Research on the Transitivity System in China: A Review and Prospects

The transitivity system is an important linguistic resource for realizing ideational meaning in systemic functional linguistics, and it constitutes the semantic content of the clause. Taking the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database as its main data source, this paper selects and reviews articles on the transitivity system published in Chinese core journals of foreign-language studies from 2009 to 2019. The statistical findings show that, in addition to theoretical inquiry, the theory of the transitivity system has been widely applied to discourse analysis, translation studies, foreign-language teaching, and other fields, yielding substantial research achievements. By reviewing the current state of transitivity-system research in China, this paper aims to identify its potential and limitations and to offer new directions for future research.