Narrative experiential meaning-making in Malay short stories

Abstract

The experiential meaning-making in narrative can be studied by applying the Ideational Metafunction theoretical framework as introduced by Halliday. According to Halliday, the meaning-making can be realized by means of three Transitivity main elements found in clauses which are process, participants and circumstances. A study was conducted on three Malay short stories entitled ‘Catatan di Meja Makan’, ‘Anita’ and ‘Meneruskan Perjalanan’ by Zurinah Hassan to analyse the experiential meaning-making of narrative using Transitivity analysis from Systemic Functional Linguistics as the analytical framework. The findings of the Transitivity analysis on Malay short stories show that material process types are mostly found and followed by mental processes. This results in the most found participants are actors for material process types, whilst participants for mental processes are sensors. The findings also show that the participants for material processes can be living or non-living entities. The writer usually conveys the meaning of short stories in active forms, by which means active processes are used to illustrate the actions of participants in Malay short stories. The findings of this study are a contribution to the field of Malay language studies using the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, of which studies on Malay language using this theory are still lacking.