A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TRANSITIVITY PROCESSES IN PAKISTANI CRICKET COMMENTARY: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

This research paper aims to investigate all the transitivity processes and types with their frequencies in Pakistani cricket commentary through Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1960). It further leads to perform Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis of the selected clauses demonstrating different transitivity processes to uncover the ideological construction in Pakistani cricket commentary. This research paper intends to answer the first and second question of which transitivity processes are found in Pakistani cricket commentary; and what are the frequencies of each type and subtype of transitivity processes, through quantitative analysis by using UAM corpus tool. It also intends to answer the third question that how ideologies are made through transitivity processes in Pakistani cricket commentary, through qualitative analysis by taking assistance from Fairclough’s CDA. The transcription of commentary five cricket matches was taken, a mixed method approach was applied by incorporating two frameworks; transitivity analysis by Michael Halliday and three-dimensional model by Fairclough. The results and findings show that the most frequent transitivity processes in selected corpus of Pakistani cricket commentary are material, relational and mental process with frequencies 75%, 15% and 5%, while verbal and existential processes are relatively less frequent with frequencies 3% and 2% respectively. No modal transitivity process is identified in the dataset. The qualitative analysis shows that material, mental and relational processes majorly contribute to construct ideologies in cricket community. This research is significant in analysis of the language of cricket commentary through transitivity processes and CDA. This study is delimited to the analysis of only Pakistani cricket commentary, not focusing on commentary of other countries’ commentators.