Linguistics and English Language Teaching Journal p-ISSN: 2339-2940 Vol. 9, No 1, June 2021 e-ISSN: 2614-8633 24 Mental Verbs in Marketing Texts: Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspectives Bahtera Sembiring a,1,* , Mulyati Khorina b,2 , Danny Gandana Nugraha c,3, abc Department of English, Politeknik Negeri Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia 1 bahtera.sembiring@polban.ac.id; 2 mulyati.khorina@polban.ac.id; 3 danny.nugraha@polban.ac.id *corresponding author I. Introduction In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), language has various social dimensions in terms of register and genre [1]. Register covering three elements field-mode-tenor, charaterizes the type of a text. The field which refers to the content or discipline of a text is in the level of semantic and it belongs to ideational metafunctions [2], [3]. The ideational metafunctions are grammatically realized by clauses as representation working on Transitivity system [4]. The system deals with process, participants, and circumstance. There are six types of process on the system in which the participants of each process are labelled based on the meaning the process served. Among the six process types, three of them are considered as the main ones: material, mental, and relational [3]. Mental process like the other two main processes, operates on two modes: like and please types and working on four types of mental clauses: perceptice, cognitive, desiderative, and emotive. Since, the context in which a text occurs strongly shapes the language used in the text [5], this paper is discussing what mental process appear in characterizing marketing texts. Mental process is described as a process which serves to represent inner experiences of human. The experiences may be acquired either through cognition, perception, or emotion. Accordingly, mental process consisting of two sub-types: like and please. The differences between these two types can be seen in the examples below. 1) Mary liked the gift. 2) The gift pleased Mary. Clause 1) possesses mental process of like type. The mental process is realized by lexical verb of like. The patricipants of mental clause are labelled Senser as the subject or the entity who experences another entity labelled as Phenomenon (Table 1.). Traditionally, this verb of this clause is classified as transitivity since it requires object. However, the label does not reflect semantic function as served by SFL. Table 1. Mental process of like type Mary liked the gift Senser Process: mental Phenomenon ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Received: 8/5/2021 Revised: 16/5/2021 Accepted: 2/6/2021 The aim of this study was to examine mental verbs found in Marketing texts. Thus, the qualitative data were taken from a graduate textbook entitled Selling Today. The data were analyzed by applying Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. The results showed that mental process of like type appear to be dominant which is realized by various lexical verbs. The mental process occur on all types of mental clauses: perceptive, cognitive, desiderative, and emotive. However, among the four types of mental clauses, cognitive clauses has the highest occurance frequency with various choices of verbs realizing its mental process. The findings offer opportunity to model English grammar for Marketing students. Keywords: Mental process Perceptive Cognitive Desiderative