Transitivity in a ghanaian literary text - a study of the major process types in awoonor’s just to buy corn

Abstract

This study uses Halliday's transitivity framework to analyse how language has been used by Kofi Awoonor to reveal the African experience represented from the Ghanaian perspective in his story Just to Buy Corn. The primary focuses of the study are the three main process types, and the interplay between processes, participants and circumstances in the three major process types is used as representation of the author‟s perception of the Ghanaian experience. Using the qualitative design and the interpretative content analysis, the study finds that processes abound in the text, with a total of 533 processes. Material processes appear the most with a frequency of 336 representing 63.04% of the data analysed. The second most frequently used in the story are relational processes with a frequency of 103 representing 19.32%, followed by the mental process with a total frequency of 43 and a percentage of 8.07%. The verbal process follows with a frequency of 26 representing 4.88%. The behavioural process type follows with a frequency of 21 representing 3.94%, and existential process with a very small frequency of 4 representing 0.75%. The dominance of material processes in the story indicates the existence of a lot of physical actions in the African experience. The conclusion drawn from the study is that the selected story uses more primary process types than secondary types and confirms that the transitivity system can help in analysing clauses effectively and also helps us encode our experiences of the world. This affirms the assertion that language forms selected by writers are unplanned, yet, deliberately chosen to perform certain specific communicative functions. Keywords: Kofi Awoonor, Systemic Functional Grammar, Transitivity, Short Story, Social Ideology