Corpus-based Transitivity Analysis of Nelson Mandela’s Speech I am prepared to die

Discourse is the language of action in a specific context and discourse analysis is principally concerned with the internal structure of a text. CDA, on the other hand, emphasizes how ideology is represented through discourse, how discourse may be misunderstood and how power is resisted in a political as well as social context. The present study is an attempt at conducting the critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Nelson Mandela’s speech entitled, I am prepared to die by employing Transitivity Analysis (Halliday, 1985) as a tool. The purpose of the study is to investigate how language facilitates politicians in building up ideology and representing it and how a politician makes particular lexical choices to manifest his/her thinking power to the readers or audience. While conducting Transitivity Analysis, this study focuses on the ideational meta-function of Mandela’s discourse to examine how a politician influences the minds of people through his/her ideology. A quantitative approach has been adopted in this research and the corpus tool UAM has been used for the analysis of the data. The findings show that Mandela used material processes frequently in his speech to highlight the physical actions he had taken for the betterment of African people