The use of functional stylistics in analyzing a portion of “The Wedding Dance”

This paper aims to analyze the transitivity patterns used in one of the most prominent short stories in Philippine Contemporary Literature “The Wedding Dance” which was written by a renowned writer Amador T. Daguio. This study is based on Halliday’s framework of transitivity analysis to delve on the meaning of the story in the literary discourse. This paper used the simple random sampling among the short stories in the Grade 7 English Learning Material from the Department of Education. In addition, the story is divided into three parts according to the number of sentences. Subsequently, part of the story has been identified and selected as basis for the analysis through random selection process. Furthermore, the paper used all 15 sentences from the first portion of the short story to be analyzed and interpreted using the functional stylistics. Analyzing and interpreting a portion of the short story in the context of functional stylistics played an integral part for it provided a portion of in depth understanding and interpretation of how each process type works and functions. It is also evident that the distribution of process type varies in different yet meaningful ways. Thus, by examining the transitivity process in the text is indeed indispensable for it explained how the field of the situation is being constructed, and have clear idea how transitivity patterns reflected the nature of the text.