Towards Defining Transitivity System: Meaning-focused Approach

Transitivity has been the important research focus since its birth. Different schools of linguistics carry out such research on transitivity from their theoretical basis. The traditional research failed to give a clear definitive level of transitivity, and mainly judged the transitivity of verbs or sentences according to the post object forms. Such kind of researches dropped into the vagueness between form criterion and meaning criterion when dealing with the highly context-depended clauses.This thesis carries out the research from the experience basis of transitivity and in the meaning-focused mode, trying to explain transitivity as the conceptual-semantic structure which analyzed human experiences into a set of operational and construable process configurations. Based on the new transitivity model of Peng (2006), and the combination of certain theories in the Systematic Functional Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, the research separates the'experience realm'and'process types', and reconstructs the transitivity model in the double processing model—operational and relational. The thesis tries to add a new type of social experience into the experiential basis of transitivity according to the certain theory of sociology and further develop the completeness of description on human experience through transitivity theory. Based on the above theory, the thesis constructs the new matrix of transitivity and analyzes the transitivity into six new process types: material-operational, material-relational, social-operational, social-relational, mental-operational and mental-relational. The paper also learns from the Prototype theory in Cognitive Grammar and double-tagged mode in Cardiff branch, put out the main prototypical clause for each new process types and carry out double-tagged research from transitivity study and ergative study.Through the review of transitivity theory and discussion on new model of transitivity, this thesis aims to make the meta-research on transitivity more prolific. The shortage of this paper lies in the detailed classification of each process type, which could be completed and constructed in the analysis of different discourses.