19
“You will find the functional grammar much richer semantically than either formal or traditional school grammar. This makes the analyses you undertake
more insightful when it comes to interpreting a text.” In sum, it can be concluded that as systemic functional grammar looks how
meanings are realized in a text, either spoken or written, through the grammatical structure of the text itself, it is important that this study involves systemic
functional grammar in order to reveal meaning in the spoken text and how the text is organized.
2.2.3 Text
Language, as a tool of communication, has its nature to exchange meaning with which we are interacting, or in other words we produce what we call as text. It can
be said that the term „text‟ comes as an authentic product of social interaction.
Eggins 1994: 5 reveals that the term „text‟ refers to a complete linguistic interaction spoken and written, preferably from beginning to end.
It can be assumed that there are two kinds of text, spoken and written texts. While spoken text is a way of constructing meaning in which it is conveyed
through verbal communication, on the other hand, written text is a kind of text used to conveying meaning in written form.
Gerot and Wignell 1994: 61; furthermore, show the differences between two kinds of text as follows.
20
most spoken most written
context dependent context independent
language in action language as reflection
language as process language as product
dynamic synoptic
Figure 2.1 The Shifts between Spoken and Written Texts
The term either „spoken‟ or „written‟ does not concern about the medium through which language is transmitted, but the way the meanings are encoded. For
instance, when someone reads an academic paper aloud, the feature of the text are more like those of written text rather than spoken text. Conversely, when we
transcribe a speech, the written version has more common with spoken text. Tackling down a text cannot be separated from the texture of the text.
Halliday and Hasan 1989: 70 define texture as a point of reference for deciding what kind of elements can appropriately appear when, where, and how often. It is
something that distinguishes text from non-text and holds the unity. In line with the texture definition, Halliday and Hasan 1976 in Eggins 2004: 24 divide
components of texture into two, which are coherence, or the text‟s relationship to its extra-textual context the social and cultural context of its occurrence, and
cohesion, the way the elements within a text bind it together as „a unified whole‟.
Therefore, since this study employs a kind of text which is in the form of spoken text, it is necessary to know not only how words, phrases, and clauses are
21
made up to be a text, but also how coherence and cohesion which help the text relates to its context.
2.2.4 Context
