Representing the Researcher and the System Survivor: A Systemic Functional Analysis of Mentorship Discourse in Nigerian Academic Writing

Academic opinion writing has increasingly become an important platform through which scholars interrogate institutional practices and advocate reforms in higher education. However, limited linguistic research has examined how such texts construct academic identities through grammatical choices, particularly within African university contexts. This study investigates how transitivity patterns in academic opinion discourse construct the identities of the researcher and the system survivor in Nigerian higher education. Specifically, the study examines the distribution of process types, participant roles, and their ideological functions in representing mentorship and supervision. The study is anchored on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly the transitivity system within the ideational metafunction. Adopting a qualitative descriptive research design, the study purposively selects Dr. Felix A. Oyeleye's opinion article Beyond Supervision: The Crisis of Mentorship in African Universities as its corpus. Using Halliday and Matthiessen's transitivity analytical framework, clauses are identified, classified according to process types, and interpreted in relation to identity construction and institutional ideology. The findings reveal that material processes dominate the discourse, portraying mentors as transformative agents while supervisors are represented as procedural actors. Mental processes construct postgraduate students as emotionally burdened and intellectually aspirational, whereas relational processes distinguish mentorship from supervision by assigning contrasting institutional attributes. These linguistic patterns demonstrate how transitivity functions as an ideological resource for critiquing supervisory practices and advocating a stronger culture of mentorship in Nigerian universities. The study contributes to SFL by demonstrating the usefulness of transitivity analysis in examining academic opinion writing within African higher education discourse.