Articles

Visualizing texts: a tool for generating thematic-progression diagrams

Authors: Ping Alvin Leong

DEGREE OF INTENSITY in English-Chinese translation: a corpus-based approach

The claim in translation studies that Chinese tends to have a preference for stronger or more exaggerated terms than does English has not been substantiated by any hard linguistic evidence. One system to appro...

Authors: Long Li and Canzhong Wu

Applying quantitative appraisal analysis to the study of institutional discourse: the case of EU migration documents

This article addresses the methodological issues related to applying the appraisal framework quantitatively with a corpus of institutional texts. The aim is to explore how to best annotate evaluative expressio...

Authors: Mira Tupala

Embodied meaning: a systemic functional perspective on paralanguage

This paper develops a framework for analysing paralanguage, initially inspired by systemic functional linguistic (hereafter SFL) research on early child language development. A distinction is drawn between non...

Authors: J. R. Martin and Michele Zappavigna

Developing a systemic functional approach to teach multimodal literacy

This article argues for the importance of teaching multimodal literacy in schools so as to adequately equip students to navigate the multimodal communicative landscape. Developing multimodal literacy in studen...

Authors: Fei Victor Lim

A review of Karl Maton, Susan Hood & Suellen Shay (eds.), Knowledge Building: Educational Studies in Legitimation Code Theory, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016. xvii + 264 pp., US$160.00 (hbk)

As educational linguistic researchers, we seek to explore the relations between language, society, knowledge and education. This current volume appeals to us since its efforts coincide with our research intere...

Authors: Yan Liu and Hui Yu

‘A man who revels in his own ignorance, racism and misogyny’: Identifiable referents trump indefinite grammar

Typically, a noun phrase beginning with the indefinite article introduces a referent assumed to be unknown to the addressee. But in newspaper opinion journalism, this is not always the case. In ‘instead of hai...

Authors: Katy Jones

Clause complexing in systemic functional lingustics – towards an alternative description

This article examines Halliday & Matthiessen’s systemic functional description of expanding clause complexing. As a perspective, their description is compared to the Cardiff Grammar’s treatment of clause combi...

Authors: Thomas Hestbæk Andersen and Alexandra Emilie Møller Holsting

Language shift: analysing language use in multilingual classroom interactions

This paper offers a framework and set of tools for analysing the use of language shift in multilingual classroom discourse. The term language shift refers to the use of multiple languages in all types of inter...

Authors: Harni Kartika-Ningsih and David Rose

‘The axial rethink’ – making sense of language: an interview with Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a leading scholar in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Together with William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, he developed Rhetorical Structure Theory, a discourse analytica...

Authors: Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Bo Wang, Isaac N. Mwinlaaru and Yuanyi Ma

Femininity and female sexual desires in “The Lang Women”: an analysis using Halliday’s theory on transitivity

This article deals with the linguistic representation of and the relationship between femininity and female desires and needs in Masters’ short story “The Lang Women”. Based on Halliday’s theory of systemic fu...

Authors: Thu Hanh Nguyen

Advanced cancer patients’ construction of self during oncology consultations: a transitivity concordance analysis

This paper explores advanced cancer patients’ self-identification from a grammatical-concordance perspective. It combines corpus linguistics tool of concordance and transitivity analysis to investigate the gra...

Authors: Neda Karimi, Annabelle Lukin, Alison Rotha Moore, Adam Walczak and Phyllis Butow

The semiotic sense of context vs the material sense of context

This paper investigates the relationship between culture and language through analyzing material and semiotic features in a context of language-in-use. The paper first discusses what is meant by ‘material’ and...

Authors: Wendy L. Bowcher

Putting transitivity to the test: a review of the Sydney and Cardiff models

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the system of Transitivity is a common means by which to analyse both isolated clauses as well as clauses in context. To date, two Transitivity models have emerged. Th...

Authors: Leanne Victoria Bartley

Pedagogic register analysis: mapping choices in teaching and learning

This paper offers a method for analysing pedagogic practice of all kinds that is detailed, exhaustive and appliable to designing effective teaching practice. The analysis builds on research into the structurin...

Authors: David Rose

Lexical metaphor as affiliative bond in newspaper editorials: a systemic functional linguistics perspective

From the perspective of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), lexical metaphors are recognized as a resource for enacting interpersonal meaning in discourse. Within the appraisal framework, they constitute a mea...

Authors: Feifei Liu

Review of “reading in secondary content areas: a language-based pedagogy” by Zhihui Fang and Mary J. Schleppegrell

Authors: Shan Zhu

Lexis as most local context: towards an SFL approach to lexicology

The world of lexis is vast and complex and it is generally accepted in psycholinguistics that it is represented as part of a large complex network. However, in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) modelling l...

Authors: Lise Fontaine

Ideology and the text-in-context relation

While aspects of Halliday’s theory have been adopted for the study of ideology in discourse - in particular via Critical Discourse Analysis - these applications of his ideas have not attempted to bring the ful...

Authors: Annabelle Lukin

From explicit to implicit orientation: mapping rank scale to modality in English and Chinese

In Systemic Functional Grammar, modality is treated as a semantic domain that extends across more than one grammatical environment. The basic distinction that determines various realizations of modality is mod...

Authors: Shu-Kun Chen

A review of Jonathan J. Webster and Xuanwei Peng (eds.), Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics: the state of the art in China today. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

The present paper is to review Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics: the state of the art in China today, a volume to highlight the contribution of Chinese scholars to the development of systemic functional l...

Authors: Jian Lu

On the notion of abstraction in systemic functional linguistics

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the theoretical dimensions of stratification, instantiation, and delicacy within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It does so by examining the nature of the c...

Authors: Jamie Williams, Noah Russell and Derek Irwin

The extent to which the passive voice is used in the scientific journal article, 1985–2015

Some recent research has suggested that use of the passive voice in scientific writing has declined over the last few years. This study attempts to see to what extent that is true. The corpus consists of 32 sc...

Authors: David Banks

Using the Appraisal framework to analyze source use in essays: a case study of engagement and dialogism in two undergraduate students’ writing

A key element of academic writing involves incorporation of external voices, which is a complex rhetorical and linguistic task. Student writers must face this challenge of using sources to strengthen their own...

Authors: Miki Mori

‘On the grammar of death’: the construal of death and killing in Colombian newspapers

The aims of this paper are twofold. First, following Halliday’s 1998 paper ‘On the grammar of pain’, this study maps the lexicogrammatical resources available to Spanish speakers in the register of hard news to c...

Authors: Alexandra García Marrugo

An interpersonal sketch of the biblical Hebrew clause

The aim of the present paper is to describe the Biblical Hebrew clause as a locus of interpersonal meanings from a systemic functional perspective. Although systemic functional linguistics has been applied to ...

Authors: Eric T. Racher

A review of Lise Fontaine, Tom Bartlett and Gerard O’Grady (eds.), Systemic functional linguistics exploring choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 533pp

Systemic Functional Linguistics Exploring Choice provides a fresh inter-disciplinary perspective on the key notion of choice in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Although one of the ...

Authors: Changling Zhao and Wei He

Surveying the historical landscape: the evaluative voice of history textbooks

Much attention has been devoted to understanding the rhetorical features of history texts and how they position readers to take up particular views toward the past. One useful taxonomy for investigating evalua...

Authors: Gordon Myskow

The early semantics of the neologism BREXIT: a lexicogrammatical approach

The aim of this paper is to examine the nominality of the neologism BREXIT using a corpus-informed lexicogrammatical approach. The term BREXIT, coined in 2012, used initially in print and social media in the U...

Authors: Lise Fontaine

Circumstantiation: taking a broader look at circumstantial meanings

This paper argues for a view of circumstantial meaning as a region of ideational meaning that is instantiated across a range of lexicogrammatical structures: from the rank of the clausal constituent of circums...

Authors: Shoshana Dreyfus and Isabelle Bennett

Disciplinary variations in academic promotional writing: the case of statements of purpose

This paper explores disciplinary variations in academic promotional writing via a comparative analysis of statements of purpose (SoPs) written for different disciplines. A total of 100 SoPs written by English ...

Authors: Sibo Chen

An exploratory study of ESL writing by junior secondary students in China: text type, register and textual features

While interest in L2 writing research has increased exponentially in recent years, research on adolescent L2 writing remains relatively scarce. Drawing on the framework of functional text analysis, namely cont...

Authors: Winfred Wenhui Xuan

An analysis of the evaluation contexts in academic discourse

This paper develops a new framework to examine the use of ‘evaluation resources’ in research discourse. In previous studies of evaluative resources, two distinct, although interwoven, types of context have bee...

Authors: Xiaoyu Xu and Hilary Nesi

Coherence in Hong Lou Meng and its English translations: an exploratory investigation

Coherence can be studied from both logical and textual perspectives in systemic functional linguistics. The logical and textual metafunctions together contribute to the coherence of a text. Coherence is realiz...

Authors: Xi Li and Canzhong Wu

Construing the ecological perspective of the Tai Dam as seen in ‘Sen Huen’ ritual manuscripts

This paper is a part of the research project entitled “Transmission of ‘Sen Huen’ ritual as an intangible cultural heritage of Tai Dam ethnic group”. The Sen Huen ritual is a significant aspect of the Tai Dam’...

Authors: Pattama Patpong

A review of M. A. K. Halliday, Aspects of Language and Learning

This volume was published as one of the “M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics” Series. It is based on a series of lectures given by Professor Halliday at the National University of Singapore in 1986....

Authors: Hui Yu

“It is hard to mesh all this”: Invoking attitude, persona and argument organisation

This paper focuses on the nature of invoked attitude as part of the Appraisal framework under Systemic Functional Linguistics, offering an amended set of diagnostic tools for tracking the ways that attitude ma...

Authors: Alexanne Don

A survey of studies in systemic functional language description and typology

Systemic functional theory embodies a multilingual perspective to language from its earliest formulation. However, it was not until the last two decades that descriptions of languages other than English, parti...

Authors: Isaac N. Mwinlaaru and Winfred Wenhui Xuan

An exploratory genre analysis of three graduate degree research proposals in applied linguistics

This exploratory study investigated the rhetorical structure of three research proposals written by students who successfully sought entry into MA/PhD programs in applied linguistics at a Singapore university....

Authors: Bin Yin

What’s the point? The role of punctuation in realising information structure in written English

The main claim of this paper is that punctuation marks, in conjunction with spaces between words, function to provide visual rather than auditory cues for information structure in written English. Information str...

Authors: Nick Moore

Ideological representations and Theme-Rheme analysis in English and Arabic news reports: a systemic functional approach

On 14 February 2005, the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, was killed along with 22 others in a massive car bomb in Beirut. His assassination provoked an international outcry, which ended the 30-year p...

Authors: Lorena Potter

Recreating the image of Chan master Huineng: the roles of MOOD and MODALITY

The article investigates the roles of MOOD and MODALITY in the recreation of the image of Chan master Huineng in four English translations of The Platform Sutra by Wong Mou-lam, (Sutra Spoken by the Sixth Patriar...

Authors: Hailing Yu and Canzhong Wu

A multimodal discourse analysis of the textual and logical relations in marketing texts written by international undergraduate students

Thematic progression and the composition of information value contribute to the development of well-structured meaningful text. Discourse-based research of the textual features has been confined to language le...

Authors: Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

Exploiting the ‘non-dit’ and other discursive tactics in the New Caledonian independence debate: a pragma-functional approach to critical discourse analysis

This paper seeks to critically evaluate part of the New Caledonian independence debate, as discursively enacted by various social actors within the postcolonial space. It is common within Critical Discourse An...

Authors: Margo Lecompte-Van Poucke

Negotiating solidarity with potential donors: a study of the images in fundraising letters by not-for-profit organizations

Letters mailed by not-for-profit organizations in their fundraising campaigns derive their persuasive appeal from a complex interplay of verbal text, typographic features and images, combined in a visual desig...

Authors: Caroline Lipovsky

Towards an understanding of contextual features that influence the linguistic formality of British Sign Language users

This paper seeks to understand linguistic formality through the identification and measurement of contextual features. Using an adapted sociometric methodology to combine systemic functional linguistics and si...

Authors: Luke A. Rudge

A review of Wendy L. Bowcher and Bradley A. Smith (eds.), Systemic Phonology: Recent Studies in English. Sheffield: Equinox, 2014. vii + 451 pp. £85.00 (hbk), £30.00 (pbk)

Authors: Juanjuan Xiao

Register in the round: registerial cartography

Registerial cartography is the activity of systematically describing the registers that make up a language — with register in its original sense of a functional variety of a language, i.e. of the adaptation of...

Authors: Christian MIM Matthiessen

Indeterminacy in process type classification

Clausal analysis within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is generally based upon a classification of the clause into one of six process types. Although this allocation is often portrayed as clear-cut, in ...

Authors: Laura Gwilliams and Lise Fontaine

The role of grammatical metaphor in the development of advanced literacy in Spanish as a first, second, and heritage language

This paper draws some general conclusions from the evidence gathered by two recent analyses, which traced the development of advanced literacy by two undergraduate language learner populations: (1) Humanities ...

Authors: Omar Velázquez-Mendoza