Application of transitive structures in the analysis of the personality type of the characters in the novel Tarlan

Functional linguistics has universal parameters of transitivity, and analytical psychology has introduced psychological types by analyzing the psyche. Considering the transitivity parameters and the archaic nature of psychological types, we seek to analyze the relationship between the psychological types of two characters in novel Tarlan with regard to their "introversion" and "extroversion", the scale of transitivity in the dialogues, and the author's descriptions of the characters. The research question is ‘what role does language play to represent the story characters’ psychology?’. We used the personality typology by Jung and two theories by Hopper and Thompson about the structure and parameters of transitivity. As the data analysis showed, the dominant mental attitude of Tarlan is ‘introvert’ and that of Rana is ‘extrovert’. We then examined the transitivity of the dialogues and clauses of both characters. It was concluded that psychological traits not only shape the person’s disposition, behavior and character but also affect his or her language and how it is used. The clauses of the extroverted characters had higher transitivity, while those of the introverted characters were less transitive in most parameters.