How Willa Cather s Style Alienated Paul? A Stylistic analysis of Paul s Case based on Halliday Transitivity System

The purpose of the current paper is to investigate the way linguistic codes’ function in Willa Cather’s short story, Paul’s case. To achieve this goal, the data of the study, which were the clauses of Paul’s case, were analyzed based on Halliday (1994) transitivity system rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The model provides a suitable mean to determine Clause constituents considering the type of the processes and participants. According to the data, the relational process was the main process of the story as it had the highest frequency, which demonstrates how Paul is alienated by the society and how he became the victim of the distorted reality as the material processes relating to him were significantly lesser than relational and mental ones. Understanding the link between linguistic constitution of the text and literary meaning as Short (1995) declared, has resided in an explication of how texts are interpreted by readers whether native speakers or EFL learners. Hence, stylistics has distributed to frame accurate and retrievable how analysis and comprehension is formed or new aspects of interpretation revealed.