Grammatical Transitivity and Indirect Speech Combination in Action: Voices from Characters in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011)

Abstract

In mass communication, the material process use makes it easy to lay emphasis on the participants’ actions, events, and circumstances of their occurrence, while mental process contributes to insisting on their psychological and emotional states. As for indirect speech, it characterizes the version always used by messengers, public announcers, journalists, and reporters. This study aims to analyze Transitivity and Indirect Speech in clauses ingrained and identified in some passages taken from Helon Habila’s Oil On Water (2011). One of the major principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics is that the exploration of the Transitivity properties (processes, participants, and circumstances) in a text leads to draw conclusions about the question -“who does what to whom, under what circumstances?”? In order to deliver the set objectives, the ongoing study specifically draws on the principles of experiential meaning to get data from the selected extracts and, focuses on describing the clauses containing reported speeches. By following the mixed research methods guiding principles, this research work has generated some data which enable to come up with a conclusion on the psychological and psychosomatic states of the participants as well as on the assigned status adopted by some characters. That correlates them to reporters and journalists. This research work has enabled me to develop another. This paper has made it easy to have another view about Helon Habila’s messages and the way they are conveyed throughout his novel.