The Representation of Jewish-American Soldiers in the Military Documentary “Camp Confidential: America’s Secret Nazis”: A Systemic Functional Analysis

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the linguistic representation of Jewish-American soldiers in the military documentary named Camp Confidential: America's Secret Nazis. The theoretical framework used in this paper is Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics. All clause simplexes produced by two Jewish-American veterans - Arno Mayer and Peter Weiss - were analyzed. The results showed that Material process was the dominant one, followed by Relational, Verbal, and Mental processes. As participants were inherent in the types of processes, Actor and Goal of Material process were the two most prevalent participants detected. While circumstances of Location were the most common, circumstances of Contingency occurred the least. These components of the transitivity system contributed to the representation of Jewish-American soldiers as typical Jews harboring hatred against Nazi Germany, disciplined people placing the mission first, and people who were rich in emotions and able to control them. This study also found that the difference in the language used by the two veterans could be ascribed to two factors: the nature of their job positions and the content they contributed to the storyline. The findings of this study have contributed to constructing a more familiar and relatable representation of soldiers compared to some previous studies. This study hopes to contribute to the existing body of literature on SFL by demonstrating SFL application in analyzing different types of texts, especially research into the representational meaning and the representation of soldiers in documentaries.