. verbs, for example, the word "Britain" is included as a participant (basically, as subject or object). I am trying to get results that rank those verbs according to frequency.  If I manage to do that, I plan to label those verbs as processes manually following the transitivity system suggested by Halliday. For example, I might get results that indicate that the most frequent verbs Britain "cooperates" with either as the subject or the object are "create", "construct", "demolish", "modernize", and that will help me conclude that the most frequent type of processes in which "Britain" participates are, in fact, material processes (because all those verbs belong to the category of material processes).

I hope I explained it better now and thank you for your time and patience.

Dajana