Systemic Functional Grammar Research Articles

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II SPEECH TO THE NATION ON CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been a crucial field in social sciences that aims to investigate the language structures in a social and cultural context. Furthermore, it scrutinizes the relationship between language, power, and ideology in political discourse as well as specific discourses such as media and literature. In other words, CDA is utilized to reveal the covert ideology in political speeches by focusing on language use. Various political speeches of significant politicians have been investigated by researchers so far. The common problem of different countries is coronavirus these days. Hence, the most popular speeches are generally about coronavirus. The purpose of this study is to investigate Queen Elizabeth II's speech to the nation on Coronavirus which is a call for unity. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is used as a framework to analyze Queen’s speech and raise readers’ awareness in terms of comprehending the underlying messages in the speech based on three meta-functions: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function.

A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SELECTED BILLBOARD ADVERTISEMENT IN CALABAR MUNICIPALITY

This study investigates the discourse patterns of billboard advertisements in Calabar Municipality. The research reviews that the billboard is a very distinctive mode of advertising that is different from other forms. This is as a result of its linguistic and paralinguistic communicative strategies towards reaching a large populace which is embedded in its language use. It is in this light that the study adopts the primary and secondary sources of data collection. The primary source of data involved the field where the researcher collected pictorial representations of data. Secondary sources consist of library and other sources of materials, published and unpublished works, texts, journals etc. In the course of the study, two theoretical frameworks were adopted; M.A.K Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Social semiotics. Textual metafunction in Halliday's classification of the metafunctions of language in context of situation was utilised in this work. We made use of theme and rheme in the analysis. Socio-semiotics which sprouted out as a branch of Systemic Functional Grammar is also used to account for how sign systems are used in billboard for the expression of meaning. Findings revealed that billboard is a very essential form of advertising and the language is its most effective tool. This is because it is used to intrude the audience consciousness. The linguistic means employed in billboards aids comprehension.

A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis of English News Reports on 2010 Diaoyu Island Incident in Chinese, Japanese and American Newspapers

The aim of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is to reveal how ideologies influence the discourse, and vice versa by studying the linguistic characteristics of the discourse and the specific social, economic, political and historical contexts the discourse itself is based on. As a type of mass media discourse, news plays a more and more important role in the society. It not only conveys the information to the readers, but also influences the attitudes and concepts of the readers by the embedded ideologies. Thus, news discourses evoke much interest of critical linguistics. The present study selects the news reports on the 2010 Diaoyu Islands incident from three newspapers: China Daily, The Japan Times and The New York Times. Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Systematic Functional Grammar, the present thesis conducts a contrastive critical analysis of news reports in three stages. In response to the research questions, this study has obtained the following findings: The different linguistic features are shown in the three newspapers towards the report on the same event. In the lexical choices, the three newspapers report differently from three perspectives, i.e., the description of the incident location, the description of the cause of the incident and the naming of the incident. In the distribution of the processes, verbal process takes the highest percentage both in China Daily and The Japan Times, while material process takes the highest percentage in The New York Times. In the distribution of the news sources, the quotation from its own authorities takes the highest percentage both in China Daily and The Japan Times, while the quotation from all walks of Japan takes the highest percentage in The New York Times. Besides that, news sources from Chinese experts and scholars in China Daily take a high proportion; and a large number of news sources from American authorities are detected in The Japan Times. Different linguistic features reflect different ideologies embedded in the three newspapers. And the main reason for that is the difference of politics, history and culture existing in the three countries. Accordingly, news discourse, especially political news discourse could not only reflect the dominant ideology, but also serve to convey the ideology to influence or even change the reader’s understanding of the events reported in the newspapers.

小学教师课堂话语语气及人际意义研究——系统功能语言学视角

小学教师课堂话语语气及人际意义研究——系统功能语言学视角

A TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF GRETA THUNBERG’S 2019 CLIMATE ACTION SUMMIT SPEECH

Climate change has been one of the most significant concerns for the United Nations. As a result, the United Nations held a summit in 2019, inviting several notable speakers in the field. One of them is a young teenager from Swedish, Greta Thunberg. Greta Thunberg is a prominent climate activist who delivered a speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019, which is about how people and the government need to limit global warming. Her address became viral and garnered attention from many media, and roused a massive youth-led climate rally. Thus, this study analyzed her speech as the object of the study and employed a descriptive qualitative method. The study scrutinized 54 clauses through transitivity analysis from Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to understand the processes in the address and its function. This current study has revealed that the speaker’s dominantly used material process (37%) to describe the damage to the environment done by people. The use of relational process (31.5%) describes climate change's effects on the world and her life. The mental process used in 16.7% of the data provokes guilt and responsibility, as she pointed the audience as the actors that cause climate change. The behavioural process (7.4%) shows that Thunberg will not stay quiet on climate crisis when her generation is the one who will suffer from it. Existential process (3.7%) is used to describe the existing problems, while verbal process (3.7%) is used in quoting the high-profile politician to prove that none of their promises have been fulfilled.

Interpersonal functions in Greta Thunberg’s “civil society for rEUnaissance” speech

Greta Thunberg delivered a speech entitled “You’re Acting Like Spoiled, Irresponsible Children” to influential figures in Europe through the “Civil Society for renaissance” event, in which she was personally invited by the president of the organizer, Luca Jahier. Through her speech, she managed to convince the European Union to pledge to spend billions of euros to combat the climate crisis. This study aims to discover how interpersonal metafunction is used in the speech and what functions are revealed through Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis and Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar. The data, consisting of seventy-one independent clauses, were taken from Thunberg’s book which consists of her speech transcription, titled “No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference”. The research discovers that through the use of mood, modality, and pronouns, Thunberg conveys her view on her relationship with the audience as victim and perpetrator, and the one who holds responsibility and takes the blame.

Appraising Katherine Mansfield’s Father Figures in “The Little Girl”: A Transitivity Analysis

This article explores the patterns of father figures, the father -child relationships and power imbalance depicted in Katherine Mansfield's “The Little Girl”, using one tool of analysis from Systemic Functional Grammar, which is Transitivity. Examined are the ways Mansfield, as a Modernist and feminist writer, thematizes and engages herself to the theme of the fathering model and the father - child relationships typical of her time in her story. The study concentrates on The Little Girl, by Mansfield, which contains father figures and children as one of the central issues. The study concludes that there is a remote father syndrome in Mansfield's “The Little Girl”, and that the fathering style and practice of the Old Father type makes the impossibility of healthy father-child relationships, and that the Old Father's conventional fatherhood creates a power imbalance between males and females, and finally there is an aspiration for the New type of father in the child’s life.

The Analysis of the Thematic Structure of the Standard Arabic Clause: A Special Focus on Verb-initial Structures

The objective of the present paper is to give a detailed presentation of how the thematic structure is expressed in Standard Arabic (SA) and how different it is from that of English language. SA is a language which displays different linguistic properties in comparison to English, the language around which the Systemic Functional Grammar theory (SFG) was first developed (Halliday, 1994). Very few studies have been carried out to study the thematic structure of SA and none of them deals with all types of sentence structures in this language. Abdul-Raof’s study is a case in point (Abdul-Raof, 1998); he is mainly concerned with studying the thematic structure of nominal clauses i.e. clauses starting with nouns, despite the fact that Arabic is a language where VSO structures are frequently used. It is precisely at the level of VSO structures that the analysis of thematic structure in Arabic becomes problematic. Contrary to what previous studies in this area of enquiry say, I will mainly argue that the verb cannot be considered Theme in SA. It is also worth noting that the present work is part of a general endeavour to develop a Systemic Functional Grammar of SA.

Analysis of President Xi’s Speech at the Extraordinary G20 Leaders’ Summit in light of Systemic Functional Grammar

Politics is a genre of language, and language is the manifestation of politics (Mazrui, 2008). Political discourse not only plays an important role in the process of national external communication but also conveys certain ideology and political intentions. Based on interpersonal function in Systemic Functional Grammar and using President Xi’s speech at the Extraordinary G20 Leaders’ Summit as the original data, this paper analyzes and explores how this speech can achieve discourse function through personal pronouns, mood, and modality. In addition, this paper reveals how various linguistic resources are used to realize interpersonal meaning in political discourse.

Guiding towards register awarenessin an undergraduate EFL curriculumin Italy

AbstractThis contribution adds to ever-growing research on ‘pedagogical stylistics’, (e.g.,Burke et al. 2012). We present a case study describing a register approach to teaching literature, or verbal art (Hasan 1985/1989), to undergraduate EFL students in a Systemic Functional Grammar (FG)-based perspective (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). Our research is guided by two main goals: enhancing the students’ sensitivity to the peculiar functions of language in literature, as part of a wider curriculum on teaching register awareness, and setting up good practices to monitor and assess the effectiveness of our approach. Thus, we present a set of activities based on Hasan’s (1985/1989,2007) framework for the analysis of verbal art as a ‘special’ register, which is rooted in FG. We then discuss quantitative and qualitative data related to student perceptions of our pedagogical approach, gathered through specifically designed questionnaires, which were followed by semi-structured interviews when possible. The data illustrate the largely positive impact of the approach on students’ engagement, though not unequivocally: problematic issues and implications for future research are also discussed.

Systemic Functional Grammar Analysis of News Reports of Li Wenliang Incident

Based on a report on Dr. Li Wenliang in the British mainstream BBC media under the epidemic of Covid-2019, this paper analyzes from three perspectives guided by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar: transitivity, mood and personal pronoun. It is found that the material process appears most frequently which shows that the news reports mainly reproduce the event process. The second is the verbal process, which shows that news reports are good at making use of multi-channel speech sources to enhance the authority and objectivity of reports. The third is the relational process and psychological process, which reflects the subtlety of news report content and the concealment of attitude. This paper reveals the ideological direction implied in the news reports through seemingly neutral and objective reports, aiming at providing reference for readers in the process of reading Chinese and foreign political discourse.

Análise das atividades de produção escrita em livros didáticos de inglês do PNLD à luz do sistema de transitividade: que abordagem predomina?

Este artigo tem como objetivo apontar que abordagem de ensino de escrita predomina em livros didáticos de inglês do PNLD para o final do Ensino Fundamental. Parte-se de ideias sobre três principais abordagens de ensino de escrita – escrita como produto, como processo e como prática social – e dos pressupostos do Sistema de Transitividade da Gramática Sistêmico-Funcional para análise das escolhas linguísticas presentes nas propostas de atividades de produção escrita. Acredita-se que a análise dessas escolhas verbais nas instruções das atividades evidencia a abordagem de ensino de escrita adotada para engajar o aluno em atividades sociais de produção textual. Justifica-se que ter consciência dessa abordagem pode auxiliar o professor no aceite, na rejeição ou em adaptações da proposta. Analisam-se atividades de três obras de diferentes edições do PNLD, e os dados mostram o predomínio da abordagem de escrita como processo, e de ações materiais requeridas de alunos nas propostas analisadas. As implicações são: a evidência da pertinência do Sistema de Transitividade para a análise de atividades de livros didáticos, consequentemente a necessidade de divulgação da teoria de suporte na formação docente, a visão de escrever como ação criadora e transformadora, e a importância das ações de professores e alunos no fazer pedagógico.

Analysis of Presupposition in Cosmetics Advertisements

Pragmatic presupposition focuses on the study of the relationship between the speaker and the hearer at the time of communication and the language they used. It can effectively serve advertising language from the linguistic field. In other words, pragmatic presupposition can meet some of the requirements of the advertisements. Nowadays people confront a variety of commercial advertisements, such as food advertisements, drink advertisements, digital product and cosmetic advertisements, etc. In fact, advertising language is the core factor which determines the success or failure of one commercial advertisement. Most domestic and overseas scholars have studied advertising language through cooperative principles，rhetoric and systemic-functional grammar, etc. However, they do not pay enough attention to the pragmatic presupposition manifested in both Chinese and English cosmetic advertisements. Therefore, this paper conducts a comparative study based on previous studies of pragmatic presupposition with new data. The data analyzed in this study are taken from some major fashion magazines in America, United Kingdom and China, such as VOGUE, Cosmopolitan，Trends health，etc. These cosmetic advertisements were advertised in the recent 20 years. Through the analysis, it is found that there is no significant difference between Chinese and English cosmetic advertisements in terms of types of pragmatic presupposition manifested. Both Chinese and English advertisers mainly adopt four types of pragmatic presupposition: existential presupposition, factive presupposition, state presupposition and behavior presupposition, and state presupposition takes up the largest proportion. The present study provides a more comprehensive analysis of pragmatic presupposition and classification of it. In addition, the results of this study also could help advertisers and consumers increase their mutual understanding.

HETEROGLOSSIA: ANOTHER SFG-BASED APPROACH TO TREATMENT OF WORD ORDER AS A MEANS FOR EXPRESSING MODALITY IN VIETNAMESE

The paper first introduces heteroglossia – a development of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) in Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) school before suggesting possible uses of heteroglossia in present-day studies of language, with particular focus on the role of word order in sentences of Vietnamese, a typical isolating language. The change of word order is considered a means for expressing modality, as shown in several interesting examples in Vietnamese, which proves that SFG and heteroglossia as its variant is an effective approach for exploring the role of word order in Vietnamese.

Power and Representation in The Jakarta Post’s Article on UGM Rape Case Settlement

In 2019, a rape case involving two students of UGM went viral. After being headlines in many news articles, the case was settled in February, and one of the newspapers which cover this news is The Jakarta Post who released an article entitled ‘ UGM settles alleged sexual abuse case’. Through systemic functional grammar, this study attempts at analyzing the transitivity processes and participants in the article, and it aims at describing how it signifies the power relation and representation in the article. This is a qualitative study which applied critical discourse analysis, and the data used are sentences and clauses taken from the news article. To analyze the data, the researcher applied Halliday’s transitivity theory and Fairclough’s theory on power and representation. The results of the study reveal that there is an unequal representation in the article where it gives more opportunities for UGM to deliver their statement and argument since UGM holds more power than the other participants.

Genre Instruction and Critical Literacy in Teacher Education: Features of a Critical Foreign Language Pedagogy in a University Curriculum

Author(s): Mitsikopoulou, Bessie | Abstract: This paper focuses on critical pedagogy and EFL teacher education and it argues that it would be unrealistic to expect students who have been educated through traditional university curricula (aiming to deliver content through a ‘banking model’) to become critical foreign language teachers and educators. The education of future teachers requires new university curricula which view literacy as a critical social practice and prepare them through transformative pedagogies, encouraging them to examine critically their values and beliefs by developing a reflexive knowledge base, an appreciation for multiple perspectives and a sense of critical consciousness and agency.Based on this premise, the article presents the case of Genres in English, an undergraduate language course at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, aiming to raise students’ critical literacy. Using the tools of Systemic Functional Grammar and drawing on a genre-based approach to writing development, the course initially invites students to take up the role of critical text analysts deconstructing academic and media texts and at a later stage to engage in a popularization of science writing task mediating information from an academic to a media text. Through language tasks which approach genres as historical constructs, students are introduced to the ideological nature of discourses and genres and they explore the conditions of production, distribution and consumption of texts. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, the paper presents the findings from a small-scale research conducted with students who have attended the course.

A Systemic Functional Grammar-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

The present paper investigates the grammatical choices made by Jamaica Kincaid in her work Lucy. It analyzes how the selected structure contributes to the realization of particular beliefs such as gender inequality, using the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) approach (Halliday 1973, 1985, 1994; Halliday and Hasan 1989; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). In particular, the study examines the participants’ roles and the processes types assigned to them with reference to the transitivity system. The data of the present study are collected from the first three chapters of Lucy. The corpus belongs to seven males and eleven female characters who were directly involved in all the actions in the text. A total of 325 sentences were extracted. They were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The results of the study revealed the writer’s subvert of traditional gender stereotypes through displaying women as effectual dynamic actors and assertive sayers. In addition, all female characters were shown as the main participants of the other minor processes, in the sense that they were the behavers and sensers in both behavioral and mental clauses. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, gender inequality, systemic functional grammar, transitivity system.

Depiction of the Family’s Relationships in Selected Children’s Short Stories: A Multimodal Analysis (Summary)

This study aims to apply the frameworks of Michael Halliday’s (1985-2004) Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Transitivity, Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar, and van Leeuwen’s (2005) Inter-mode relations to four selected children short stories which are taken from Disney movies. These short stories are Frozen (2013), The Incredibles (2016) Finding Nemo (2016), and Brave (2016). These short stories shed the light on the nature of the relations between the family members, present conflicts between them, and assert that love and understanding between the family members can save and rescue all the family or sometimes the world around them. The findings of this study reveal that meaning does not depend only on the written text; it depends also on various aspects such as gaze, angle, distance, colors, and so on. Hence, in the selected short stories, the meanings conveyed through the visual representations match the meaning conveyed through the textual representations.

Systemic Functional Grammar and its Usefulness in English-Korean Translation

This paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of Systemic Functional Grammar in English-Korean translation in the absence of explicit macro- and micro–level translation education. To this end, this paper explains the main four functions of Systemic Functional Grammar such as experiential, logical, interpersonal and textual functions and shows good and bad translations with translation materials in accordance with the four functions. In addition, the merits of Systemic Functional Grammar in translation are stated in considering translation strategies, delivering accurate meaning and using language shifts depending on genre, culture, readers’ expectations and writers’ purposes. This paper is meaningful in that it dealt with the usefulness of Systemic Functional Grammar in English-Korean translation in detail under the unfamiliar situation of Systemic Functional Grammar in Korea.

Representation of People with HIV/AIDS in The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This study aims to understand representational meanings from the transitivity choices used by news reports from The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe in reporting people with HIV-positive cases and exposing the underlying ideology behind the representation. Fairclough’s three-dimensional concept in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was applied in this study. The study also relied on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, particularly in the transitivity analysis. Two selected articles were collected from The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe newspapers. The findings revealed that both news media dominantly report people with HIV/AIDS through material process, then followed by verbal process and relational process. Next, the study found that people with HIV/AIDS are represented as discriminated and threatened group in The Jakarta Post; meanwhile, they are represented as a mistreated group in Jakarta Globe. Last, the study found that The Jakarta Post attempts to construct that people with HIV/AIDS need to be more accepted and protected; meanwhile, Jakarta Globe attempts to construct an idea that people with HIV/AIDS need to be given more attention. To sum up, the combination of the both theories is substantially advantageous in the discourse to expose ideology.