Transitivity Analysis of Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking: Exploring Processes of Asking, Giving, and Receiving

Abstract

This study investigates how experiential meaning is constructed through transitivity choices in Amanda Palmer's TED Talk The Art of Asking. Drawing on Halliday and Matthiessen's (2014) Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, the research focuses on the ideational metafunction, particularly the transitivity system, to examine how processes, participants, and circumstances are employed to represent acts of asking, giving, and receiving. Using a qualitative descriptive method, the data were taken from the official transcript of the talk and analyzed at the level of the finite clause. Clauses that were incomplete, unintelligible, or irrelevant to experiential meaning were excluded from the analysis. A total of 312 finite clauses were identified and categorized into six transitivity process types: material, mental, relational, verbal, behavioral, and existential. The findings reveal that material and mental processes are the most dominant, indicating that the discourse emphasizes both action asking as an intentional and agentive social practice, and internal reflection foreground thoughts, feelings, and beliefs related to trust, shame, and vulnerability. Furthermore, relational processes function to redefine values, particularly by framing, asking and receiving beyond economic transactions, while verbal, behavioral, and existential processes support the construction of social interaction, emotional response, and shared conditions. Overall, the study demonstrates that transitivity analysis provides valuable insights into how personal public discourse linguistically constructs agency, vulnerability, and human connection.