ideational dimension of the grammar of the clause (see p. 70 above) usually referred to in systemic linzuistics 'transirivirv'
1985: 5), and deals with the types of process and the types of participant involved them (participant here means elements in clauses). As I cared in chapter 1 above, it has received a great deal of attention in analyses within Critical linguistics (see Fowler et al. 1979'
and Hodge 1979; Kress 1988; Hodge and Kress 1988).
main types of process are 'relational' processes, where the verb marks a relationship (being, having, becoming, etc.) between ticipants, and 'action' processes, where an agent acts upon a goal.
I .shall. also say a little in this section about 'theme', a textUal of the grammar of the. c.lause with the ways m elements are positioned accordmg to their mational prominence.
One thing to notice about the action type of process in the extract from the antenatal care booklet, is that pregnant women are rarely referred to as agents. Agents in action processes are often staff (in many cases implicitly so, because the
IS passive and the agent is 'deleted', e.g. 'you will be weighed'), or non-human entities (e.g. 'social conditions' and 'sub-in the second paragraph under the head'sub-ing 'Your first ). Conversely, pregnant women or their physical characteris-ncs ('you', .'your height') quite often occur as goals in action clauses. It IS also the case that 'you' (referring to pregnant rarely occurs .in the informationallY-important initial posrnon of a clause, as ItS 'theme' (see further below).
The Book is different in these respects. It contains a lot of action processes with 'you' as agent, and many of its clauses have 'you' as theme. For example:
You will probably want to ask a lot of questions yourself about antenatal care, about the. hospital, about your pregnancy. You may also wantto.say something about what you hope for in pregnancy and at the midwife anything that you feel is import-ant. Wme down advance the things you want to ask or say.
'You' is the agent of 'want', 'ask questions', 'say', and implicitly of 'tell' and 'write down'; and 'you' is theme in five clauses (including dependent clauses, such as 'what you hope for in pregna,:,cy at the. birth'). We might say it is also an implicit theme m the Imperatives 'tell' and 'write down'. The instance of 'you' in bold print underlines the 'you-centredness' of the
Preg-Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality 179
Book, in contrast to the decentering of the women in The Baby Book. In the latter, the relatively high proportion of agent-less passives, where the implicit agent is a member of the medical staff, combined with the categorically predictive modalities I re-ferred to in the last section ('you will be weighed' combines the features), give the sense of pregnant women being subjected
to anonymous and invariant procedures. The thematization of 'you' in the Pregnancy Book shows again that it adopts (if ambi-a1ently, as I suggested in the last section) the perspective of the women, whereas the perspective in The Baby Book is firmly that of the medical staff.
A final transitivity feature is the degree of 'nominalization' in sample. Nominalization is the conversion of processes into lIominals, which has the effect of backgrounding the process itself ... its tense and modality are not indicated and usually not specifying its participants, so that who is doing what to whom is left implicit. Medical and other scientific and technical language favours nominalization, but it can be abstract, threatening and mystifying for 'lay' people such as the readers of this sample.
There are a lot of norninalizations in The Baby Book; some examples in the subsection. 'The first visit' are 'a comprehensive review of your health', 'medical disorders', 'kidney disease', 'your previous health problems', 'the outcome of the pregnancy', 'the development of a baby'. The high frequency of nominalizations is another indication of the orientation of this text to a medical voice.
I now discuss the issues raised by this example in more general terms, beginning with transitivity, then going on to voice (active versus passive), nominalization, and theme.
There are processes and participants - animate and inanimate in reality, and there are processes and participants in language, but we cannot simply extrapolate from the nature of a real process to the way it is signified linguistically. On the contrary, a real process may be signified linguistically in a variety of ways, according to the perspective from which it is interpreted.
A language differentiates a small number of process types and associated participant types, and the signification of a real process is a matter of assimilating it to one of these. A social motivation for analysing transitivity is to try to way to work out what social, cultural, ideological, political or theoretical factors determine how Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
178
180 Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality 181 dead') suggest the possible political and ideological signifi-ance of choice of process type. For an issue is
ways important is whether and
e made explicit or left vague media accounts of Important The examples above evoke one category of events where is issue constantly arises: violence and violent death. Thus Trew
shows that the political of a
deter-choice of process types to signify deaths the of political in South Africa, thus .determlnes responsibility for the deaths IS explicitly attributed, and whom. Similarly, wars, unemployment, industrial decline, and accidents are sometimes signified as events that just and sometimes signifi.ed in terms of actions re-sponsible agents. These can be a of p.ohtlcal and ideological struggle. The same IS true of signification pro-cesses of antenatal care io the example earlier, and the question of pregnant women are represented as agents of actions, or
only goals of actions. . .
The grammatical form of a clause IS not always a
forward guide to its process type; there are, for example, cases of what Halliday calls 'grammatical metaphor'(1985: chapter 10), where one process type takes on the typical grammatical realiza-tion of another. These are extracts from a report in the British Communist newspaper The Morning Star: 'Big Demos Boost Health Service Fight' (headline); 'health workers and col-leagues demonstrated and rallied, marched and picketed, leafleted and petitioned'; 'Parliament was hit by of
These are apparently action clauses which give .a strong ion of purposeful activity. The and are
(subject-verb-object) clauses, the typical directed action but one might see them as metaphorical alternatives to, for example, 'many people have demonstrated and this has helped those fighting for the health services', and 'hundreds of. north-erners conducted a lobby of Parliament.' The second consists of a series of apparently non-directed action clauses, which agaio can be seen as metaphors (for 'took part in demonstrations', 'held rallies', etc.), In this case, there is clear motivation for the grammatical metaphor in the political position of the newspaper.
An additional variable with directed action clauses is 'voice', which can be either active or passive (Quirk et al. 1972: 801-11;
Halliday 1985: chapter 5). In a passive clause, the goal is subject Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
a process is signified io a particular type of discourse (and . different discourses), or in a particular text.
The main process types in English are: 'action', 'event', 're-lational', and 'mental' processes. I have already referred to actio and above. Two types of action processes
be and 'non-directed' action. Directed
action. type I have in The Baby Book, where agent IS acting upon a goal.It is generally realized - manifested on the surface of the text - as transitive (subject - verb - object) clause, for example 'the police shot 100 demonstrators'.
directed involves agent and an action but no (explicit) goal, and IS usually realized as an intransitive (subject - verb) clause such as 'the police were shooting'. Event processes iovolve an event and a goal, and are also generally realized as intransitive clauses, such as 'lOO demonstrators died'. Non-directed
and .c1auses are not always sharply distinguished, but they do how they are most naturally questioned:
action most naturally lioked to the question form What did x(= the agent) do?', and events with the question form to x (=.the goal)?' Relational processes iovolve of being, becoming, or having (possession) between en-nnes, for example'lOOdemonstrators are dead'. Finally, mental (verbs such as 'know', 'think'), percepnon ( hear, notice), and affection ('like', 'fear'). They are generally realized as transitive clauses (for example 'the demon-strators feared the police'), and involve what Halliday calls a 'senser' ('the demonstrators' in this case - the entity that experi-en.ces the mental process), and a 'phenomenon' ('the police' io this case - the target or source of that experience).
Which process type is chosen to signify a real process may be of cultural,. political .or significance, as I suggested above. .a hterary. example of its cultural signi-ficance a study of Gelding's The Inheritors (Halliday how the perspective of Lok (Neanderthal man) signified the novel with event processes, with the conse-that and the relations of agency and causality cannot be represented. This registers the pnmmveness of Lok, and his inability to make sense of the acnons of The People (Homo sapiens).
Some of the illustrative examples I used above ('the police shot 100demonstrators', 'lOOdemonstrators died', 'lOOdemonstrators
183 Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
bnormalities which may be pres.ent', which a new
categ-of abstract ..The of new ennnes IS of
ominalization which IS of considerable cultural and Ideological II1p0rtance. For instance, an advertisement for
the headline 'Good looks can last you a lifetime!", good is a nominalization (from concrete relational processes as 'you look good ") which entifies a and
into an inherent state or property, which can then Itself the focus of cultural attention and manipulation (good can, for example, be cultivated, enhanced, looked after;
can be said to bring people good fortune, make them happy, give them trouble). Accordingly, one finds nominalizations them-taking on the roles of goals and even agents of processes.
further discussion of the properties of nominalization, see Kl'ess and Hodge 1979: chapter 2.)
I have referred already to 'theme' in discussing the motivations choosing passive clauses. The theme is the initial part of the clause the rest of it being sometimes, referred to as the 'rheme' (Quirk et aI. 1972: 945-55; Hallidar 1985, 3).
clauses in these terms means looking at their textual functions (p. 76 above), and how they structure, in a br.oad sense. The theme is the text producer s POint of departure a and generally corresponds to what is taken to be (which does not mean it actually is) 'given' information, that is, infer-already known or established for text producers and
interpreters. . .
Looking at what tends to be selected as theme different types of text can give insight into commonsense assumptions about the social order, and rhetorical strategies. Consider, first, common-sense assumptions. The 'unmarked' .choice of theme in a
tive clause (a statement) is the subject of the clause; this IS the choice made if there is no special reason for choosing something else.Inthe subsection of theBaby Book extract headed 'Examina-tion', for instance, we have a sequence of themes (a 'thematic structure') in the main clauses of the sentences, which shows the agenda the medical staff are working to ('your height', 'a com-plete physical examination', 'a vaginal examination',.'a cervical smear'), and indicates their commonsense assumptions about examination routines. The first clause of the second paragraph, with the theme 'the purpose of this', is rather different, and shows anothers asoect of the ootential of theme: the existence Text Analysis: Constructing Reality
182
and the is either 'passive agent' (a phrase beginning 'by'), or omitted altogether (examples with and without agent from The Baby Book are 'antenatal care will be provided eith by. your hospital or by your general practitioner', and height will be measured'). Active is the 'unmarked' choice th
selected are no reasons for
passive. And monvanons for choosing the passive are varioll One is that it allows for the omission of the agent though
. Ifb . I ' ' I S
may various y motivated by the fact that the Irrelevant or unknown. Another political or gical reason for agentless may be to obfuscate
and hence causali.ty and responsibility (compare 'police shot 100 demonstrators' with 'lOO demonstrators were killed'). Passives also motivated by considerations relating to the textual function
the A passive shifts the goal into initial 'theme'
posi-tion, usu.a1IY .means it as. or already
information; It also shifts the agent, if ItIS not omitted Into the prominent position at the end of a clause where we usually find new information. For example, in 'antenatal care will be either by your local hospital or by your general practitioner', 'antenatal care' is a given - it is what the whole is about - and the new information is who provides it, the.a.gent (actually two alternative ones) in the new informa-non position. For more on theme, see below.
shares with the passive the potentiality of omitting the agent, and the variety of motivations for doing so.
The in the same. direction in 'a complete physical exammanon WIll then be carried out': as I noted earlier the bi.nation here of agentless passive and categorical predictive mod-ality reinforce the voice in the booklet by giving the sense of women being subject to anonymous and invariant procedures, ,and here Ca complete physical
-
without an Identified agent - strengthens this.Nominalizarions can also involve omission of participants other than agents; for example, both agent and goal are omitted from 'examinations' and 'tests' in 'it involves a series of examinations and the course of your pregnancy.'
NomlnalIzatlon turns processes and activities into states and objects, and concretes into abstracts. For example, it is one thing to refer. to concrete in pregnancy which may not be developing normally; It IS another to refer to idenrifvinv 'anv
E
NERGY consumption world- that for the some industrial nationscouldfold 1850. in the 30years,
(The Guardian, 14 August 1990)