European Journal of Research in Social Sciences Vol. 2 No. 4, 2014 ISSN 2056-5429 Progressive Academic Publishing, UK Page 78 www.idpublications.org TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS: REPRESENTATION OF LOVE IN WILDE’S THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ROSE Asad Mehmood, Roshan Amber, Sobia Ameer & Rabia Faiz University of Sargodha, Sargodha, PAKISTAN ABSTRACT This study reorients representation of love in Oscar Wilde’s short story The Nightingale and the Rosein a more focused way by subjecting it to Halliday’s transitivity model of text analysis. The transitivity analysis showed how Wilde balances the concept of love which, upon cursory glance, appears to tilt towards the protagonist, the nightingale, with the arousal of sympathy. Transitivity analysis of the short story by taking into account the processes associated with the main characters enabled to bring to limelight Wilde’s widely acknowledged and debated view of contraries by presenting the nightingale and the young student of philosophy as two contrary views of love balancing each other. The finding through linguistic tool of transitivity is based on the assumption that language form is not fortuitous, but performs a communicative function. Keywords: The Nightingale and the Rose, Oscar Wilde, Linguistics, Stylistics, Transitivity Analysis. INTRODUCTION It is widely believed that people who study and use a language are interested in how they can do things with language, how they can make meanings build up and be understood through choices of words and grammatical resources. Bloor and Bloor claim that “when people use language, their language acts produce – construct meaning” (2004, p. 2). Kroger and Wood (2000, p. 4) believe that language is taken to be not simply a tool for description and a medium of communication but as a social practice, a way of doing things. The study of language is so important that, as Fairclough (1989, p. 2) states, “using language is the most common form of social behaviour” and we depend on language in our public and private interaction, determining our relationships with other individuals and the social institutions we inhabit. For Halliday (1985, xiv), “a language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized and answer the question, “how are these meanings expressed?” This puts the forms of a language in a different perspective: as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves.” It is from this point of view of language that systemic functional linguistics was developed by Halliday and his associates during the 1960s. Fairclough claims that language “is a material form of ideology, and language is invested by ideology” (2001, p. 73). Social language or discourse is not only representational but intervenes in social change because “discourse contributes to the creation and recreation of the relations, subjects…and objects which populate the social world” (p. 73). That is to say, discourses are material effects of ideology which also have a strong impact on shaping our sense of reality. Making the same point, Fowler makes the link between discourse and ideology even clearer when he defines discourse as “socially and institutionally originating ideology, encoded in language” (1986, p. 42). With this idea in mind, in this paper, I will examine the function of language as useful tool in the short story “The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde in the light of Halliday’s