Aug 2026· European Journal of Education & Language Review· 0 citations· 37 references
Abstract
This research investigates the application of ideational grammatical metaphor (IGM) and transitivity patterns within Trump’s speeches, addresses, and interviews, spanning from his 2025 inaugural address to June 2025, utilizing Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. This study inspects how Trump employs grammatical metaphor (GM), specifically nominalization, and manipulates transitivity processes to shape political narratives, establish authority and power dynamics, obscure agency, and communicate ideological stances. The analysis reveals that Trump’s communication style is marked by a prevalence of material processes, highlighting action and agency, a strategic use of GM to reify abstract concepts, and consistent transitivity patterns that support his political objectives. Through a descriptive-analytical examination of a 95,609‑word corpus comprising nine speech contexts, the study combines frequency‑based analysis with detailed clause‑level interpretation. It shows that Trump systematically deploys material processes to construe himself and his administration as highly agentive actors, relational processes to fix identities and values as seemingly factual, and nominalization to reify complex political processes into abstract entities that can be claimed, restored, or defended. Taken together, these patterns constitute an “agentic leadership discourse” in which grammatical choices redistribute agency between Trump, allies, and opponents and stabilize a particular worldview. The study extends earlier SFL‑based analyses of Trump by focusing on his second term, integrating ideational grammatical metaphor with transitivity, and comparing multiple genres (formal addresses, interviews, and press conferences) within a single presidency
This study investigates the ideational representation of Donald Trump in Al Jazeera English’s coverage of his victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election using the transitivity framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). Employing a qualitative descriptive approach, the study analyses three news articles published between November 2024 and January 2025. The findings reveal that Material Processes (50%) and Verbal Processes (23%) are the dominant process types. These patterns construct Trump primarily as an active political actor and a prominent communicator, while Relational Processes further reinforce his institutional legitimacy. Referential choices, including personal names, pronouns, and political titles, strengthen his representation as a personalized, normalized, and institutionally validated leader. Overall, Al Jazeera English represents Trump as agentive in action, authoritative in speech, and legitimate within formal political structures. These findings demonstrate how transitivity functions as a linguistic resource for constructing political representation in international news discourse.
Despite growing scholarly interest in transitivity studies across literary genres, Victor S. Dugga’s Gidan Juju remains underexplored in terms of its linguistic structures and ideological formations. This study examines transitivity patterns in Victor S. Dugga’s Gidan Juju within the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Guided by Halliday’s (1994) transitivity framework, the study adopted a qualitative research design. Data comprised purposively selected passages from the play. Analysis was conducted at the clause level to identify the six process types of transitivity patterns (material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal and existential), their associated participant roles and the contextual circumstances. Findings reveal a striking dominance of material and verbal processes across the text to foreground thematic concerns in Gidan Juju material processes foreground physical acts of conflict, corruption and manipulation. Participant role analysis demonstrates consistent alignment with socio-political power structures: figures of authority are systematically encoded as actors and sayers, while subordinate characters occupy goal, recipient, or senser positions. The study concludes that transitivity analysis constitutes an indispensable linguistic lens for uncovering the ideological and thematic underpinnings of African dramatic literature. The study recommends that literary scholars should integrate Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and transitivity analysis to uncover linguistic mechanisms of meaning-making beyond traditional thematic interpretations.
Philomena Msurshima Nomigo, A. Abdullahi, Attah Michael Abashi· International Journal of Art...· 0 citations
The Aqedah, the binding of Isaac narrated in Genesis 22, is one of the Hebrew Bible's most theologically charged and linguistically dense passages. This study offers a systematic philological analysis of the Masoretic Hebrew text of Genesis 22:1–19 (BHS, 5th ed.), focusing on verbal morphology, participant marking through the accusative particle ʾet (אֶת) and its discourse functions, the waw-consecutive narrative chain, and the lexical semantics of key verbs, especially nissāh Building on this philological foundation, the study applies Halliday's transitivity system within Systemic .)עָּקַד( and ʿāqad )שָּחַט( with attention also to šāḥaṭ ,)נִסָּה(Functional Linguistics (SFL), together with van Leeuwen's social actor theory, to examine how agency in the Hebrew source text is preserved, reshaped, or reassigned across six major English Bible translations: the KJV (1611), RSV (1952), NIV (1978), NRSV (1989), ESV (2001), and NLT (2004). The analysis shows that the Hebrew text's grammaticalisation of agency, through verbal stems, participant marking, and narrative sequencing, constrains and helps explain the divergent agency constructions found across the translations, with implications for moral responsibility, divine sovereignty, and human volition. The findings demonstrate that close philological attention to the Hebrew original is essential for understanding how translation participates in theological and interpretive meaning-making.
V. Bello-Osagie, Yusuf Abdullahi· European Hebrew Journal· 0 citations
Background Research on Trumpism has concentrated on Donald Trump’s campaign speeches and social media, while the long-form writings of governing-coalition elites remain underexamined. Book-length texts offer more complete argumentative structures than tweets or short speeches, providing a fuller view of how elites construct crisis narratives through metaphor. Methods Six book-length works published before their authors entered core positions in the Trump governing coalition were analyzed using an integrated framework combining BERTopic topic modeling, manual metaphor identification, source-target domain mapping, actor-positioning coding, and multi-label emotion appraisal within corpus-assisted critical metaphor analysis. Results Across the six texts, 2,074 contextually verified linguistic metaphors were identified, concentrated in six focal source domains—war/conflict, decline/fall, corruption/disease, invasion/infiltration, betrayal/abandonment, and revival/reconstruction—forming a pronounced crisis–repair asymmetry: threat-oriented domains account for over 90% of instances, while revival/reconstruction provides a limited but emotionally concentrated repair script. Actor positioning reveals “us vs. internal them” as the predominant pattern, locating antagonists inside the political community. Emotion-appraisal profiles differentiate these domains: anger and pride/dignity characterize war/conflict, loss/nostalgia marks decline/fall, disgust and humiliation cluster in corruption/disease, and hope and sacredness define revival/reconstruction. Conclusion These findings indicate a stable, cross-issue crisis-and-repair metaphorical architecture that extends beyond a single leader’s rhetoric, functioning as a shared cognitive mobilization structure at the textual level. The study contributes theoretically by showing how differentiated metaphor-emotion profiles organize crisis construction, blame attribution, and repair imagination in political texts. It also contributes methodologically by offering an operational pathway for integrating computational topic modeling with corpus-assisted critical metaphor analysis.
This study investigated the ideological functions of pronouns in Indonesian EFL student political debates through a tripartite analytical framework consisting of referent erasure, political distance, and deixis. Grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis, the research examined how pronoun choices functioned not only as grammatical references but also as rhetorical strategies for negotiating power, alignment, and agency. The data were collected from 26 undergraduate students from Universitas Pembinaan Masyarakat Indonesia, Politeknik Angkatan Laut, and Institut Keislaman Tuah Negeri during six real-time English debate sessions conducted in 2026. Debate transcripts were analyzed qualitatively to identify patterns in the use of pronouns such as we, they, you, and impersonal constructions. The findings revealed that students strategically shifted pronoun usage to construct solidarity, distance opposing groups, obscure responsibility, and strengthen persuasive arguments within civic and political discussions. Pronouns thus operated as micro-sites of ideological negotiation that reflected identity positioning and contextual meaning-making. This study contributed to applied linguistics and English language education by demonstrating how EFL learners used grammatical forms to exercise voice, persuasion, and ideological stance in multilingual academic discourse.
Unknown authors· SALEE Study of Applied Lingu...· 0 citations
This study examines conceptual metaphor use in President Joko Widodo's (Jokowi's) pandemic economic speeches from 2020 to 2022, a period spanning the acute COVID-19 crisis through Indonesia's post-pandemic recovery. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), with corpus-assisted analysis using AntConc, this study analyzes seven official speeches to identify dominant metaphorical frames and their rhetorical functions. The findings reveal that Jokowi's pandemic economic discourse is predominantly structured around a developmentalist metaphor system, with the Development Frame (14 instances) and Economy Frame (13 instances) together accounting for the majority of the 38 metaphorical expressions identified. Rather than foregrounding crisis as threat or danger, Jokowi consistently reframes the pandemic as a platform for economic transformation and forward movement. Key conceptual metaphors include development is a journey, economy is a living organism, and economy is a machine, all of which project active government agency and optimistic national trajectory. Crisis metaphors appear minimally and are quickly redirected toward development and recovery framing. This pattern is interpreted in relation to Jokowi's populist-developmentalist leadership ideology, which constructs political legitimacy through tangible outcomes and collective resilience rather than institutional reform or crisis dramatization. The findings contribute to the growing body of literature on political metaphor in non-Western contexts and offer implications for understanding how crisis communication strategies are shaped by ideological orientation and leadership identity.
