Exploring Transitivity in Speeches of President Joko Widodo Using UAM Corpus Tool

Abstract

This research investigates the transitivity system as a part of systemic functional linguistics theory together with the UAM Corpus Tools 3.2, developed by Donnel (2008) in the presidential speeches of the President of the Republic of Indonesia, Joko Widodo (hereafter JW). It focuses on analyzing processes, participants, and circumstances. The research is a descriptive qualitative study. The speech transcripts of President Joko Widodo in 2015 and 2018 are stored in a text file (.txt) with UTF-8 encoding. The findings of this research showed that material process types were found more than other process types in 2015 and 2018. This indicates that, by using material clauses, JW strongly desires to emphasize real work or action work in his speech. In terms of the participants, Actor and Goal were the most dominant in 2015 and 2018. In terms of Circumstance, Location, Cause, and Manner were the most dominant in 2015 while in 2018, Cause, Manner, and Location were the most dominant. Location is again one of the most dominant circumstance features in the text. This can be considered as consistency in JW’s speeches. On the other hand, the fact that JW utilizes the same elements from the speech from three years prior means that this might not be regarded as a breakthrough.