A Linguistic Analysis Of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Theory In Political Texts

Abstract

     This paper investigates the linguistic analysis of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar Theory in political texts in 2012. M.A.K .Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar has been adopted for analyzing the speeches of the president Barack Obama on election campaign in 2012, and David Cameron's Conservative Party Conference speech, so as to identify the appealing processes of the transitivity system obtained from the analysis of these two texts.

The study aims at identifying the linguistic choices made in the speech of Obama according and David Cameron to Halliday's model. It tries to answer the following questions: What are the linguistic choices of the transitivity system which occur in both Barack Obama speech on election campaign in 2012 and David Cameron's Conservative Party Conference speech in 2012?. What are the frequent processes found in Barack Obama and David Cameron speeches?. The objective of this study is to characterize and describe the six process types and identify the more frequent processes that Barack Obama and  David Cameron used in their speeches.

The study concludes that the analysis of the process types in Barack Obama and David Cameron speeches in 2012 shows that the most frequent types are material processes for both speeches. The analysis shows that this theory is applicable to all cultures, all situations, and to any time.