the ISFC39 Proceedings - International Systemic-Functional ...

Papers from the 39th ISFCTransitivity/Ergativity in Thai Political Science textsIngrid WijeyewardeneUniversity of New EnglandArmidale, NSWiwijeyew@une.edu.auAbstractAgency is an important area of study in both politics and linguistics. It attributes power or capacity to socialactors and can also confer legitimacy to their actions. A study of how agency is construed in the grammar ofpolitical texts can illustrate how writers attribute agency as well as signify their position on the legitimacy orotherwise of political events. An initial transitivity analysis of Thai political science texts on the 2006 coupshows that the ways writers attribute agency reflect their own divergent political and ideological positions on thelegitimacy or otherwise of these events. As Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) argue, the system ofTRANSITIVITY comprises two complementary perspectives: the transitive model and the ergative model, andone or the other may be foregrounded across different registers. In this paper I explore the potential fruitfulnessof ergative analyses of three Thai political science texts, each of which were written from competing discoursepositions. I ask what this analysis reveals about agency or lack of agency in texts written at a particularly fraughttime in Thai politics and whether the complementary perspectives, transitivity and ergativity, foregroundcomplementary ideas on the role of the agents and affected participants in the events surrounding the 2006 coup.That is, which actors or institutions act on others or are being acted upon, and which acts are construed as selfengendered?1 IntroductionOn 19 th September, 2006, conservative forces loyal to the Thai monarchy and led by themilitary staged a “bloodless” coup that overthrew the popularly elected government led byThaksin Shinawatra. The conflict marked a critical point in a struggle not only betweencompeting elite forces, but set in motion a conflict between conservative elites and anincreasingly vocal and broader society-based oppositional movement in Thailand. Theconflict has polarised the country and has been the subject of a great amount of public andacademic debate that has variously sought to legitimise or challenge the actions of thosecompeting social forces, interests and groups embroiled in the struggle. This paper focuses onthree articles by three Thai political scientists written shortly after the coup, each representingdivergent political and ideological positions. Depending on the ideological positions of thewriters, it is argued that different participants will be foregrounded as agents while otherparticipants will be construed as affected by the actions of particular social actors, or may notappear in the texts at all. By building up an account of linguistic agency in these texts, andlinking this to the social context we can uncover aspects of the particular ideologies at workand understand aspects of the struggle for hegemony in these particular contexts and the useof rhetoric to build a persuasive argument in these politically contested circumstances. InSFL, agency can be explored through the ergative model.While there has been a significant contribution to documenting the metafunctional profileof Thai (Patpong, 2006), there has, however, been very little work on the system ofAGENCY as realised through the ergative model in Thai grammar. As Halliday &Matthiessen (2004) have argued, the system of TRANSITIVITY comprises twocomplementary perspectives: the transitive model and the ergative model, and one or theother may be foregrounded across different registers. Some of the literature on ergativity inSFL (e.g. Halliday, 1968; Davidse, 1992) seeks to explain the phenomenon in languagewhereby the affected participant (the Medium through which the process is enacted) in anintransitive clause becomes the Goal in a transitive clause. Davidse (1992), for example,129