Agency and ideology in Thai discourse: A case study of political science texts

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of agency in three Thai political science texts. Agency is a key notion that attributes power to and legitimises or delegitimises some social actors and ideas over others. This paper draws on the tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Pattama, 2006) to ascertain how the writers of three academic texts (Chaiwat, 2007; Khien, 2006; Pitch, 2007) construe participants and agency or the lack of agency in the exercise and contestation of power. To elicit conceptions of agency and ideology, I refer to Duranti's (2007) definition of agency in language, and to Fairclough's (1992) notion of discourse as the ideological use of language in social or cultural contexts. I argue that the writers of the three Thai texts attribute agency to social actors, events and ideas as a means to convey their position on the legitimacy of certain political events. The way in which the writers attribute agency reflects their different ideological positions. That is, their positions are expressed through the way that the authors attribute different degrees of control or lack of control that social actors have over their environment or other participants, or in the degree to which ideas or events are construed as impacting in some way on participants in the clause. This paper explores how the writers construe who/what does what to whom - which grammatical participants are agents, and which are affected by an action - and the manner in which the writers valorise some actors, events or ideas over others through the lexicogrammatical choices that they make in the texts.