A Systemic Appraisal of Experiential Meaning in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

Abstract This article has explored the transitivity patterns of two excerpts from Adichie’sHalf of a Yellow Sun from a systemic functional perspective. It aims at unveiling the writer’s world view, messages, and personal experience encoded through the poignant recount of the consequences of the past Biafran civil war in the selected excerpts. To reach these objectives, the study has appealed to the mixed methodology. Among several other findings arrived at elaborated on in the subheading entitled interpretation of the findings, the study reveals that the overriding material processes in the examined passages, function to signal that the Nigerian civil war consequences written about are not fictitious artistically devised narratives but real facts. They have been used to depict the duplicity and treachery that some of the minority tribes members like the Igbos were victim of in the time of the Biafran civil war in Nigeria between 1967 and 1970. The recorded cognitive mental processes have been used to encode the author’s full knowledge of the historical facts about the Nigerian civil war and precautions to take to avoid it breaking out afresh in the future. The intensive attributive and identifying processes have been used to describe the scenes of the civil war providing all the necessary details about it in a way that helps know and understand all its nooks and crannies. As for the verbal processes, they have served to depict the historical narrative feature of the examined excerpts and as an indirect result of the novel as a wholeInvestigating such other areas of the systemic functional linguistics as register variables study, mood and modality analysis, tenor of discourse analysis as well as themes patterns exploration in the scrutinized excerpts to mention but a few, would contribute in unveiling deeper meanings. Key-words:Analysis, meaning,participants processes, transitivity.