A Stylistic Analysis of Transitivity Processes in Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” and Robert Creeley’s “America”

By probing the language of a literary text one can have a profound understanding of that text and thus a real appreciation of the writer’s artistic achievement. Ac-cordingly, this paper tackles the relationship between linguistic structures and socially constructed meaning in two American poems: “The New Colossus” (1883) by Emma Lazarus and “America” (1968) by Robert Creeley. They were known for glorifying and condemn-ing America’s liberty and greatness respectively. Em-ploying Halliday’s transitivity which is rooted in Sys-temic Functional Linguistics, the paper attempts to re-veal the poets’ aims by employing specific verbs. This paper also scrutinizes Halliday’s transitivity, which includes processes such as material, mental, verbal, existential, relational, and behavioral, to show its func-tions in the overall meanings of the two poems.