ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a particular linguistic model that has had an important bearing on the way gender issues in texts. Transitivity is concerned with the semantic structure of clauses and refers, broadly, to who does what to whom, and how. An analysis of transitivity therefore probes a clause to find out who are the actors, the acted upon and what processes are involved in that action. For M. A. K. Halliday, the grammar of a language is a system of ‘options’ from which speakers and writers choose according to social circumstances, with transitivity playing a key role in ‘meaning making’ in language. This means that the choice of certain linguistic forms always has significance, the roots of which are arguably often ideological. The chapter demonstrates that, transitivity patterns, especially in the manipulation of agency at the grammatical level, can be significant in terms of the intersection between language and power.
