A TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF SYNDICATE MEETING MINUTES IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR UNIVERSITIES IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

The study explores institutional governance discourse in meeting minutes through transitivity analysis within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study is based on the metafunctional framework of Halliday (1994) and has analysed sixty sets of meetings’ minutes from a selection of six institutions in Pakistan, three from the public sector and three from the private sector. Systematic analysis of clauses was conducted using Halliday's transitivity model for material, relational, verbal, mental, behavioral and existential processes. The results show that material processes prevail in all institutions and are mostly about production of minutes as documentation of institutional processes, approvals, policy implementation and administrative decision-making. There were also considerable inter-institutional differences: public universities showed a clear preference for passive constructions of materials, which highlight institutional authority, while private universities showed a preference for active constructions of materials, which set the accent on individual responsibility and management efficiency. This study contributes to the growing body of SFL research in South Asian higher education contexts. Most significantly, the contrast between passive material processes in public universities and active material processes in private universities constitutes the central empirical finding, demonstrating how governance ideology is linguistically constructed and reproduced through transitivity choices in institutional documentation.