<![CDATA[Greta Thunberg’s environmental crisis speech at the UN Climate Action Summit 2019 was publicly and widely recognized. In relation to that, this research addresses three research objectives: 1) to reveal the construction of discursive strategies of blaming; 2) to identify the focus of blaming, which includes characters, behavior, and outcome; and 3) eventually, to discover the purpose of Thunberg’s speech. Accordingly, these are all answered through the application of Hansson et al.’s discursive strategies of blaming and the focus of blaming, along with the purpose of Thunberg’s speech, which are discerned from the three metafunctions of Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The findings show that SFL provides a useful analytical framework for identifying the blaming strategies in Greta Thunberg’s speech, including what is blamed and how the blame is expressed. Furthermore, the formula of these metafunctions facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the speech's overall communicative purpose. The analysis reveals that her speech conveys judgments of veracity, propriety, capacity, and tenacity, with the focus of blaming realized through lexicogrammatical choices operating across the three metafunctions.]]>
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