A Linguistic Analysis of Violence in Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones

Brief Bio Surinder Kaur is M.A., M.hil (English) from GNDU. Presently, she is pursuing her Ph D from RIMT University, India. She has presented papers in national and international conferences and Seminars. Her seven research papers have been published in the national and international journals (New Zealand, Romania and Slovenia). Her areas of research interest include feminist and gender studies, discourse analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics.  Her email address is sandhu.surinder85@gmail.com.

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Abstract

The proposed endeavour focuses on the violence content in Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones novel which is the first novel of her young adult urban fantasy fiction series The Mortal Instruments. I used the corpus linguistics and CDA. Then I used the framework of transitivity available in the Systemic Functional Linguistics developed by M.A.K. Halliday to study who affected whom and under what conditions. This proved a useful tool for analyzing violence because of its inherent property of involving two participants, the victim and dominant person, hence unequal power relations. Social positioning becomes a potent factor in the occurrence of violence events.

Keywords: Violence, SFL, Transitivity, Corpus Linguistics CDA, Power, Social Position.

Introduction

This research is the result of the observation that contemporary fiction aimed at young adults presents a disturbing amount of violence in its treatment of classic themes like good versus evil, lust for power and dominance, revolt against the system and saving the world from some deadly beast or demon etc.  Chris Crowe, an author and former president of ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents), explores the question of appropriateness of violence in his article “The Problem of Young Adult Literature” published in The English Journal  asserts that the books are bad because they are not classics and they “corrupt the young” (46). He cites Marianne Jennings, who said that books like The Pigman are “trash that plants the destructive seeds of violence, theft, and sexual perversion in the still malleable minds of children” (48).

Young adults or teenagers are 12 to 18 year age groups. Although they are over with their childhood fantasies and are on the road towards becoming mature individuals, they still carry an impressionable and sensitive mind which is open to all sorts of influences. The individuals in this age group are in precarious position as any wrong idea or deed done in these formative years is believed to have lifelong impacts. Celebrity psychologist Seema Hingoranny notes this is because a teenage mind is fashioned differently. It is indeed one of the most unique and terrifying phases of growing up. They get easily flustered with situations, people and themselves, because they are trying to fit in a lot of things together. This is how many succumb to dangerous and fatal online games like Blue Whale. Similarly reading literature which directly targets them and have high content of violence can have devastating results. Instead of having positive, nurturing and nourishing effects and inculcating moral values and ethics, violent literature only instigates evil instincts and appears to glorify violence as something cool and acceptable.

The mainstay of the present paper is that authors of YA fiction make use of excessive violence and sensationalism in order to make their works riveting to adults readers apart from targeted groups and this makes their works inappropriate for young readers whose age group label these works carry. Exposure to so much bloodshed and cruelty may make them insensitive to violence and they may develop violent behavioural tendencies. The aim of research is to demonstrate the violence content empirically in City of Bones (2007) by Cassandra Clare and show how violence is related to power position regardless of the good or evil side characters subscribe themselves with. Further I will try to find out how violence correlates to the concept of social identity. Thus I propose for a reduction in the violent and cruel content in young adult literature.

The present research will show the results achieved after investigating the presence of violence in City of Bones. I will explore whether presence of violence can be empirically demonstrated by means of a corpus linguistics analysis or not. The framework for the analysis is a combination of

        I.            Corpus-based approaches (Biber et al 1998, Scott 2001 and Stubbs 1996, 2002)

     II.            Systemic Functional Linguistics (Transitivity analysis) (Halliday 1994, Downing and Locke 2006)

  III.            Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, Van Dijk 1997, 2000, 2001. 2003, 2004, Widdicome 1998 and Wodak and Meyer 2002, 2009)

The present paper might provide a new insight into the violent content in City of Bones as well as into the possible effects it may have on young adults.

In order to carry out a study of violence, I will first separate those excerpts from the book which contain high violent scenes and then label them according to the violence they represent. Then I will study the process types that appear in the corpus in order to find out who is inflicting violence upon who and then I will study the participants and circumstances that are part of the corpus selected for the analysis, City of Bones corpus. My intention here is to find out whether power and violence are intrinsically related in them as “age and gender are easily identifiable at first sight, but whether someone is or not classified as having a violent nature is directly related to his/her actions” (Paoletti, 171).

In sum, my main objective will be to find out the relationship between transitivity processes and socially-constructed meaning related to power in the text. By doing this, I intend to shed some light on the power relations between the characters in this text and how this unbalanced relation creates a context for violence and what are the consequences these power relations might have on the participants?

Young Adult Fiction

Young Adult Fiction or YA literature, as defined by Beach and Marshall, is “literature written for and marketed to young adults.” Other characteristics include (but are not limited to) the following: a teenage (or young adult) protagonist, first person perspective, adult characters in the background, a limited number of characters, a compressed time span and familiar setting, current slang, detailed descriptions of appearance and dress, positive resolution, few subplots, and an approximate length of 125 to 250 pages (Beach and Marshall, 1991). Sales of YA novels have exploded in recent years.

The term "young adult" was coined by the Young Adult Library Services Association during the 1960s to represent the 12-18 age range. Novels of the time, like S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and Cormier's The Chocolate War offered a mature contemporary realism directed at adolescents. The focus on culture and serious themes in young adult paved the way for authors to write with more candour about teen issues in the 1970s.

J.K. Rowling's well-timed Harry Potter series exploded the category and inspired a whole generation of fantasy series novelists. The shift led to success for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight vampire saga and Suzanne Collins' futuristic The Hunger Games. Now, reveling in the continued success of fantasy subgenres and series, young adult fiction is enjoying a sustained boom rather than an afterglow. The common themes are love, good versus evil, adventure, social issues like rape, suicide and bullying etc.

Violence

Violence is universally condemned yet to be found everywhere and YA novels could not remain untouched and in fact make lavish use of violence in the depiction of the above mentioned themes. The World Health Organisation defines violence in World Report on Violence and Health as “[t]he intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, mal development or deprivation” (Krug et al. 5).

In their World Report on Violence and Health, Krug et al. (6) attempt to provide a more useful taxonomy of violence; they divide violence into three categories, depending on the “characteristics of those committing the violent act” (Krug et al. 6). The first is self-directed violence, such as suicidal behavior or self-mutilation. The second is interpersonal violence, divided into family and intimate partner violence as well as community violence. Terrorist acts, war or attacks for economic reasons are subsumed under the term collective violence (see Krug et al. 6).

According to Indian Penal Code’s chapters XVI and XVII, sections 299 to 377 and 378 to 462, following types constitute violence and I will use this table for present study:

Violence Category	Definition
Abuse/Assault/	To hurt by mistreating, physical attack involving actual body contact
Child abuse/ Child Abandonment	Mistreatment of children, leaving a child as a rejection of one’s responsibility towards the child
Domestic/ Gender Violence/ Rape	Acts of violence against a family member Acts of violence from male to female The unlawful compelling through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse
Injury	Physical harm or damage to a person
Kidnapping	Taking away a person without his consent
Murder	The killing of human being
Murder Attempt	Unsuccessful attempt to kill a person
Robbery/Snatching	Act of taking something other’s property by physical violence or by duress
Threat	Act of verbally assaulting/ duress to make somebody do something against their wishes

Table 1: categorization of violence

Violence, language and power

My objective in this section is to discuss the relationship between language, social power and violence. If we accept that language constructs a reality, then we can acknowledge that language can create a favourable context in such a way that the actions taking place within it can be suitably manipulated. Therefore, language can be a contributor to an enactment of, for instance, discourses related to: gender equalities and inequalities; struggles for and against racism and the fostering of peace or violence within our society. Thus, violent acts can reflect a violent society because, as O‘Connor (1995,309) signals, “when the words of violence are spoken by others and by ourselves, we may well be advancing acts of violence.”

According to Thomas at al. (2004,11), “language is the arena where the concepts of right [...] and duty are created, and thus language actually creates power, as well as being a site where power is performed.” Power is defined by Horno (2005,23) as the ability “to affect one‘s own or another person‘s development, a capacity which can be used positively or negatively […].” Investigating the discourse of violence related to power entails investigating the relationship between the two main characters involved in this relationship: the victim and the perpetrator. The victim is understood in terms of weakness, passivity and suffering, in other words, having a lack of power. In turn, the perpetrator is the person who has the power not solely because he or she holds a higher status.

The relationship between language, power and violence, in my view, can be extrapolated to the world of City of Bones. In fact, that is the core of the present chapter. As demonstrated, there is a discourse of violence within the text, my aim then is to investigate whether the relationship between perpetrators and victims in the text is based on the presence or lack of social power and the use that perpetrators make of it in order to commit violent acts against their victims. If this is so, then one of the messages that these tales are sending to children is that one might take an advantage of a predominant power position –either related to social status or solely to a better  position of strength- to make use of violence so as to achieve any aim or solely for revenge. As in the City of Bones, Valentine sends raveners and other people, he has converted into demons, to kill his own wife and daughter. Lord of devils, Abbadon, attacks Jace and Clary and demands for the mortal cup and when Clary refuses to give him the cup, he attacks everybody viciously to kill them. Another example is Hodge. He uses his hawk to attack Clary and snatches cup from her hand.

The next part of the Introduction deals with the brief review of theoretical framework of the project i.e. Corpus Linguistics (CL), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and the analysis of transitivity as proposed in Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL). The combination of these three approaches, might, in my opinion, contribute to clarify the relationship between social identity and power that seems to be present between the characters in the text.

Corpus linguistics has been described by Stubbs (2002, 20) as “a method in which observational data from large texts collections are used as the main evidence for the uses and meanings of words and phrases”. McCarthy (1999, 1) claims, computational analysis has become, in the last decades, a remarkable assistant at the time of studying texts. Corpus linguistics is based, according to Stubbs (2002, 220-221) on two principles. The first is that data and analysis must be independent and the second is that repeated events are significant. Regarding the main characteristics of Corpus linguistics, Biber (1998,4) explains that the main characteristics of this kind of approach are: (i) it is empirical, that is, according to Baker et al (2008,277) “they (CL methods) enable the researcher to approach the texts (or text surface) (relatively) free from any preconceived or existing notions regarding their linguistic or semantic/pragmatic content”; (ii) it uses a corpus as a base of analysis; (iii) it makes extensive use of computers for analysis and (iv) it depends on quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques. For the present project I make use of Word Smith tools 7 developed by M. Scott (2010). As he explains, these are composed of different tools for different tasks like wordlist, concord and keywords (2001, 47). In short, Corpus linguistics methodologies provide good support for a study of meaning in discourse. I agree with Widdowson (2000, 6-9) that “Corpus analysis reveals textual facts, fascinating profiles of produced language, and its concordances are always springing surprises.”

Fairclough (1993) defines CDA as discourse analysis which aims to explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony. According to Van Dijk (1998a) Critical Discourse Analysis is a field that is concerned with studying and analyzing written and spoken texts to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality and bias. It examines how these discursive sources are maintained and reproduced within specific social, political and historical contexts.

The systemic functional linguistics approach to discourse analysis is based on the model of “language as a social semiotic” outlined in the works of Halliday. Language is used functionally, what is said depends on what one needs to accomplish. In Halliday’s theory, language expresses three main kinds of meanings simultaneously: ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings (1985). Among them, the ideational meaning (the clause as representation) serves for the expression of “content” in language, that is, our experience of the real world, including the experience of our inner world. When we use language we often use it to speak of something or someone doing something. That is why the ideational meaning can be referred to as experiential meaning coming from the clause as representation. The interpersonal function helps us to participate in communicative acts. The textual meaning creates links between features of the text with elements in the context of situation; it refers to the manner in which a text is organized. Transitivity is a part of Ideational function. In his An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Halliday identifies transitivity as follows:

           A fundamental property of language is that it enables human beings to build a mental  

           picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what goes on around them and

           inside them. …Our most powerful conception of reality is that it consists of “goings- on”:

           of doing, happening, feeling, being. These goings-on are sorted out in the semantic system

           of language, and expressed through the grammar of the clause… This… is the system of

          TRANSITIVITY. Transitivity specifies the different types of processes that are recognised

          in the language and the structures by which they are expressed (1985,  101).

There are six processes in transitivity:

Material process	Process of doing, acting	Actor, goal, range	Jump, Catch, hit etc.
Mental process	Process of feeling, thinking and perceiving	Sensor, phenomenon	Think, know
Relational process	Process of being and having	Carrier, attribute	Is, has
Verbal process	Process of saying	Sayer, receiver	Say, tell, answer
Behavioural process	Process of physiological and psychological behavior	Behaver	Laugh, breathe
Existential process	Process of existing	There	There was a cat on the road

Table 2 : Transitivity processes

The concept of Identity

The concept of identity is related to our daily lives as Payá (2009,10) explains, there are a lot of fields in which the term ‘identity’ could come to our minds if a survey were to be carried out in the streets: nationality, social class, religion, profession, gender, personality, to mention just a few. Tajfel (1974,69) defines social identity as that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the emotional significance attached to that membership. For Antaki and Widdicombe (1998,2) identity is “a person‘s display of, or ascription to, membership of some feature-rich category”. Widdicombe (1998,52) notes that  identity means an affiliation to a category based on the actions, beliefs and opinions of a person. What is clear is that participants in all processes assume identities as they get enrolled in different social activities (Gregori 2000). In fact, participants may adopt different multiple identities, sometimes simultaneously, and these may change even within a change in their social status or when immersed in different types of status interaction, and according to different participants ( Gregori 2000 ).

For the aim of the present study, I will be focusing on the social information related to individual identity transmitted by transitivity involved in The Corpus. Furthermore, it is my intention ―to show that and how this identity is made relevant or ascribed to self or others, as Widdicombe (1998, 191) suggests.

This part summarized briefly the concepts of YA, Violence. Also CDA, CL ,Transitivity and Identity that I will be using as a theoretical framework for the analysis of the text and hence will be able to put forward the results as I believe that the combination of these methods can be an effective tool for identifying violent content, its analysis and then for producing reliable results.

Research Hypothesis and Methodology

Hypothesis:  to show that for marketing and wide readership, YA fiction writers make use of excessive violence and sensationalism in order to make their works riveting to adults readers apart from targeted groups and this makes their works inappropriate for young readers whose age group label these works carry by using CDA, corpus analysis and transitivity analysis.

My hypothesis is based on what Nodelman (2005:10) calls as ‘the children‘s lack of experience’ which I agree with. In my view, this lack lays the responsibility on our shoulders of protecting them from “experiences they may not yet understand well enough to cope with” and of educating them “into the sort of understanding that will enable them to look after themselves” (Nodelman 2005, 100).

My hypothesis is also based on the consideration of young adults as a group, not individually, and some assumptions though based on children are readily applicable to teenagers as well need to be taken into account:

§  Children have limited understanding and short attention spans. [...]At any given  stage, a child is capable of understanding only a certain amount.

§  Children are emotionally vulnerable, easily upset, and often permanently damaged by exposure to ugly painful matters. They respond to depictions of evil or deprivation not by becoming evil but by having nightmares, or even by developing permanent neuroses.

§  [...]. Exposing children to evil or violence in books merely encourages their most basic, most unfortunate, and most uncontrollable tendencies.

§  [...]. They are pliable and, therefore, highly suggestible, and they are prone to dangerous experimentation. They respond to depictions of violence by becoming violent themselves. [...]. Children will become whatever they read about. (Nodelman 2003:87)

Put it simply, the use of violence not solely regarding the vocabulary, but also the processes carried out in the City of Bones, such as "Girl," it hissed. "Flesh. Blood. To eat, oh, to eat has experiential value in terms of a violent representation of some participants in the text. Hence, in my view, there is a question to be answered about the text, namely, what types of processes and participants prevail?

Methodology

I selected 20 excerpts are from the novel, label them according to the violence they represent and then did an intuitive analysis of these excerpts. Using the Wordsmith tools 7 software’s wordlist function, I got the frequency of all the words used in the corpus. Then I search for the concordance lines of words directly related to violence and have high frequency of occurrence in the wordlist by using the concord function. I closely analysed the context and role of these words in the violence depiction in the novel. After this I studied the transitivity patterns in the corpus. Further I isolated those processes which displayed violent content to study participants. This assisted me in categorizing the participants under different identities they share according to their position to inflict violence on others.

Results and Discussion

This part of the paper will discuss the results I achieved after computational and transitivity analysis of the selected excerpts. I selected 20 excerpts according to the criteria I discussed in the previous chapter. This part is divided into four parts. First part will be an intuitive analysis and presents classification of excerpts according to violence type. Second part will be an analysis of frequencies of words directly related to violence. Then I provide the results of transitivity analysis to see who has the power to inflict violence and this leads me to last part, i.e. identity analysis.

Intuitive Analysis

I believe that an intuitive analysis of some of the selected excerpts which compose my corpus will settle the base for my computational corpus investigation because, as Biber (1998, 10) argues: “intuition and anecdotal evidence can also lead to interesting corpus based investigations [...]”. This starting point is, in my view, essential in order to establish a first approach to my main hypothesis: that is, that the fiction aimed at young adults has got a higher content of violence and cruelty than that which, in my opinion, should be found in texts aimed at them. The present study seeks to provide a quantitative and qualitative account of the presence of violence with the intention of encouraging a linguistic and social intervention in the content of the YA fiction with the purpose of decreasing the content of both violent language and violent acts. Below, I present the results of the intuitive analysis of some excerpts. This analysis was crucial to determine whether it was worth applying a quantitative analysis of the whole corpus.

City of Bones presents a violent and disturbing story about a young girl, named Clary, who happens to be the daughter of a barbaric and relentless evil person. Her mother did everything to protect her and keep her safe from the underworld demons. She never tells Clary herself that she is a shadowhunter herself. After surviving murder attempts and other cruel acts, Clary comes to know the truth about herself and her family. Through this journey of self realization, she gets hurt physically, mentally and emotionally.

The beginning of the novel acts as a signpost for the violent content young readers have to deal with in the following chapters. We read a murder enacted in a lively club by a group of shadowhunters. As Isabelle, a shadowhunter girl, hits the boy with her whip and he writhes in pain, she laughs loudly and then Jace kills the boy:

Excerpt 4

           He sank the knife into the blue-haired boy's chest. Blackish liquid exploded around the    

           hilt. The boy arched off the floor, gurgling and twisting. With a grimace Jace stood up.

           His black shirt was blacker now in some places, wet with blood. He looked down at the

           twitching form at his feet, reached down, and yanked out the knife. (MURDER)

Clary, a normal teenage girl watches the whole scene, feels utterly disgusted, starts screaming and but as other people cannot see shadowhunters, she is unable to say anything definitive about the murderers. Two days later her mother gets attacked by demons and they take her away. Clary reaches home and found herself face to face with a demon. He launches himself with full force on Clary. Clary only manages to hit it with a photograph but this has no effect the demon:

Excerpt 5

            The photograph hit its midsection and bounced off, striking the floor with the sound of

             shattering glass. The creature didn't seem to notice. It came on toward her, broken glass

             splintering under its feet. "Bones, to crunch, to suck out the marrow, to drink the  

             veins..."

            Clary's back hit the wall. She could back up no farther. (MURDER ATTEMPT)

Clary inadvertently puts the sensor she snatched from Jace into demon’s open mouth and sensor explodes burning the demon completely. But before dying it hits Clary head with its claws and she goes unconscious. As she wakes up after three days, another shock awaits her. She calls Luke, her mother’s boyfriend for help but he turns out to be a stone heated fellow:

Excerpt 6

         "Look." His voice was hard. "Whatever your mother's gotten herself mixed up in, it's    

          nothing to do with me. You're better off where you are." "But I don't want to stay here."

         She heard the whine in her voice, like a child's. "I don't know these people. You-" "I'm Not 

         your father, Clary. I've told you that before." Tears burned the backs of her eyes. "I'm

         sorry.  It's just-" "Don't call me for favors again," he said. "I've got my own problems, I  

         don't need to be bothered with yours," he added, and hung up the phone.

                                                                    (HELP REFUSAL AND CHILD ABANDONMENT)

Clary feels forsaken but yet another blow awaits her and this time she comes to know that her own mother has put a memory block on her mind so that she should not remember her connection with shadowhunt world. Clary undergoes immense emotional pain at this moment and feels like she is betrayed by her own mother. Surviving another attempt of murder from vampires this time, she tries to hone her talent of learning magic runes and very effectively learns and applies them. She also learns another fact that she has the power to get things that are hidden in paintings.

Valentine, the self-proclaimed evil lord and unfortunately the father of Clary, is on the rise and he is after the mortal cup which Clary knows that is hidden in a painted tarot card. She gets the cup and here we have one of the most violent and barbaric scene when king of demons, Abbadon, attacks her and others and seriously injures Alec under the orders of Valentine:

Excerpt 18

          The demon leaped at him. Jace whipped his blades up and outward with an almost

        frightening speed; both sank into the fleshiest part of the demon, its abdomen. It howled 

        and struck at him, knocking him aside the way a cat might bat aside a kitten. Jace rolled and

       got to his feet, but Clary could see from the way he was holding his arm that he'd been hurt. 

                                                                                                                                      (INJURY)

And also

         With a snarl it struck again, bone-talons catching Alec a vicious blow that lifted him off his 

         feet and hurled him against the far wall. He struck with a sickening crunch and slid to the

         floor. Isabelle screamed her brother's name. He didn't move. Lowering the whip, she started

         to run to him. The demon, turning, caught her a backhanded blow that sent her spinning to

         the ground. Coughing blood, Isabelle started to get to her feet; Abbadon knocked her down

         again, and this time she lay still. (MURDER ATTEMPT)

Demon feels pleased with his actions and threatens Clary and her shadowhunter friends that he will take pleasure in killing them and hearing their bones crunch under his weight.  Alec stays unconscious for many days. After other attacks, betrayals leading to much of turmoil and shocking revelations, Valentine is able to take the Mortal cup and uses his power to vanish before anyone can get hold of him.

To conclude so much violence and blood flow clearly shows the high violent content in the novel and in my opinion, is unsuitable for young readers whose sensitive minds are open to all kinds of influences without much filtering good from bad because in novel even those who are shown on the side of good are equal participants in violent acts, in fact they inflict pain on others as something acceptable or standard of coolness.

After this intuitive analysis, I can confirm that, in my opinion, the rest of City of Bones Corpus may contain a high content of gratuitous violence; thus, a more accurate study by means of a quantitatively computational analysis based on corpus linguistics combined with a qualitative interpretation of other violent acts may help test my hypothesis.

5.1.2 Classification of excerpts

The following table details the classification of violent excerpts according to the violence they present:

Violence Category	Frequency of occurrence
Abuse/Assault/	5  (excerpts 1,2,3,14,20)
Child abuse/ Child Abandonment	1  (excerpt 6)
Domestic/ Gender Violence/ Rape	1 (excerpt 17)
Injury	4  (excerpts 11, 12, 15, 18)
Kidnapping	--
Murder	5  (excerpts 4, 5, 9, 10, 16)
Murder Attempt	3  (excerpts 7, 8, 19)
Robbery/Snatching	--
Threat	1 (excerpt 13)

Table 3:  Categorization of violence in City of Bones

As we can observe the suitability of excerpts into one of the violence category means that it is not only intuition but facts that prove the presence of a context of violence in the City of Bones.

5.2. Frequency Analysis

This section is devoted to explaining how the computational analysis of frequencies of the lexical units in The Corpus was carried out. I fulfilled a computational analysis of the frequencies of the lexical units in The Corpus. I selected WordSmith 7 (Scott 2018) in order to implement this stage of the present study because it can provide me with all the tools which, in my opinion, can help to go through all the stages which I intend to in order to achieve my final target.

By using the application “wordlist” I get the number of words that made my corpus and also their statistics that is shown in the following table:

    

 Table 4: The statistics of the City of Bones corpus

The file size means the number of characters that can be found in the corpus. Here we have 14,620 characters. The total running words (tokens) in the text are 2,604. The number of distinct words is 820 and word ratio is 31.49. Vargas (2008, 9) explains that the higher the type/token ratio is, the more distinct words will be found in the text. On the other hand, a low ratio will be evidence for a high number of repetitions. This corpus contains 31.49 ratio which means Corpus is broad in terms of vocabulary hence we are facing a corpus with a high specialization rate. In other words, the topics in this corpus might not be repeated or frequently repeated.

 The words which have high frequency and also the words which are related to violence are given in the table below that make up the 20 excerpts I chose for my analysis:

THE	163	6.26	TEETH	8	0.31	ACROSS	4	0.15
AND	74	2.84	THERE	8	0.31	AIR	4	0.15
TO	69	2.65	AGAINST	7	0.27	ALEC	4	0.15
HER	65	2.50	BOY	7	0.27	ALMOST	4	0.15
A	53	2.04	CHEST	7	0.27	ARM	4	0.15
IT	44	1.69	EYES	7	0.27	BE	4	0.15
HIS	43	1.65	FACE	7	0.27	BLADES	4	0.15
HE	42	1.61	FELL	7	0.27	BROUGHT	4	0.15
OF	42	1.61	HAIRED	7	0.27	BY	4	0.15
SHE	41	1.57	HEAD	7	0.27	CAME	4	0.15
JACE	40	1.54	OFF	7	0.27	CLAWS	4	0.15
HIM	30	1.15	ROLLED	7	0.27	DEEP	4	0.15
WAS	30	1.15	STAGGERED	7	0.27	EAT	4	0.15
AT	28	1.08	STRUCK	7	0.27	FELT	4	0.15
IN	28	1.08	THROAT	7	0.27	FORWARD	4	0.15
WITH	28	1.08	AN	6	0.23	HARD	4	0.15
ITS	26	1.00	COULD	6	0.23	HE'D	4	0.15
AS	24	0.92	DON'T	6	0.23	HILT	4	0.15
THAT	20	0.77	FLUNG	6	0.23	HIT	4	0.15
OUT	18	0.69	GO	6	0.23	HOT	4	0.15
BACK	17	0.65	HANDS	6	0.23	I'M	4	0.15
BUT	17	0.65	IF	6	0.23	JAWS	4	0.15
HAND	17	0.65	ISABELLE	6	0.23	LET	4	0.15
CLARY	15	0.58	JUST	6	0.23	MOUTH	4	0.15
FROM	15	0.58	KNIFE	6	0.23	NEVER	4	0.15
INTO	14	0.54	RAPHAEL'S	6	0.23	RAISED	4	0.15
DOWN	13	0.50	SENSOR	6	0.23	SAW	4	0.15
FOR	13	0.50	THING	6	0.23	SCREAMED	4	0.15
YOU	13	0.50	WALL	6	0.23	SEE	4	0.15
BLADE	12	0.46	WHIP	6	0.23	SERAPH	4	0.15
BLOOD	12	0.46	YOUR	6	0.23	SOMETHING	4	0.15
DEMON	12	0.46	ABBADON	5	0.19	STARTED	4	0.15
I	12	0.46	AROUND	5	0.19	THEM	4	0.15
ON	12	0.46	ASIDE	5	0.19	TOO	4	0.15
BLACK	11	0.42	CLARY'S	5	0.19	AWAY	3	0.12
RAPHAEL	11	0.42	ENOUGH	5	0.19	BACKWARD	3	0.12
AGAIN	10	0.38	FREE	5	0.19	BEFORE	3	0.12
FEET	10	0.38	GROUND	5	0.19	BEGAN	3	0.12
FLOOR	10	0.38	HERSELF	5	0.19	BEHIND	3	0.12
HAD	10	0.38	HIMSELF	5	0.19	BLOW	3	0.12
SAID	9	0.35	JACE'S	5	0.19	BODY	3	0.12
TOWARD	9	0.35	KILL	5	0.19	BOY'S	3	0.12
UP	9	0.35	KNOCKING	5	0.19	CAUGHT	3	0.12
WERE	9	0.35	NOT	5	0.19	CRUNCH	3	0.12
BETWEEN	8	0.31	NOW	5	0.19	DIDN'T	3	0.12
BLUE	8	0.31	SKIN	5	0.19	DOOR	3	0.12
CREATURE	8	0.31	THEN	5	0.19	FLUID	3	0.12
LIKE	8	0.31	THROUGH	5	0.19	FORCE	3	0.12

OVER	8	0.31
GLEAMING	3	0.12
GOT	3	0.12
HEARD	3	0.12
HEAVILY	3	0.12
HEAVY	3	0.12
HISSED	3	0.12
HUNG	3	0.12
ITSELF	3	0.12
KNOW	3	0.12
LASHED	3	0.12
LOOKED	3	0.12
LUNGED	3	0.12
MARBLE	3	0.12
ME	3	0.12
MY	3	0.12
NEARLY	3	0.12
NEXT	3	0.12
NO	3	0.12
ONE	3	0.12
ONTO	3	0.12
OR	3	0.12
QUICK	3	0.12
REACHED	3	0.12
RIGHT	3	0.12
SEEMED	3	0.12
SEIZED	3	0.12
SHIRT	3	0.12
SHOULDER	3	0.12
SHOULDERS	3	0.12
SIDE	3	0.12
SLOWLY	3	0.12
SOME	3	0.12
STOOD	3	0.12
STRIKING	3	0.12
THREW	3	0.12
TORE	3	0.12
UNDER	3	0.12
VALENTINE	3	0.12
WANT	3	0.12
WHO	3	0.12
WILL	3	0.12

Table 5 : Top Frequency list in the City of Bones Corpus.

Among the lexical words in the frequency list, some of the words stand out as particularly interesting regarding violence. At first sight, the words blood, caught+seized, kill+killed+killing,       and hit with other words used to convey same meaning like struck, striking, knocked, slammed stand out from rest of the corpus as these are directly related to violence and have high frequency. For this reason, I decided to carry out a study of their concordances.

5.3. Concordances

This section details the concordance lists of some words that hint violent content in the corpus.  I made use of concord program of wordsmith tools 7. First I will list the concordance tables and then I will closely analyse these.

Table 6: Concordance list of blood

Table 7: concordance lines of seized and caught

Table 8: concordance lines of Kill, Killed and killing

Table 9: Concordance lines of hit, struck and striking

As these tables clearly show that word blood (12), hit+strike+struck (14) and kill+killed+killing (9) and seized+caught (6) are words that clearly present a scenario of violent with other words like threw, flung or slammed providing the context of violence.

A notable feature of the concordance of word blood is that none of the blood is the result of any inadvertent cutting or self injury but a result of other person’s assault or murder attempts. This further hints at the use of the word as a conscious choice to depict violent nature of the characters involved. A distinction has been made between the colour of the blood of demons and other persons. Their blood is represented as black in colour but other characters when get injured or murdered have red blood.  However this difference does not help to mitigate the effects of violence as regardless of colour, blood flow always presents a horrible sight. For example excerpt 9:

                  "Don't watch," he said, going to stand over the scarred thing's body. He raised the  

                  blade over his head and brought it down. Blood fountained from the giant's throat,

              splattering Jace's boots. (MURDER)

The use of word seize marks the violent nature of different characters as the very meaning of the word conveys i.e. taking something from some person by force or against the wishes of the person involved. Though it can be noticed that the word seize does not always means an attack but sometimes it is also a way of defence as in the scene when Clary gets attacked by a forsaken, she seized a photograph to hit the demon. Similarly Jace seized the knife and sank it in the heart of Raphael to prevent him from attacking Clary.

Hit, struck and striking words are used for attack purpose only. There is not a single instance where these words do not have negative or violent connotations. Another word that has used with same meaning as hit is shove. Following excerpt perhaps best summarises the discourse of violence in the novel:

Excerpt 17

        Alec moved, blindingly fast. A sharp crack resounded through her head. He had shoved her

       against the wall so hard that the back of her skull had struck the wood paneling. His face was

        inches from hers, eyes huge and black. "Don't you ever," he whispered, mouth a blanched

        line, "ever, say anything like that to him or I'll kill you. I swear on the Angel, I'll kill you."

                                                                                                                   (GENDER VIOLENCE)

Therefore I find all these striking examples more adequate in my opinion for adult readers than for teens due to their graphic violent content.

Transitivity Analysis

 This stage of my research is devoted to showing the results achieved when analysing the process types and the participants found in The Corpus so as to arrive at a more detailed account of the processes by which all the characters involved are described. The reason for this study is that it is my intention to investigate the relationship between linguistic structures and socially constructed meaning in The Corpus as Burton remarks, “stylistics analysis is not just a question of discussing ‘effects’ in language and text, but a powerful method for understanding the ways in which all sorts of ‘realities’ are constructed through language” (Burton, 201). Hence, I have carried out a study of verbal processes according to Halliday‘s (1994) systemic framework, namely, transitivity system, because it entails revealing not only the type of verbal processes but the meaning, participants and circumstances surrounding them. Therefore, by doing this, I might be able to glean enough information, if indeed this is possible, about how social power or, put more simply, unequal power relationships, are related to violence. This is the case because since human beings are able to put our experiences and thoughts into either oral or written stories (what is called narratives), transitivity analysis is applied to search what processes are experienced in a text and to uncover its main linguistic features. Besides, taking into account that transitivity is related to the ideational function and this function is concerned with the transmission of ideas, then, with this analysis, I will be able to show the ideas that were and still are transmitted to children.

I was able to track 375 processes in 20 excerpts (Appendixes 1 and 2). Following table presents the division of process types:

Process type	Frequency of occurrence
Material	243
Mental	44
Verbal	29
Relational	42
Behavioural	21
Existential	5
Total	375

Table 10: Processes in the corpus

The statistical analysis clearly shows that from 375 processes found, material processes dominate the city of bones corpus. That is to say, processes of doing and causing. Some examples of material processes are displayed in the following table:

1	She moved with a lightning speed	Move
34	The blue-haired boy slashed at Jace with claws extended	Slash
43	He sank he knife into the blue-haired boy’s chest	sink

Table 11 : Material processes

Mental processes i.e. processes belonging to the world of inner consciousness involving processes of cognition, understanding and sensing etc. are second in number but far less than material processes. The differences between these two process types indicate that the characters in the novel are more concerned with action i.e. doing thing rather than reflecting on how things should be done or what will be the consequences of doing certain things. Another interesting fact is that Clary is sensor in majority of mental processes which may be because before entering the shadowhunt world, she was a normal teenage girl interested in drawing. So as she enters the magical world, her human traits and emotions are still dominate part of her personality and especially the habit of reflecting on things. Following table provides some examples of mental processes:

83	To her horror, Clary realized that the noises it was making were words	Realize
131	She had almost forgotten the sensor	Forget
142	I’m next, she thought, panicked	Think

Table 12 : Mental processes

Next to mental processes are relational processes in the frequency of occurrence. I found 42 instances of relational processes in the corpus. These processes relate a participant to its identity or description. They are different from material processes because one participant does not affect other participant. Some examples from the corpus are:

48	His black shirt was blacker now in some places, wet with blood	Was
74	But the thing was too fast for her	Was
187	For a moment the giant stood swaying	Stood

Table 13: Relational processes

I found verbal processes to be fourth in occurrence frequency with 29 samples. These are the processes of saying and existing on the borderline between mental and relational processes. Halliday notes that this kind of processes express the relationship between ideas constructed in human consciousness and the ideas enacted in the form of language (1994, 107). Following are examples from the corpus analysed:

54	Between his teeth, he hissed, “so it be, the forsaken will take you all”	Hiss
165	“Don’t call me for favours again”, he said	Say
299	“Seize the trespassers’” he said	say

Table 14: Verbal processes

Behavioural processes are notably difficult to differentiate because these processes are related to physiological and psychological behavior. They stand between material and mental processes. In order to recognize these processes I relied on two aspects- one that it has single participant (i.e. intransitive verb in traditional grammar) and second that when both physical and mental features of an action are inseparable. Following table shows some examples:

18	She laughed standing over him	Laugh
274	She relaxed momentarily and then tensed again	Relax
297	His lips curled back from his pointed incisors	Curl

Table 15 : Behavioural processes

Finally, Existential processes i.e., processes of existence, had an occurrence of only 5 lines. This process type is easiest to catagorise because the word there is necessary as a subject like in the following examples from the corpus:

17	And now there were hands on him	There
195	There was a series of heavy and cracking thumps	There

Table 16 : Existential processes

The process analysis clears that material processes dominate the process types. Around 85% of the material processes involve a discourse of violence. Also this is an indication that the world of the City of Bones is more concerned with materialistic things and people inhabiting this world do not abstain from anything to achieve their goals even when this means killing other people or shedding the blood of innocent. Not only the demons and attackers enjoy violent attacks and murders, the major characters are also shown as very much keen on violent acts. In the beginning of the novel, when shadowhunters kill a demon boy, Isabelle hit him with her whip and then laughs. Jace too murders forsaken and Raphael with his seraph blade but he does not show a momentarily hesitation.

These characters share different participant roles as both perpetrators and victims of violence. For example in the first excerpt the group of shadowhunters are in power position and they inflict violence and kills a demon boy. However when king of demons, Abbadon, attacks them, they are victim. Abbadon is able to dominate them and punish them because of his demon powers and huge size. Infact before him, they all look dwarfs. Abbadon is able to seriously injure Alec and Isabelle because of vicious poison he carries in his talons. Both of them are victims here.

Alec is able to bully Clary when she says the truth about his feelings for Jace because of his gender. Similarly Clary’s mother’s boyfriend, Luke, is able to turn his back on Clary because he has no social responsibility towards Clary. He is not her father so he moves away from her and asks her to never to call him for help again.

The processes of doing and controlling the action by participants who carry them clearly marks out other processes. For this reason, after completing the process analysis, I solely focused on those clauses which reflected violent actions as my primary aim it to study the participants involved in these actions to study the connection between violence and power resulting in the construction of social identities. As discussed earlier, identity concept is used here in the sense of membership. An individual becomes a member of a particular social group on the basis of characteristics/features/traits he/she shares with the other members of the group. The study of identity will also be beneficial in uncovering the social position of the participants and hence this will further shed light on how these participants use their social position/situation to inflict violence on others. 

Analysis of Identities of Violent Participants

I isolated 78 clauses which displayed violent/cruel actions. A striking feature related to this analysis is that material processes have high frequency of occurrence. I followed the formula of ‘what did X do?’ to study violence in these clauses. This analysis is shown in the following table:

Actor	Verb	Goal	Beneficiary	Range	Circumstance
(Isabelle)	striking out	at him (blue-haired boy)
(Isabelle)	jerking	Him (blue-haired boy)			Off his feet
(Blue-haired boy)	Flung himself	On Jace
The blue-haired boy	Tearing	At Jace		With hands
The blue-haired boy	Slashed	At Jace		With claws extended
He (Jace)	sank	Into the blue haired boy’s chest		The knife
The creature	Lunged	At her (Clary)
The creature	Hurtled	Into her (Clary)
(The creature)	Knocking	Her (Clary)		To the ground
She (Clary)	Hit out	At the thing (the creature)			With a scream
The creature	Lunged for	Her face (Clary)			Jaws wide
She (Clary)	Jammed	Between its teeth		The sensor
He (Demon)	Lurched	At Jace			With his enormous fists raised
Jace	Brought			The seraph blade	Around in an arching sweep
(Jace)	Burying	Hilt in the giant’s shoulder		It (blade)
He (Jace)	Raised			The blade	Over his head
(Jace)	Brought			It (blade)	Down
Jace	Threw	His knife
Jace	Shoved	Her (Clary)			Brutally aside
He (Jace)	Flung himself	On the other boy
(Jace)	Grabbed	For the knife			Sticking out of Raphael’s chest
(Jace)	Hauling	Raphael			Upright
(Jace)	Jamming	Raphael’s shoulder blades		The tip of the knife	Between
She (Clary)	Kicking out	At the vampire girl
She (Vampire girl)	whipped			Her hand	Forward
(Vampire girl)	Striking	Clary’s cheek			With enough force
(Simon)	Launched	At Raphael		itself
Simon	Hung				Grimly from his forearm
He (Alec)	Had shoved	Her (Clary)			Against the wall so hard
The demon (Abbadon)	Leaped	At him (Jace)
(Jace )	Sank	Into the fleshiest part of the demon, its abdomen		Both (blades)
It (Abbadon)	Struck	At him (Jace)
(Abbadon)	Knocking	Him (Jace)			Aside
She (Isabelle)	Lashed out	At the demon			With her whip
It  (Abbadon)	Struck				Again with a snarl
He (Abbadon)	Hurled	Him (Alec)			Against the far wall
The demon (Abbadon)	Caught	Her (Isabelle)			Turning
Abbadon	Knocked	Her (Isabelle)			Down again
He (Jace)	Flung	The seraph blade	At the demon (Abbadon)
He (Jace)	seized	seraph blade			Out of its chest (Abbadon)
(Jace)	Brought	the demon’s chest		The blade	Down, again and again, into

Table 17: Participants in the active material processes

Material processes occur in four variations. The above table shows the actor in active position which means that he is conscious of what he is doing and thus in full control of it. The other types of material processes are in passive form or a body part acts as an initiator of action. According to Kennedy (1982), using body parts as actor has the effect of distancing; the impression of detachment i.e. there is no connection between the physical actions of the actor and cognition of the actor. The actor seems to be driven by a force which he is unable to bring under control. Another thing that is used to create the same distancing effect between the actor and action is use of objects in the actor place. Following table lists these three types of material processes:

Goal	Verb	Actor	Range	Circumstance
His hands (blue-haired boy’s)	Were pulled			Behind him
His wrists (blue-haired boy’s)	Bound		With wire
Her shoulders (Clary)	Were gripped	By Jacob
Back of her skull (Clary)	Had struck		The wood paneling

Actor	Verb	Goal	Range	Circumstance
(Hands)	Hauling	Him (Blue-haired boy)		upright
(Hands)	Throwing	Him (Blue-haired boy)		Against one of the concrete pillars
The enormous fists	Caught hold	Of him (Jace)
Hands (Lily’s)	Catch		At her jacket
Her booted toe (Clary)	Connected			Hard
His fingers	Digging into	Her skin (Clary)
His sharp rat teeth (Simon)	Sunk deep	Into the flesh (Raphael)
Its razored hand (Abbadon)	Lashing down	At Jace
Bone-talons (Abbadon)	Catching	Alec
A backhand blow	Sent	Her(Isabelle)		Spinning to the ground
Its hand (Abbadon)	Lashed out knocking	Jace	Into the stairs
Isabelle’s whip	Came down	Across his back (Blue-haired boy’s)
The photograph	Hit	Its midsection (Demon)
An object	Slammed	Into the back of her skull		Heavily
The blade	Struck	Home (Raphael’s chest)
It (Isabelle’s whip)	Struck	The demon’s grey hide
Alec’s featherstaff	Had pierced	Its skin (Abbadon)
It (Jace’s blade)	Stuck	In the creature’s chest

Table 18: Material processes with passive, body part and object as actors

One major distinction is made between the animate and inanimate goals in material processes. If an actor has more animate goals then it means he is an effective agent of the process and exerts full control over the situation. Out of total 63 processes listed in above tables, 51 processes carry goals and only 8 processes are goalless. These processes represent clear violent and cruel actions in which both sides (good and evil) equally participate in inflicting violence on each other depending on the advantage they have on other party. Hence it can be safely said that it is not only thinking or paragraph analysis but empirical data too proves the fact that City of Bones exhibits an enormous amount of violence which renders this novel unsuitable for young minds. Following table represents the complete data:

Material Process Type/ Actor	Total Number of Processes	Animate Goals	Inanimate Goals	Goalless
Active	41	31	4	6
Passive	4	4	-	-
Body Parts	11	9	-	2
Objects	7	7	-	-
Total	63	51	4	8

Table 19: Division of goals in material processes

There are 9 instances of violence in verbal processes. These processes are processes of ‘saying’ or ‘communicating’ ( Downing and Locke, 2006, 151) and are represented by verbs like say, tell, ask, repeat and answer. They have one participant called sayer who conveys the message and the second participant is called receiver. The message is called verbiage. The examples found are displayed in table below.

Sayer	Verbal Process	Verbiage	Receiver
It (Demon)	Hissed	“Girl, flesh, blood. To eat, oh, to eat”	Clary
It (Demon)	Moaned	“to eat, to eat, but it is not allowed, to swallow, to savor”
He (Luke)	Said	“Don’t call me for favors again”
He (Luke)	Added	“I’ve got my own problems, I don’t need to be bothered with yours”
He (Jace)	Said	“I can pierce your heart just as easily through your back”
She (Clary)	Said	“Or he’ll put that blade through Raphael’s heart”
He (Raphael)	Shouted	“seize the trespassers, kill them both- the rat as well”
He (Alec)	Whispered	“Don’t you ever, ever, say anything like that to him or I’ll kill you. I swear to angel, I’ll kill you”
It (Abbadon)	Snarled	“shadowhunter, I shall take pleasure in killing you, in hearing your bones crunch as your friend’s did-”

Table 20: verbal processes with violent content

As we can observe from the table Clary is both a victim and perpetrator. It is only a matter of her social situation. When she has the power she threatens to kill Raphael, hence plays the role of violence inflictor but as Raphael rose to power position, Clary becomes a victim of violence. Similar pattern is followed by other characters in the novel.

 By investigating the results of the study of participants, four different identities that could be said to be the perpetrators of violent acts were identified:

i)                   Parents/partners

Under this category, there are two people who commit violence but more on psychological level than physical level. These are Clary’s own mother and her boyfriend, Luke, whom she views as a father figure. But Clary only seems to be delusional because the moment she is in dire need of these people; they are not there to help her. Clary’s mother erases all her memories and puts a memory block on her mind. Though she gives the lame excuse that this is the only way to save her daughter, she robbed Clary’s memories and also violate the privacy of her mind. She was able to do this psychological violence because of her power position as she was the parent and mature person, this gives her right to bring up her daughter in any way she liked.

Next person in this identity is of course Luke. As Clary calls him after the kidnapping of her mother and demon attack on her, instead of listening to her and consoling her, he reprimands her for calling him and tells her never to call him again and ask for help. He was able to refuse help because of his social position.

ii)                  Saviours

Under this identity, I have placed the Shadowhunters i.e., Jace, Isabelle and Alec. They share this identity because of their fight against the demons. Although they do inflict violence on demons but it is only to stop them from disturbing the peace of human world. They hold a power position because of their virtues and ethics. They do not kill any human being and neither do they involve themselves in any other kind of malignant activity but when it comes to fight and end demons, they are as voracious and fierce as a lioness. Jace is recognized as a most accomplished shadowhunter because he has killed more underworlders and demons than other persons.  This fact puts him in a powerful position and he acts as a leader and guiding force for other shadowhunters.

iii)               Destructors

As its name hints, this identity is shared by demons, forsakens and vampires. They are the representation of evil forces and inflict violence to extend the boundaries of darkness and hatred. Their sole aim is destruction and killing. They do not care whether they kill an innocent person or a criminal. In their minds, no difference of this kind exists. Most importantly, they have a serious dislike for sahdowhunters and humans. They are able to commit violence on account of their evil powers. For example, a forsaken, demon and vampires all attack Clary because she does not possess any special powers tp prevent them or to murder them. So they use their powerful positions to get their goals accomplished.

iv)                Helpers

There is only one participant who comes under this identity category. He is Simon, Clary’s friend. He inflicts pain on Raphael to save his friends. As Raphael readies himself to sink his vampire teeth in Jace’s throat, Simon lashes out at Raphael and uses his forced conversion position as a rat to his advantage and attacks Raphael’s arm. Simon bits Raphael so hard that he has no choice but to let go off Jace. Although for the sake of help but Simon’s refuge to violence keeps him from becoming an ideal character to be followed by teens as message it provides is that violence is the solution for everything.

To sum up, as Santaemilia (2000,13) argues, power can be measured in many different ways: according to social prestige, to reputation, to psychological control, intelligence or sexual seduction. In The City of Bones Corpus, power is measured either in terms of social status, either political or familiar or in terms of greater strength due to magic or to gender inequalities. The victim is most of the times a less aware person and the perpetrator, predominantly, a person with a high social status.

First, I studied the frequencies of all the words contained in The Corpus, focusing on those lexical items related directly or indirectly to violent processes.  In addition, I carried out a study of 6 processes in which I found out that material processes were the dominant ones. The relationship between the types of predominant processes and violence is, in my opinion, a crucial finding in the present study since material processes articulate an action carried out by an entity, the Actor, able to have the intention of starting, controlling and ending an action and thus, inferring a volitional feature to those violent acts in the City of Bones novel.

Transitivity has made this analysis possible because it deals with the transmission of ideas and thoughts. Hence based on the violent acts in the novel, I was able to show how power and violence are related and how power position used to perpetuate violent acts lead me analyse the identity construction of characters fit in. 

Conclusion

The combination of corpus and discourse analysis with computational analysis proves my hypothesis that City of Bones contains a high content of violence. The wordlist provided me with most frequent words that were directly related to the violence such as blood, kill and hit. Further the analysis of transitivity provided conclusive evidence that the world of City of Bones is marked by material actions and most often these material actions have a singular aim, i.e. violence. On the basis of transitivity analysis, I was able to label out the victims of the violence and doers of the violence. And clears further hypothesis that violence is a fluid category i.e. both perpetrators and victims share these positions. A victim is also who commits violence and perpetrator is also the one who is victim of violence. Thus, this shows that there is no fixed category of victims and perpetrators of violence, but only a position of power is a determiner of these categories and as power keeps on shifting so does these categories. Therefore young readers may take the message after reading this novel that if he/she is in a situation where he/she has the power/advantage over others, violent acts are acceptable and vice versa. Therefore the violence content of these novels must be curtailed in order to make them an enjoyable and at the same time educative reads for young adults for whom these are marketed and written.

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