EXPERIENCING THE WORLD THROUGH FICTION: A TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF CULTURAL WORLDVIEWS IN PAKISTANI AND NATIVE ENGLISH SHORT STORIES

Abstract

This research investigates how cultural worldviews are linguistically encoded through the experiential metafunction in fiction, employing Halliday and Matthiessen's (2014) transitivity framework to analyze the native English story "The Mild Attack of Locusts" and the Pakistani short story "The Crucifixion." Using UAM CorpusTool for manual clause annotation, we systematically compared participant roles across material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential processes. The analysis reveals how each author fundamentally construes experiential perspective through distinct transitivity patterns: Native narrative foregrounds material action (27% Actor frequency) dominated by animate participants (90.4%) interacting with concrete inanimate (84.8%), constructing a world where human agency confronts environmental challenges through observable, goal-directed intervention. In stark contrast, the Pakistani text deemphasizes physical action (18.6% Actors) in favor of mental processes (7.7% Senser/Phenomenon) and abstract inanimate Actors (28.6%), framing experience as shaped by internal states and contextual forces like societal structures or spiritual imperatives.

Subtler patterns further illuminate this divergence: where native writer prioritizes Sayer-focused verbal exchanges (4.5% Sayers vs. 0.9% Receivers) to advance pragmatic action.and communication. Behavioral processes reveal externalized emotion in the native text (6.7% Behaver) versus restrained introspection in the Pakistani narrative (6.1%), while relational processes show heightened descriptive focus on states of being in the latter (13.8% Carrier/Attribute vs. 12.6%). Existent participants (1.5% ) function differently, as factual anchors in the native story versus symbolic presence in the Pakistani text.

These patterns crystallise two cultural ontologies: the native text embodies an empirical agency framework, prioritising individual mastery over environment through material intervention; the Pakistani text reflects a symbolic negotiation paradigm, where meaning emerges from contemplation of contextual forces. The study demonstrates that transitivity choices are inherently cultural acts, with participant distribution systematising worldview differences beyond mere style. Pedagogically, this offers educators tools for teaching cross-cultural literacy through linguistic analysis. Theoretically, it advances Systemic Functional Linguistics as a lens for decolonising literary studies by revealing how grammar perpetuates cultural epistemologies Western narratives privileging environmental control versus South Asian narratives centring metaphysical embeddedness. Ultimately, this research proves that stories encode cultural DNA through their experiential perspective, making transitivity analysis essential for understanding how fiction shapes and reflects human experience.