Perspective
critical awareness toward many language use phenomena. In the context of CLA, critical discourse analysis CDA appears as one of analysis framework for language practices.
CDA is concerned with studying and analyzing written texts and spoken words to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality, and bias and how these
sources are initiated, maintained, reproduced, and transformed within specific social, economic, political, and historical contexts van Dijk, 1988: 144. CDA is necessary for
describing, interpreting, analyzing, and critiquing social life reflected in text. Fairclough also 1997; 132-133 provides us a useful definition that encapsulates most other definitions of
CDA: CDA is the study of often opaque relationships of causality and determination
between a discursive practices, events, and texts, and b wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events, and texts arise
out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor
securing power and hegemony.
II. Systemic Functional Grammar
The discussion on systemic functional grammar SFG has been very popular in recent years. This is driven by the fact that this notion offers a new perspective of seeing
language in terms of its function. Systemic functional grammar is part of a broad social semiotic approach to language called systemic linguistics. The term ‘functional’ indicates that
the approach concerned with the contextualized, practical uses to which language is put, as opposed to formal grammar, which focuses on compositional semantics, syntax and word
classes such as nouns and verbs. It is functional in three distinct although closely related senses: in its interpretation 1 of texts, 2 of the system, and 3 of the elements of linguistic
structures. Further, it is functional in the sense that it is designed to account for how the language
is used. Every text that is, everything that is said or written unfolds in some context of use; it is the uses of language that have shaped the system. Language has evolved to satisfy human
Perspective
needs and the way it is organized is functional with respect to these needs, it is not arbitrary. A functional grammar is essentially a ‘natural’ grammar, in the sense that everything in it can
be explained by reference to how language is used. Following from this, the fundamental components of meaning in language are
functional components. All languages are organized around two main kinds of meaning, the ‘ideational’ or reflective, and the ‘interpersonal’ or active. These components are called
‘metafunctions’ in the terminology of the present theory, are the manifestations in the
linguistic system of the two very general purposes which underlie all uses of language: to understand the environment ideational and to act on the others in it interpersonal.
Combined with this is a third metafunctional component, the ‘textual’ which breathes relevance into the other two.
Halliday 1994: 198 introduces three functional modes of meaning of language from the point of semantic system: 1 ideational experiential and logical; 2 interpersonal; and
3 textual. He states that they are different kinds of meaning potential that relate to the most general functions that language has evolved to serve.
2.1 Ideational experiential meanings
Ideational meaning deals with the ways the language represents the interlocutor’s experience: ‘how we talk about actions, happenings, feelings, beliefs, situations, states and so
on, the people and things involved in them, and the relevant circumstances of time, place, manner and so on Lock, 1996: 9. That is, it focuses on how the text represents the
externalinternal reality: a certain happening by a certain situation in the reality. Taking “Mike arrived at school at nine o’clock’ as an example, it can be analyzed that a man i.e.
Mike represents his act i.e. arrive at the past tense i.e. --- ed in a certain situation i.e. place = school, time = nine o’clock. Obviously, the interlocutor of the text represents his
event in the experiential world.
2.2 Interpersonal meanings
Interpersonal meanings focus on the interactivity of the language, and concern the ways in which we act upon one another through language. In either spoken texts or written
