From Theory to Practice: Transitivity Analysis of Alfred Tennyson’s Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

Abstract

This paper investigates the progression of the narrative and the psychological and emotional development of the major character in Home They Brought her Warrior Dead by applying Halliday’s theory of transitivity. Transitivity patterns are useful to study the link between languages and thought The study will pave the way to understanding the inner feelings of the widow, which are concealed by the poet by using different linguistic choices. In the first two stanzas of the poem, the widow does not show any sign of movement, whereas, in the third and fourth stanzas of the poem, action, and movement become the focus. Thus, there is a subtle narrative progression from the first two stanzas to the last two stanzas of the poem. The present study is a contribution to the field of Systematic Functional Linguistics and lexico-grammatical analysis, which originate with the frameworks of stylistics and foregrounded approaches to texts. However, Transitivity analysis is markedly different from traditional analysis as in the former approach text analysis is an explanatory activity (how a text means?), whereas, in the latter, the analysis is esteemed as an interpretive activity (what a text means?). The study is significant because it provides an analytical and objective tool for exploring meanings from the text by studying the relationship between the metafunctions and grammatical system, between the cultural context and the schematic structure of the text.