Week 3 · Grammar and Style II: Transitivity at Work 及物性实操

Sep 28, 2026 · ← Course home

Planned session. A hands-on week. We run full transitivity analyses of a literary passage in the lineage of Halliday’s classic 1971 study of The Inheritors — counting process types, tracking participant roles, and asking what the pattern means: how transitivity choices construct a narrator’s or character’s mind style.

The analysis then crosses into translation: what happens to a transitivity pattern when it moves between English and Chinese? We pair the grammatical analysis with 刘宓庆’s treatment of narrative and descriptive texts, and practise with 董启明’s checklist (Ch. 2) as scaffolding for your first structured write-up.

Key concepts: transitivity patterns in text; mind style; foregrounding; style-preserving vs. style-flattening translation.

Reading: Simpson B3; 董启明 Ch. 2 (the analytic checklist); 刘宓庆 on 叙述描写.

Slides and materials will be posted here after class.