A corpus-based ideational meta-functional analysis of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech at United Nations general assembly

Abstract

The current research paper aims to analyze the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly. It attempts to explore the transitivity process in political speech. In this research, the Ideational meta-function of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is used as a theoretical framework. Transcription of Imran khan’s speech at UNGA is taken as research material. A quantitative research methodology is used in this paper to unveil levels of transitivity. The basic unit of transitivity analysis is a clause. For this purpose, a random sample of clauses is obtained from the text for analysis. The theme of Islamophobia, Kashmir, and related text is examined in this research. Transitivity analysis was scrutinized using UAM software, which is a corpus-based analysis tool. Participants, types of process, and circumstances were investigated in depth. Major findings showed that the material process of transitivity is most frequently used by speaker to represent actions and happenings in the physical world. This paper intends to highlight how linguistics analysis of political discourse can help to represent the ideology of leaders. The current research may be useful for linguists, researchers, and learners to interpret and analyze texts of different genres from the perspective of SFL.