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.