Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in King Charles III's Speech at the State Opening of Parliament 2024

Abstract

This research examines King Charles III's Speech at the State Opening of Parliament 2024, with the primary purpose of understanding the use of ideational grammatical metaphor realized through nominalization, as outlined in Halliday's 1999 systemic functional linguistics theory. The nominalization types are Quality, Process, Relator, and Circumstance. This research employs a qualitative method with a case study design. Clauses and words in selected speeches are used as data in this study. The data were obtained by searching the transcripts of King Charles III's speech on the official website of the United Kingdom government. The results show that nominalization of process is found to be the most frequently used, occurring 127 times (84%), followed by 23 nominalizations of quality (15%), and the least by 2 nominalizations of relator (1%). Based on these findings, we can conclude that the language of the royal parliament, or the King's Speech, employs grammatical metaphors to condense experience, depersonalize agency, and establish authority through abstract nominal expressions.

Keywords: Ideational Grammatical Metaphor, Grammatical Metaphor, Nominalization, Parliamentary Speech, King Charles III, Systemic Functional Linguistics