Transitivity, agency, mind style: What’s the lowest common denominator?

Louise Nuttall

doi:10.1177/0963947019839851

Transitivity, agency, mind style: What’s the lowest common denominator?

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article

Abstract

Analyses of the worldviews presented by texts have identified grammatical patterns in terms of the transitivity system outlined in systemic-functional grammar (Halliday, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). While contributing to different interpretations of mind style and ideology in different contexts, these patterns and interpretative effects often bear fundamental similarities. In this article, I investigate this underlying similarity in transitivity analyses, or ‘interpretative “lowest common denominator”’ (Simpson, 1993: 105), from a cognitive stylistic perspective. This article attempts to characterise this low-level effect and test it empirically. It takes as its starting point a body of analyses in stylistics and critical discourse analysis, which repeatedly link comparable sets of grammatical features (e.g. goal-less intransitive clauses and metonymic agency) to a diminished sense of intentionality, awareness and control in the human agent responsible (e.g. Halliday, 1971; Kennedy, 1991; Simpson and Canning, 2014; Trew, 1979). I argue that the shared interpretative effects of these stylistic choices can be understood in terms of Cognitive Grammar’s model of construal (Langacker, 2008). Specifically, I propose that the effects of transitivity choices are fundamentally effects for our attribution of mental states, or ‘mind-modelling’ (Stockwell, 2009) of participants, as part of a construal. Finally, I describe an online reader response experiment which tests this proposal among a wider sample of readers. Combining methods from experimental studies of mind attribution in psychology with a controlled alteration of texts by Conrad and Hemingway, this research reveals predictable cognitive effects of transitivity choices across contexts.

Language	English
Pages	159-179
Number of pages	21
Journal	Language and Literature
Volume	28
Issue number	2
Early online date	19 Apr 2019
DOIs	10.1177/0963947019839851
Publication status	Published - 1 May 2019

Fingerprint

attribution

grammar

worldview

discourse analysis

Transitivity

ideology

psychology

interpretation

experiment

Construal

Attribution

Clause

Experiment

Ernest Hemingway

Critical Discourse Analysis

Reader

Systemic Functional Grammar

Alteration

Modeling

Experimental Study

Cite this

Nuttall, L. (2019). Transitivity, agency, mind style: What’s the lowest common denominator? Language and Literature, 28(2), 159-179. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947019839851

Nuttall, Louise. / Transitivity, agency, mind style : What’s the lowest common denominator?. In: Language and Literature. 2019 ; Vol. 28, No. 2. pp. 159-179.

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Nuttall, L 2019, 'Transitivity, agency, mind style: What’s the lowest common denominator?', Language and Literature, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 159-179. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947019839851

Transitivity, agency, mind style : What’s the lowest common denominator? / Nuttall, Louise.

In: Language and Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2, 01.05.2019, p. 159-179.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article

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