Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

9.3 Transitivity, and the notions of overt and covert agency
Unit 9 Language and society
Section 2 Language variation

A speaker can align themselves with a social position by their choice of words, but also by the way in which they combine the words into sentences. A sentence represents an eventuality. ’Eventuality’ is a cover term for an event, or an action, or a state of affairs, and all sentences represent one of these three types of occurrence or situation. An event is something that happens. An action is something that is caused to happen: it involves an agent, a sentient individual, usually a person, who makes something happen. A state of affairs just is; it has no agent. The important point for our purposes is that the actual eventuality that is being reported can be reshaped in the reporting, such that, for example, an action can be made to seem more like an event. Consider, for example, in Table 9.1, a two-page spread of headlines from a right-wing British newspaper.

Each of these headlines is a sentence that represents an eventuality. All six eventualities are actions (as is clear when the articles are read: they all involve events initiated by agents). But the headlines present these as actions to different degrees: some are presented much more clearly as actions than others. The clearest examples of actions are (c) and (e), where there are explicit agents. It may be significant that these are also the two eventualities where the non-liberal editorial stance of the newspaper is most disapproving; perhaps agency is emphasized when the action is considered bad. In contrast, the police disappear as agents from (a), which might even be read as representing a state of affairs, and the warner (the agent of warning) disappears from (f).

Table 9.1

The distinction between eventualities represented as actions and eventualities represented as events or states of affairs is a rather crude one. A more complex and multi-dimensional differentiation uses the notion of transitivity. The core notion of transitivity involves an action where an agent does something to someone or something else (called the patient of the action). In traditional grammar, a transitive sentence is a sentence with both a subject and an object, such as ’Mary ate the cheese’, where ’Mary’ is both the subject of the sentence and also the agent of the action, and ’the cheese’ is both the object of the sentence and also the patient of the action. Core transitive sentences of this kind can be thought of as ’high in transitivity’, where transitivity is a gradient characteristic (it can be greater or lesser) of a sentence. Some of the elements of a sentence that make it highly transitive are these:

1 The subject of the sentence (the phrase before the verb) expresses the agent of the action, and there is an object of the sentence (the phrase after the verb), which expresses the patient of the action. Passive sentences such as headline (d) above get a low transitivity score on this criterion, because they do not have objects (the patient of the action is expressed as the subject of the sentence).

2 The action takes place at a moment in time and is not currently ongoing, but has finished. On this criterion headline (e) is low in transitivity, though it is high in transitivity on criterion (1).

3 The action is done on purpose. Purposiveness is an important component of being an agent in any case, and the more clear that the action is purposeful, the higher its transitivity. Headline (b) scores low for transitivity in this regard, though it can be argued that the transitivity of the actual eventuality that it reports has been reduced in reporting it.

4 The patient is an individuated entity that is totally affected by the action. Thus, for example, headline (a) scores high on transitivity because five distinct people are individuated and affected by the action; in contrast, headline (c) scores low on this type of transitivity because no specific person is affected by the action.

These kinds of criterion enable us to assess the level of transitivity on various different scores. We can then interpret the results. For example, the fact that headline (a), about the arrests, is low in transitivity criterion (1) and high in (2), (3) and (4) makes even more salient the fact that the agency of the police has been concealed; it is as though they do not act as individual agents (but perhaps as representatives of the social order). In complete contrast, headline (c), about the delay in appointing gay bishops, is high on criterion (1) but low in (2), (3) and (4). Here, despite the generally low transitivity of the eventuality (the action of delaying an action), the salience of the actors makes an interesting contrast to the absence of the police from the other headline; here, perhaps, the salience of the bishops as actors suggests that they do not represent the social order, the order to which the readers of the paper belong.

The theoretical approach of ’Critical Discourse Analysis’ or CDA explores the extent to which it is possible to make political sense of how eventualities are portrayed, particularly in the media. Such an analysis could, for example, be undertaken for the reporting over the period 25 to 26 March 1999 at the beginning of NATO’s air campaign to prevent the violent expulsion by Serbs of Albanians from their homes in Kosovo. Here is a set of headlines all representing essentially the same eventuality (or sequence of eventualities):

(g) The onslaught begins

(h) Serbs remain defiant as the missile attacks go on

(j) NATO vows to bomb Serbs until resistance is destroyed

(k) ’No sanctuary’ warns NATO as Serbs are bombarded again

(m) Belgrade rocked by bombs as British jets join NATO

(n) Air strikes begin as Blair says ’we must end vile oppression’

(o) Onslaught

(p) Firestorm!

(q) Nowhere to hide

(r) Justice

(s) Clobba slobba.

Bombing is in itself an eventuality that should be capable of being represented with high levels of transitivity: it has to be a deliberate action on the part of an agent, which affects a patient, taking place at a point in time and then stopping (for individuated events of bombing, though less so for a campaign). However, none of the headlines represents it as highly transitive. Headline (j) comes the closest to having an agent subject of the verb ’bomb’, but in fact this sentence is about vowing to bomb, not directly about bombing; that is, the verb ’bomb’ here does not have an overt subject. Similarly, (m) implies that British jets are dropping the bombs mentioned in the first part of the headline, but does not explicitly say so; instead the eventuality ’Belgrade rocked by bombs’ is a passive sentence, relatively low in transitivity (even the choice of ’rocked’ instead of ’damaged’ de-emphasizes the effect on the patient). In other headlines, (n), (g), (o) and (p), the eventuality of bombing is named, but there is no mention either of the agent (the bombers) or the patient (the Serbs of Belgrade). It is also noticeable that the eventualities tend to be represented as nouns not as verbs: ’attack’, ’onslaught’ and ’air strikes’ are all noun phrases that are inherently less transitive than equivalent verbs because they lack subjects and tend not to be located as clearly in time. Thus these headlines all function in a similar way by reporting the eventualities in ways that deemphasize transitivity, reporting an event in ways that make it seem as if we (the readers of the newspapers) - or our representatives - are not trying to kill them (the Serbs of Belgrade).