Approved and received by the Examination Committee of English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Jember University

Abstract

This study examines power representation in USA’s presidential election debate in 2012 between Obama and Romney. This study applies Systemic Functional Linguistic, specifically transitivity system by Halliday (2004) as a tool to investigate the linguistic choices presented by both speakers to serve power. The theory of discourse analysis and power and language are also applied to uncover the power position served by both Obama and Romney. This study is brought into a qualitative study. The, the research strategy applied in this study is a non-experimental method. In collecting the data, the researcher applied documentary method in which the data are taken from the debate script accessed from http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-3- 2012-debate-transcript on December 3th, 2015. On the other hand, there are three steps in processing the data. They are labeling, grouping and counting. At last, in analyzing the data, this research applied the theory of Fairclough (1989) to reveal the power served by both speakers The finding of this research shows that the distinct linguistic choices served by both speakers, based on the analysis of transitivity system, produces different power position. Obama is found to be more powerful than Romney. It is because Obama presents more actions and facts. Besides, Romney presents more plans and intentions