Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study investigates the ideational metafunction in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in order to explore the characterisation of Okonkwo, Unoka, Ezinma, Ekwefi and Mr. Brown. The study confines itself to the following objectives, namely, to identify process-types attributed to characters; identify the transitivity patterns embedded in process-types attributed to characters; establish the significance of transitivity patterns attributed in the characterisation; and establish the significance of process-type collocations in projecting the development of characters in the story. The present undertaking is drawn from the theoretical frontiers of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the analytical lens of transitivity model, backed by the methodological locale of Corpus Linguistics (CL). The study reveals that although Okonkwo, Unoka, Ezinma, Ekwefi and Mr. Brown are attributed material processes (MaPs); mental processes (MePs); relational processes (RePs); and verbal processes (VePs), significant differences exist not only in how the allotted process-types are mapped per character but also on how they impact on characterisation. / 2023

The purpose of the present study was to establish the frequency of the process types used in Galsworthy’s novel The Man of Property and the peculiarities of their realization. To achieve this aim 1524 examples of finite and non-finite clauses were subjected to analysis.The results of data analysis demonstrated that the semantic processes used in the novel the Man of Property exhibited all the familiar types of semantic processes. The most common were material processes: they accounted for about forty percent of all semantic processes. / Šis darbas yra skirtas semantinių procesų tipų tyrimui. Yra skiriami šie semantinių procesų tipai: materialiniai (arba darymo), atsitikimo, mentaliniai, verbaliniai (arba sakymo), santykiniai ir egzistenciniai. Pagrindinis šio darbo tikslas šiame darbe yra išanalizuoti semantinių procesų tipus Golsvorčio romane „Savininkas“.Tyrime buvo išanalizuota 1524 kongruentiški ir nekongruentiški sakiniai. Šių pavyzdžių analizė parodė, kad dažniausiai sutinkami semantiniai procesai romane buvo materialiniai procesai, kurie sudarė net 40 procentų visų semantinių procesų.

This dissertation uses a functional systemic approach to language to examine the construction of the respective first-person narrators of nine of the most popular, commercially successful and therefore influential African American slave narratives published between 1837 and 1862 (Roper, Grandy, Douglass, Brown, Bibb, Northup, Ball, Jacobs, Picquet). This corpus of more than 410,000 words was scanned for various linguistic features such as transitivity of verbs, nominalizations, and several syntactic features. The texts chosen differ as to their methods of production. Some of them were written by the first person narrators themselves, while others were either extensively edited, dictated to an amanuensis, or in some other way controlled. The dialectics of creation and representation through language results in the leading question in this study: how do the first-person slave narrators identify and create a personality for themselves through their texts? This dissertation thus focuses on the linguistic means by which the first-person slave narrator creates what is defined as a “discoursal self”, which helped the narrators to achieve one of their most important goals, namely, to be accepted as reliable. The dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces a sociohistorical account of slavery, resistance against slavery, abolition, and the development of the slave narrative. The chapter shows that the African American slave narrative was not a completely new and original genre but an amalgamation of a variety of preexisting white and black literary forms. The second chapter is more theoretical and deals with discourse, power, and ideology in the slave narrative. Chapter 3 approaches the language of the slave narrative. The small corpus of scholarly texts that tackle language and style in this genre is reviewed. As an alternative to these approaches, critical discourse analysis (CDA) according to Norman Fairclough is suggested. It eliminates the a priori categorization of specific linguistic features as stylistically significant, because it is based on a functional view of language that perceives linguistic expression as choice on various levels. Every choice is considered meaningful and, according to its presence, absence, or clustering in a given co-text, potentially stylistic. Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is introduced as the basis for the ensuing text analysis. Chapter 4 introduces the first quantitative observations about the density and distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in the narratives. This characteristic is then placed in relation to syntactic condensation in the forms of ellipsis, finiteness and nominalization, all of which are reviewed quantitatively. Finally, this chapter introduces the system of transitivity according to Halliday, Matthiessen, and others. It explains the distinction between the individual process types and provides a quantitative overview of the individual transitivity profiles within each narrative. Chapter 5 represents the main part of this dissertation. Each of the nine narratives is analyzed individually as to the presence of the I-pronoun in the text and the use and distribution of process types. In this way patterns of foregrounded or favored usages against absences of others emerge and contribute to the discoursal selves that the individual narrators present/construct of themselves. These preferred usages in general as well as in their local distributions are examined in detail. The quantitative observations supply the basis for further qualitative analyses derived from a large number of examples from the texts. Thus it is possible to show that each of the narratives is linguistically unique, which results in an individual construction of the respective I-narrator. The use of pronouns, process types and syntactic reconfigurations reveals how control over the activities as well as over the text is constructed, which can be directly related to issues of power. The Summary provides a synopsis of the previous quantitative and qualitative analyses and associates the quantitative results with characteristics of written and oral texts in general. Finally, it thus becomes possible to rank the nine narratives on a cline between predominantly oral and chiefly written characteristics.