A Transitivity Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner

This study uses Halliday’s transitivity approach to analyze D. H. Lawrence’s The Rocking-Horse Winner. The purpose is to provide a linguistic analysis of the literary work by Lawrence to see how far the linguistic approaches to literary texts conform to the literary analyses of the same texts. The study uses a framework based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, in which process types are identified in the text and then used to arrive at an interpretation of the text based on the linguistic analysis. The linguistic outcomes correspond with the psychological interpretations of the story. In addition, the mother-son relationship is recurrent in D. H. Lawrence’s fiction. This further supports the connection between the linguistic and the literary interpretation of the story and shows how a linguistic analysis may lead to one based on literary approaches.