Investigating the Transitivity structure of Chapter 12 of the Quran based on Halliday Systemic Functional Approach

Halliday's functional grammar underlines the significance of function and meaning and deals with language for its function in social interactions. The present research aims at exploring the transitivity structure of chapter 12(Joseph) in order to reveal the frequency with which different processes are used and their function in forming the specific style of the narrative. In doing so, we studied all clauses used in the story and described all processes, participants, as well as circumstantial elements in the clauses. Results indicated that material processes outnumbered other processes. A text narrating important events in a prophet’s life is naturaly expected to use more material processes. However, after material processes, verbal processes were the second frequently used ones. The high frequency of verbal processes could be explained with reference to the fact that the story of Joseph is narrated in the form of a set of dialogues where characters converse one another. This is to believe that while narrating events in material processes, the Quran pays much attention to the speech acts performed by characters in the narrative, making the whole narrative proceed in a dialogical style.