TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF KEYNOTE SPEECH OF JOKO WIDODO AT WEF EA 2015

Mardiono Mardiono

doi:10.32503/proficiency.v3i2.1918

Abstract

International political speeches have played an extremely important role in political environment and take broader public attention due to their political, economy, and cultural values manifested through the language used. Systemic–Functional Grammar introduced and developed by Halliday (1967) sets out that with languages there are ideational meta-function, interpersonal meta-function, and textual meta-function. Hiring the theory of transitivity from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study focuses on analysing Joko Widodo’s keynote speech. The aim is to figure out the deeper meaning of the speech through the distributions and so the dominations of the transitivity processes along with their participants. At the same time this study tries to find out the hidden information by analysing the functions of the transitivity processes and the main participants. The qualitative method is employed for the transitivity analysis while the quantitative method is taken to provide the statistic description on the distributions of the types of the process and the participants found. The analysis generates two major findings: First, there are five types of process: material, relational, verbal, mental, existential and the participants found, and no single behavioural process and its participants occurred. Among them, the material process and relational process along with their participants dominate the speech, which makes it well-delivered, more powerful, objective, and convincing. Second, the pronouns ‘we, our, and us’ are found as the main participants in Joko Widodo’s keynote speech that indicate his efforts to draw a close relation between him and his audience so his addressing has succeeded.

Highlights

Language and human lives are all developing through time and time and are inseparable from the practice of human society
The quantitative method is hired to provide the statistic description on the distributions of the process types and the participants while the qualitative method is to analyse the functions of the process types and the personal pronouns used as the main participants in the speech
It is found that the distributions and the domination of transitivity processes used in Joko Widodo’s keynote speech at WEF EA on April 20th 2015 in Jakarta are as the following table

Summary

Introduction

Language and human lives are all developing through time and time and are inseparable from the practice of human society. There is a variety of different functions of language use, and among which, at the very first stage, it is to express both the inner and outer world of consciousness of people's experiences (Halliday: 1967). Language is actualized through a web of relationships among speakers, their surroundings, and the ways how they use it. SFL defines the use of language in social contexts to attain several specific goals. Transitivity analysis of written discourse has become a feasible method of exploring different types of texts since Halliday employed it for analysing William Golding’s the Inheritors in 1971. Since the transitivity system has been able to provide a quantitative analysis of any discourse, which is far more convincing and objective, numbers of scholars prefer using the theory for analysing discourses and have contributed a deep interpretation of the data they have chosen

Methods

Results

Conclusion