Ideational Analysis of Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago’s Speech “Closing The Gender Gap and Stopping Political Dynasties”: Redirecting the Teaching of Verbs

Abstract

This study used functional grammar to analyze Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago's speech, "Closing the Gender Gap and Stopping Political Dynasties," focusing on the ideational metafunction, one of three components of functional grammar. Functional grammar explains language based on its use in real-life contexts, integrating semantics and pragmatics as central to organizing grammar. The analysis aimed to identify the types of ideational processes in the speech, the participant roles involved, and the distribution of these processes. The study identified six ideational process types: material, mental, verbal, behavioral, relational, and existential. Each process was associated with specific participant roles: actor and goal for material processes; sensor and phenomenon for mental processes; sayer and verbiage for verbal processes; and behavior and circumstance for behavioral processes. The relational process was further divided into six subtypes: attributive intensive, attributive possessive, attributive circumstantial, identifying intensive, identifying possessive, and identifying circumstantial. Existential processes involved the participant role of an existent, marked by the use of nonreferential "there." The findings revealed that the relational process is the most frequently used, accounting for 46.58% of the total processes in the speech, while the verbal process is the least frequent, comprising only 2.07% of the distribution. This analysis highlighted how different process types and participant roles function within the speech, contributing to a deeper understanding of its structure and meaning.