A Corpus-Assisted Transitivity Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”

Abstract

The current study analyzed the short story of Ernest Hemingway named “Hills Like White Elephants”. The study investigated the transitivity process in the short story genre, for which Halliday's ideational meta-function was utilised as the theoretical framework for the study. Moreover, the transcript of the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” was taken as the research material. Furthermore, the research was corpus-assisted in nature, and the basic unit for analysing transitivity is a clause. Similarly, for the purpose of this research, clauses from the text were used for the analysis as the study was based on clause level. The researcher used the UAM corpus tool, and elements of transitivity, such as participants, processes, and circumstances, were examined. The results exhibited that the writer used the material process most recurrently to characterize actions and goings-on in the text. It allowed the writer to vividly depict events, making the text more engaging and informative and elaborating Hemingway's minimalist and iceberg-style writing. This study also helped to emphasize how linguistic analysis can be helpful to understand the discourse of the text and ideology of the writer and would also be valuable for researchers and students in order to analyze and interpret texts of diverse genres from the standpoint of systemic functional linguistics.