Systemic-Functional Model Of A Social Actor Essay

When a social actor is activated, he or she is the dynamic force behind a social practice or agent of a process. Meanwhile, in many instances of representation, often a social actor gets passivated; participants are on the ‘receiving end’ of a process or activity due to the intent of a text writer to serve or perpetuate certain ideologies. Passivation of a social actor can be either subjected or beneficialised. A social actor is subjected when he or she takes the role of a goal in a process, as in ‘Maryam likes her room’. Text writer can also embed a social actor in a prepositional phrase, as in ‘backlash against feminism’. Passivation also can be done through the adjectival premodification, as in ‘religious intolerance’. Pattern of activation and passivation often work together with forms of categorisation to indicate power relations between social actors. It reveals how actors are categorised and the roles they are given help discursively construct their power relations.
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Halliday is ‘the best model for examining the connections between linguistic structure and social values’ of texts. This model of linguistic analysis places a strong emphasis on ‘function’. Halliday theorises that all language performs three functions simultaneously, which he terms ‘ideational, interpersonal and textual’ functions (Fowler, 1991: 69). The three functions are closely related and illuminate the semantic propositions and arrangement of texts. It is through the ideational function of language that meaning and experience of the world is construed and built, while interpersonal functions provides a means for exchanges of meanings between texts’ producer and receiver in the process of expressing views and standpoints. Textual function of language rests itself on the outcome of the negotiation between the two former functions. It is via textual function that forms and meanings are realized in