<b>Awarding the Inconfidencia Great Medal to João Pedro Stédile from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Abstract

Six texts on the awarding of the Inconfidencia Great Medal to João Pedro Stédile, the coordinator of the Landless Peasants' Movement (MST), in a public ceremony on April 21st, 2015, in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais State, Brazil, are analyzed. The socio-semantic system developed from Halliday and Matthiessen's Systemic Functional Linguistics (2004) was employed. Corpus of texts was discussed and classified into four major groups (material, mental, relational and verbal), according to the cognitive-functional classification by Lavid, Arús and Zamorano-Mansilla (2010). Results revealed that the authors of the texts employed in precisely the same way the material process; that sites which, in theory, have a more educated public used oftener mental processes; that ideologically well-defined authors adopted an inflexible positive or negative stance, and rarely used the third-party voice to foreground their position. The influence of the cultural context (which includes the ideology) of the authors of the texts is evident from their choice of language. The above has also been observed from the perspective of ideational metafunction and analysed by the transitivity system of clausal processes.