The Study on Transitivity of Scientific Fiction: The Time Machine as an Example

Abstract

Corpus as a tool has been introduced in literature and linguistics for many years, allowing linguistic features and authorial style more visible and appreciable to readers. Based on Biber’s MD/MF method and semantic field, this research is interested in linguistic features of science fiction and finds that transitivity is what makes science fiction distinguishable from science articles and novels. The current research is corpus-based, and corpora included in this research consist of Silence Spring (science article), The Time Machine (science fiction), and Jane Eyre (romance novel). This paper takes aims to investigate the 'transitivity' of science fiction by comparing three novels of different types. By means of the MD/MF method, the paper has found that transitivity in science fiction is achieved by TTR, mean word length, and mean sentence length. These findings may direct potential writers to focus on linguistic features worthy of notice, and readers can have a better understanding when they are reading novels.