Human Representation on Environmental Speech in Terms or Transitivity Process

The role of activists in raising humankind’s awareness regarding environmental or ecological issues or phenomenon has gained so much attention since it is spread and told in many different ways. One of them is taken by sharing the idea through speech and statements that are being spoken before the world leaders, politicians, and any other occasions. This study focuses on the speech of an environmental activist regarding climate change, Greta Thunberg. The analysis was conducted on the transitivity analysis, i.e. the distribution of experiential meaning on the speech that was presented at the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, 2018. The result shows: 1) the distribution of material process is the dominant one (41,8%), followed by relational process (19,4%), mental process (17,9%), verbal process (14,9%), behavioral process (3%), and existential process (3%); 2) through the process distribution, human beings seem to have their big roles in causing the climate change, but at the same time they are the ones who can prevent it. Therefore, the speech is regarded as beneficial discourse based on Stibbe’s ecolinguistics standard. This type of discourse has to be promoted in order to raise ecological awareness in society.

The Commentary of City Promotional Films Based on Transitivity Theory: A Case Study of Xi’an and San Francisco

Based on Halliday’s theory of ideational function, this paper selects the commentary of city promotional films of Xi’an and San Francisco and analyzes them from the perspective of the transitivity system. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the language skills of the two commentaries and to provide ideas and methods for the audience to understand such explanatory texts. This paper focuses on the following two questions: 1) How do the six processes of the transitivity system distribute in the two commentaries? 2) What are the specific functions of the six processes in the two commentaries? The results show that 1) there are two kinds of processes frequently used in explanatory texts, namely material process and relational process; 2) the frequency of mental, verbal and existential processes is relatively low; 3) behavioral process has no occurrence. The reason may be that although the textual structure and description focus of the two commentaries are different, they both belong to the applied style of oral explanation, so that they share the same social functions of shaping the city image, highlighting the city connotation and managing the city brand.

Functional Analysis of Narrative Texts in Elementary School Textbook “Fly with English”

Background: This study is an analysis of narrative texts in Elementary School textbook “Fly with English” based on lexico-grammar and context in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This study is also expected to give the pedagogical implication based on the context of teaching and learning process Method: This research uses descriptive qualitative type of study in investigating the problem. In the technique of collecting data, the writer uses observation and documentation. The writer finds 95 clauses in narrative text. In analyzing the data, the writer uses lexico-grammar of SFL framework to answer the first problem. Moreover, the writer refers to context of SFL framework to answer the second problem, and the writer also uses context of teaching and learning to answer the third problem. Result: Based on the result, there are six types of processes in the narrative text, those are: (1) material process (40%), (2) mental process (23,1%), (3) relational process (20%), (4) verbal and behavioral process (7,4%), and (5) existential process (2,1%). The writer also finds fifteen types of the participants, namely actor, goal, senser, phenomenon, sayer, verbiage, carrier, attribute, token, value, receiver, client, recipient, behaver, and existent. Moreover, the writer finds six types of circumstances, that are, location, matter, manner, accompaniment, cause, and extent. Implication: The pedagogical implication of studying Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in narrative text is to give the insight of the teacher about SFL genre pedagogy in teaching and learning process. In functional grammar, teacher can teach the language features in different ways, such as by introducing the terms of processes, participants, and circumstances that contain in the narrative text clauses.

Intimacy and Estrangement

This article explores the incremental privatization of what is today East Africa's largest corporation, communications and finance firm Safaricom. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, British multinational Vodafone became a partial shareholder of Safaricom, with the government of Kenya retaining the majority stake in the company. This was followed by the company going “public” in 2008 through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). In exploring these transformations, this article demonstrates that privatization was not a singular event but turned on the production of divisibility: a discursive, epistemological, and material process whereby seemingly “classificatory wholes”—a corporation, an infrastructure, a state asset—were first presented and then rendered as partible entities. As the lines between the public and the private were being redrawn, another conceptual series—“citizenship,” “development,” the “public”—were similarly transformed into partible objects subject to division. Unraveling the historical entanglement of the corporation and the state, this article clarifies why, today, Kenyans—some of whom have been reformatted as shareholder-client-citizens—call on Safaricom to act like the state from which it has been incrementally “unbundled.”

Grammatical Transitivity and Indirect Speech Combination in Action: Voices from Characters in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011)

In mass communication, the material process use makes it easy to lay emphasis on the participants’ actions, events, and circumstances of their occurrence, while mental process contributes to insisting on their psychological and emotional states. As for indirect speech, it characterizes the version always used by messengers, public announcers, journalists, and reporters. This study aims to analyze Transitivity and Indirect Speech in clauses ingrained and identified in some passages taken from Helon Habila’s Oil On Water (2011). One of the major principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics is that the exploration of the Transitivity properties (processes, participants, and circumstances) in a text leads to draw conclusions about the question -“who does what to whom, under what circumstances?”? In order to deliver the set objectives, the ongoing study specifically draws on the principles of experiential meaning to get data from the selected extracts and, focuses on describing the clauses containing reported speeches. By following the mixed research methods guiding principles, this research work has generated some data which enable to come up with a conclusion on the psychological and psychosomatic states of the participants as well as on the assigned status adopted by some characters. That correlates them to reporters and journalists. This research work has enabled me to develop another. This paper has made it easy to have another view about Helon Habila’s messages and the way they are conveyed throughout his novel.

Experiential and Interpersonal Meanings in Women Leader’s Discourses on Covid-19: A Case on Jacinda Ardern and Tsai Ing-wen

This article aimed to study Experiential and Interpersonal Meaning which was found in the discourses of the New Zealand Prime Minister. Jacinda Ardern on March, 23rd 2020, and President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen on January, 30th 2020 related to covid-19. The objective of this study is to discover Experiential and Interpersonal Meaning in the discourse analysis context. This present study tried to highlight the best method to adopt for this investigation by employing the four steps proposed by Miles, Huberman, and Sadana's qualitative research method (2014), i.e., data collection, data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing and verification. The results of the study showed that the Material process was prominent in the Experiential Meaning in discourses by 67.23%, The elements of participant's material process in participants were dominant by 54.61%, and location (27.435) was prominent in circumstances elements. Meanwhile, Subject was prominent in the Interpersonal Meaning in Mood Types by 52.47%, and Predicator (52.01%) was dominant in Residue Types. These highlighted how we can learn from these two female leaders in delivering suggestions, reminders, and persuading society during this Covid 19 pandemic.

Comparing Oral and Written Cooking Recipes Using Systemic Functional Grammar

This article compares oral and written cooking recipes of the same food created by the same person, by using systemic functional grammar. The aim of the article is to find out the similarities and differences of the language used in both recipes. The data are obtained from Jamie Oliver’s cooking show aired in a YouTube channel on how to make scones and the written recipe of the same food published in his website. The focus of the analysis is on the lexico-grammar of the clauses used in the texts. The result shows that there are more differences than similarities between the two texts. There are more clauses in the spoken text than those in the written text in terms of quantity and variety. In the ideational function, both texts have a similar variety of processes with the majority of material process showing imperatives of procedural texts and additional information using mental, existential, and relational processes, but in the written text there are two clauses using verbal process that are not found in the spoken text. In the interpersonal function, the two texts show demands of good and services and the use of modalities in expressing the expected results of the cooking process. In the spoken text, the relation between the cook and the audience is friendlier and closer than that in the written text. It is demonstrated in the use of vocatives and interrogatives that are not used in the written text. The textual functions show similar results in the use of conjunctions but the spoken text displays closer interpersonal textual functions found in the use of vocatives. The analyses of the three metafunctions of the two recipes may contribute to the study of food texts in linguistics that are relatively low compared to those in other disciplines.

Gender-related Analysis in American Advertisements TV

Advertising is “the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and persuasive in nature about product, service or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media” (Buren,1992:7). The ad aims to market products and services, this is according to business and this is an effective marketing tool. Advertising also offers information so that customers are aware of what is available, who makes it, and where they can get it (Durant & Lambron, 2009: 93). Advertisers need to consider gender differences to the best capacity possible to use appropriate advertisement design features. The most significant aspect of gender issues for advertisers can be how males and females react differently to the advertisement. So, “the focus is on how gender in language and society is negotiated and how linguistic forms represent and shape social and cultural conditions in which men and females live”. (Behnam and Zamanian, 2014:4) American advertisements often contain different meta-functions that are worthy of analysis. The present study intends to analyze American advertisements according to the three meta-functions such as ideational, interpersonal, and textual. This study examined 5 American advertisements (each one of them has a different theme) from a verbal and non-verbal perspective, based on the three meta-functions models developed by Halliday (1994). The results of the study revealed that American advertisements are biased to females rather than males to introduce the products because they considered females as powerful signs who use their high attractiveness to promote the products or brands. Concerning the grammatical aspects, the results showed that material process, mental process, declarative mood, and first-person pronouns are the highest used to achieve the goals of this study.