The language employed in presenting Dimmesdale’s psychological character deserves analysis to see how it was constructed by Hawthorne, the author, to create its designated effect on the readers. Utilizing an integrated application of Halliday’s transitivity framework (1994) and cognitive poetics, the current study reveals the construction of Arthur Dimmesdale’s psychological character. It examines how linguistic patterns and cognitive mechanisms interact to create Dimmesdale’s complex psychological portrait. The corpus of the study represents 60 selected narrative sentences related to Dimmesdale from chapter 12, ‘The Minister’s Vigil’. The study demonstrates how transitivity patterns grammatically encode Dimmesdale’s lack of agency and hyper-vigilant consciousness. This is created by the prevalence of passive in key material processes (55.4285%) and mental processes (22.2857%) in the sentences. Furthermore, cognitive poetics analysis is complementing transitivity analysis. It shows how conceptual metaphors, such as GUILT IS A DISEASE and THE SELF IS A BATTLEGROUND, and schema theory convert abstract psychological conflict into concrete, embodied experience. The study’s results demonstrate that Dimmesdale’s characterization arises from the strong synergy between grammatical structures and cognitive patterns. Thus, his somatic symptoms are expressed through existential processes interacting with disease metaphors. His psychological paralysis is encoded in passive constructions and internal force dynamics. His identity fracture is then articulated through the clashing of behavioural and verbal processes. The study contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about the relationship between linguistic form and literary meaning.
Shaimaa Mohamed Helal (Mon,) studied this question.