In these workshops, we will cover two main areas:

    •    problems with categorising transitivity;

    •    the ways in which a transitivity analysis, once carried out, can be used as a basis for exploring the patterns of meanings made in a text or set of texts.

In relation to the first of these areas, there is a general feeling amongst many systemic functional grammarians that transitivity analysis is problematic in practice. Halliday (e.g. 1994: xx) has consistently argued that ‘all the categories employed must be clearly “there” in the grammar of the language’. However, in the case of transitivity, it has proved difficult to implement that assumption in all cases: the grammatical criteria by which one process type can be differentiated from another are not always precisely definable, and ‘purely’ semantic criteria may be implicitly or explicitly drawn on. In the workshops, we will investigate the theoretical and practical case for distinguishing structural and functional perspectives on transitivity. We will explore the implications of applying the distinction to transitivity, and work together on examples where problems of analysis can be ascribed to tensions between the transitivity structure and function. We will use a range of text extracts from different genres, and concordances of verbs that have proved difficult to categorise. In relation to the second area, we will work on sample texts to investigate some of the insights that can be gained from transitivity analysis. Two common reasons for analysing transitivity in text are to explore differences in how contrasting texts or groups of texts represent the ‘same’ events, and to describe the patterns of transitivity choices that are characteristic of particular registers. A full analysis requires an examination not only of the frequency of process types, but also of the patterns of participants – of the kinds of roles typically assigned to different entities or groups of entities in the transitivity of the clause. Building a picture of these patterns which allows comparison between texts or generalisation across registers is a complex matter, and in the workshops we will explore the practical value of combining three main methodological resources: transitivity concordances; transitivity templates; and the cline of dynamism (Hasan 1985/1989). We will try out the model being proposed on the sample texts.