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Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts
Bibliography: leaves 75-78.
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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African Studies
2014
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| _version_ | 1867613618392006656 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Rowe, Joy |
| author_browse | Rowe, Joy |
| author_facet | Rowe, Joy |
| author_sort | Rowe, Joy |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Bibliography: leaves 75-78. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/6936 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:39:00.831Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2014 |
| publishDateRange | 2014 |
| publishDateSort | 2014 |
| publisher | African Studies |
| publisherStr | African Studies |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/6936 Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts Rowe, Joy African Studies Bibliography: leaves 75-78. Language is a primary medium through which members of society construct a social reality in which they may meaningfully conduct day-to-day lives. The choices speakers make in language encode experiences and notions of the world in particular ways but may be constrained by context. In this study, I analyze the life history interviews of two gay black HIV-positive South African men to explore how speakers use contextually-available linguistic resources to negotiate meaning. Linguistic resources of speech genre, story type, and transitivity offer structural options to speakers but also introduce constraints. Using Fairclough's Foucauldian conception of 'orders of discourse', I establish that life history interviews are a unique hybrid of genre types that draw on conventions of casual conversation and interview genres, providing speakers with new resources for articulating their social world. Generic analysis, incorporating insights from Fairclough (1995), Eggins and Slade (1997), and systemic functionalism, is used to examine the story types that speakers may draw upon to structure their experiences. Given structural and functional constraints within story types, I look at the transitivity choices that speakers make to represent their social realities. Transitivity analysis, also based on systemic functionalism, is used to investigate choices of process (verbs) and their associated participants (nouns) that encode speakers' experiential meanings. The purpose of this study is threefold: to establish that the genre of life history interviews offers speakers opportunities to negotiate power relations and influence genre conventions; to demonstrate that generic analysis may be usefully applied to oral texts to understand speakers' deeper systems of life order; and to describe through generic and transitivity analysis the individual social realities of two gay HIV -positive men. Results include a structural analysis of life history interviews, a structural argument for including Observation and Reminiscence texts within the 'story' typology, and an in-depth analysis of two unrepresented voices of South Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic. 2014-09-08T09:40:01Z 2014-09-08T09:40:01Z 2003 Master Thesis Masters MPhil http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6936 eng application/pdf African Studies Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town |
| spellingShingle | African Studies Rowe, Joy Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts |
| title_full | Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts |
| title_fullStr | Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts |
| title_full_unstemmed | Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts |
| title_short | Constructing social reality in conversation : a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts |
| title_sort | constructing social reality in conversation a generic and transitivity analysis of life history texts |
| topic | African Studies |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6936 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT rowejoy constructingsocialrealityinconversationagenericandtransitivityanalysisoflifehistorytexts |