Transitivity/Ergativity in Thai Political Science texts

Abstract

Agency is an important area of study in both politics and linguistics. It attributes power or capacity to social actors and can also confer legitimacy to their actions. A study of how agency is construed in the grammar of political texts can illustrate how writers attribute agency as well as signify their position on the legitimacy or otherwise of political events. An initial transitivity analysis of Thai political science texts on the 2006 coup shows that the ways writers attribute agency reflect their own divergent political and ideological positions on the legitimacy or otherwise of these events. As Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) argue, the system of TRANSITIVITY comprises two complementary perspectives: the transitive model and the ergative model, and one or the other may be foregrounded across different registers. In this paper I explore the potential fruitfulness of ergative analyses of three Thai political science texts, each of which were written from competing discourse positions. I ask what this analysis reveals about agency or lack of agency in texts written at a particularly fraught time in Thai politics and whether the complementary perspectives, transitivity and ergativity, foreground complementary 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 self-engendered?