الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract This study is an attempt to investigate how the linguistic features of schizophrenic patients are reflected in their dialogues at the level of clause representation through a systemic functional analysis of the transitivity processes in the inner, psychotic and normal dialogues of the schizophrenic Elyn Saks as presented in her autobiography The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness. In terms of transitivity, the study explores the linguistic features of three major symptoms of schizophrenia: shattered personality, delusions and hallucination through analyzing three types of dialogues by Saks: inner, psychotic and normal. The research design followed a mixed approach between quantitative and qualitative analyses of the results of the study. It has been found that her participant role in the inner dialogues reflected her debilitation and inferiority, while it demonstrated false power pretense and extreme fear from the outer world in the psychotic dialogues. In addition, the transitivity analysis of the normal dialogues revealed the equilibrated and stable shade of Saks’ personality. The analysis has also provided insights on Saks’ failure to tell apart her own thoughts from those of others through assigning people as participants of unreal processes in her inner dialogues. Finally, it has been found that the deviance in process construction in the psychotic dialogues is realized through violating the conditions that Halliday has set for the transitivity processes and participants which resulted in the syntactic dysfunction of her speech. |