Sonia Balasch, University of New Mexico
Transitivity in El reino de este mundo ‘the kingdom of this world’
In a commentary on Carpentiers’s novel, El reino de este mundo, it is stated that the style of this author is objective, that he does not offer his personal, subjective perspective. Although it is not clear according to which measure Carpentier’s style is considered objective, the Hopper and Thompson’s (1980) Transitivity Hypothesis allows us to measure in one way the extent to which the author’s style is objective.
High Transitivity seems “to be used for reporting events in a highly non-subjective, in fact distancing manner” (Thompson and Hopper, 2001:53). On the other hand, low Tansitivity is related to subjectivity (Scheibman 2000), that is, the different ways speakers express their own perception of the world. With this in mind, 200 clauses were analyzed from the first ten sections of El reino de este mundo. (Twenty four tokens [12%] were excluded.) In each clause, the Transitivity factors proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980) were measured and it was established that Carpentier’s statement about his non-personal perspective is not categorically supported based on an analysis of Transitivity of the sentences.
It was determined that while in the clauses with two participants there were more factors indicating a greater objective perspective by Carpentier (high Transitivity), there was a far greater number of one-participant clauses, as one would expect based on the findings discussed in Thompson and Hopper (2001). This suggests that Carpentier may be expressing his own views instead of providing objective information about Haiti, its history and culture. Thus, based a linguistic measure using the Transitivity Hypothesis, the claim that Carpentier follows an objective perspective in El reino de este mundo is not supported.
References
Carpentier, Alejo. 2004. El reino de este mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral.
Hopper, Paul J. y Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56. 251-299.
Scheibman, Joanne. 2001. Local patterns of subjectivity in person and verb type in American English conversation. In Joan Bybee and Paul J. Hopper (eds), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure,27-59. Amnsterdam: John Benjamins.
Thompson, Sandra A. and Paul J. Hopper. 2001. transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation. In Joan Bybee and Paul J. Hopper (eds), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure,27-59. Amnsterdam: John Benjamins.
