A Comparison of The Grammatical Metaphor of Transitivity in Saadi's Didactic and Romantic Poetry

As a subcategory of grammatical metaphors, metaphors of transitivity are discussed in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. This article attempts to compare metaphors of transitivity in two of Saadi's literary genres – didactic and romantic. Findings of the study, conducted in a descriptive-analytical method, are as follows: 1) Surprisingly, the surface structure of clauses from Saadi's romantic poetry indicates a higher frequency of material processes over others, followed by relational processes by far. In didactic poetry, at surface structure level, material and relational processes exceeded others, both having been used almost in the same frequency. Next frequently used process type is mental. However, the analysis of clauses suggests that a considerable number of clauses from Saadi's poetry are, substantially, mental or behavioral at deep structure level. This depicts human's internal emotions thoroughly, but, when carried into surface structure level, these processes are transformed into material and relational processes under metaphor of transitivity.It seems that, for romantic poems, the poet has been trying to further visualize and perceptualize the internal emotions of characters or lovers in his stories significantly. The transformation of mental and behavioral processes into material and relational ones is significantly more frequent in Saadi's romantic poetry compared to his didactic poetry. 2) Considering the fact that a segment of metaphors of transitivity in Saadi's poetry are either indicative of metonymy or contain secondary connotations construed in rhetoric, it seems so that the metaphor of transitivity can help literary researchers rethink a number of concepts related to semantics and eloquence.