Ideology and the Clause: the

System of Transitivity
Hallidays idea of language as a network of choices, and therefore of grammar itself as a set of
options, leads to a view of grammar as potentially forming coherent world-views. As Knowles
and Malmkjaer say, A writers linguistic choices can aid the creation and maintenance of
relations of power. This is so whether the writer intends his/her linguistic choices to function
ideologically or whether they merely reflect implicit ideology. Furthermore, linguistic choices
have to be made, whether or not the writer gives vent to intended, surface ideology. (Knowles
and Malmkjaer, 1996, p. 68) Halliday sees language in terms of three functions, the ideational,
the interpersonal and the textual, which are concerned respectively with the expression of
content, the relations between persons, and the creation of a text as a logical sequence of units.
Typically, each sentence is characterized by a functional plurality, although one function may
prevail over the others.
This chapter is concerned with the clause in its ideational function, and in particular with one of
the possible options available within it, namely the system of transitivity, the grammatical
function which expresses the experiential aspect of meaning and which is composed potentially
of three elements: (a) the process, (b) the participants in the process and (c) the circumstances
associated with the process. My analysis concerns primarily the processes in the tales, which
Halliday further subcategorizes into three main types of processes: material, mental and
relational. Material processes are processes of doing, they express the notion that some entity
does something which may be done to some other entity (Halliday, 1985, p. 103), where
the two entities are respectively the actor and the goal in the process. Mental processes are
processes of sensing, and they are divided into three subtypes: mental processes of
affection(expressing liking, fearing and so on), of perception (seeing, hearing), and
cognition(thinking, knowing), where the participants are the senser, the conscious being that is
feeling, thinking or seeing and the phenomenon, that which is sensed (Halliday, 1985, p. 103).
Relational processes are processes of being: The central meaning of clauses of this type is that
something is (Halliday, 1985, p. 112). Halliday distinguishes between different ways of being:
(a) intensive (x is a); (b) circumstantial (x is at a); (c) possessive (x has a), each of which can
come into one of two modes: attributive or identifying, where the participants are respectively
carrier and attribute, and identified and identifier. Halliday further distinguishes three subsidiary
types of processes: the behavioural, the verbal and the existential. Behavioural processes are
processes which express psychological or physiological being, like breathing or laughing; these
processes are intermediate between material and mental processes. For the purposes of this study
I have usually classified processes of consciousness represented as forms of behaviour as mental,
processes describing bodily postures or physiological processes as material, and verbal processes
of behaviour as verbal, unless it was particularly significant or relevant to identify them as
behavioural. Verbal processes are processes of saying, that is, any kind of symbolic exchange of

meaning, where the participants are the sayer, the verbiage (the verbalization), the receiver (the
one to whom the message is addressed).
Finally, existential processes represent that something exists or happens. Following Deirdre
Burtons framework of analysis in Through Glass Darkly: Through Dark Glass (Carter, 1982,
pp. 194214), I will further distinguish between processes expressing deliberate actions
(material-action-intention), those indicating actions that simply happen (material-actionsupervention), and processes indicating event processes (material-event). In this way it is
possible to highlight degrees of dynamism in the behaviour of the characters which may bring
out asymmetries or straightforward sexist imbalances in their representation. More than a
particular choice, it is the frequency with which a certain syntactic option is selected that
contributes to conveying a particular way of looking at experience (Halliday, 1971, p. 347):
sexist assumptions or, on the other hand, liberating assertions can be coded in the 60 Language
and Gender in the Fairy Tale Tradition syntactic organization of the texts, since no level of
meaning can really impose linguistic choices (Halliday, 1971, p. 346).
The analysis of the transitivity choices in the chapter compares the representation of female and
male characters in eleven retellings, and it goes through the following stages: I extract the actors
and identify the processes in each story, and then compare numbers in order to see whether there
are any discrepancies between the numbers and the types of processes initiated by female and
male actors which may be imputed to a sexist view of the author.