Halliday’s Processes in Selected Contemporary Short Stories: A Linguistic Study

The present study is a linguistic study that aims at surveying the three basic elements of Halliday’s processes in literary texts and exploring the utilities of its processes in these texts. Halliday defines transitivity as a linguistic term expresses the relation of processes and participants, and sporadically stretch out to circumstances. This system consists of six types of processes: material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal, and existential. The study aims at inspecting Halliday’s processes in construing various types of clauses in the texts of short stories from two different genres to show how transitivity system can interpret ambiguous simple and complex clauses. Halliday’s processes model are applied to analyse. The analysis conducted on two contemporary short stories. The first one is “Sea Witch” written by Zoe Mclean, horror genre 2025. The second one is “A Train Trip to Remember” by Vol Morgan, Romance genre 2025. The Results of analysis show that the dominant type of processes in the two short stories is material process, in which it has been applied (59) times in the first short story and (37) times in the second one. The other types have been used in various percentages and frequencies.