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2006 results in Discourse analysis

Page 56 of 101

  • 8 - Continuing Issues in SFL

  • from Part I - SFL: The Model
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 204-229

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses two issues that are not fully resolved within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Firstly, the chapter explores the basis behind the grammatical categories within SFL, with particular attention on Transitivity categories. To what degree are these categories determined on notional grounds (mirroring extralinguistic organization), rather than on regularities of form? Secondly, the chapter explores the issue of where ‘genre’ belongs within the SFL model. The positioning of genre within various SFL models is contrasted. Central to this discussion is the issue of stylistic variation between elements of generic structure within a text. Does this represent shifts of register within a text, or is this type of variation not register-related?

  • 2 - Key Terms in the SFL Model

  • from Part I - SFL: The Model
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 35-54

  • Summary

    Offering an introduction to the major concepts which characterize Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this chapter is designed to provide an overview of the ‘contents’ of the theory. A Systemic Functional approach looks at how language functions to make meaning in context of situation. The chapter sets out the key concepts related to meaning within SFL theory, including what is meant by the notion of ‘acts of meaning’, before moving on to describe the place of grammar within the framework. How the grammar enables the meaning-making potential in language is explained in terms of the relationship it has within SFL’s general theory of meaning. Thereafter the three main components of meaning are explained in turn, representing ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning. After explaining the Marxist orientation of the theory, the chapter explains how SFL offers insight into how language is learnt and how language eventually evolves into the adult language system with the three major components of meaning. As a theoretical overview, this chapter provides a basis for the detailed consideration given to each of these areas in the remaining chapters of the volume.

  • 5 - The Rooms of the House

  • from Part I - SFL: The Model
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 118-141

  • Summary

    Jokes like Groucho Marx’s famous ‘elephant in my pyjamas’ prove that we process units at an intermediate level between words and clauses. However, the nature of these units is open for debate. Halliday and Matthiessen (2014:362–3) maintain that there are two different units at this intermediate rank: “A phrase is different from a group in that, whereas a group is an expansion of a word, a phrase is a contraction of a clause.” The aim of this chapter is to examine this claim in detail. We base the argumentation on the three main distinctions between groups and phrases as presented by Matthiessen (1995) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). These include the concept of ‘(primary) class’ and the relation between the functional potential of the unit and the ‘head word’, univariate versus multivariate structures, and the role of rankshifted units. We conclude that there is no significant theoretical or practical value in maintaining two different types of unit at this level. We argue that it is important to ask questions such as those we propose here in order to evaluate the strength of the position of the theory and its usefulness in an appliable theory of language.

  • 24 - Language and Science, Language in Science, and Linguistics as Science

  • from Part III - SFL in Application
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 620-650

  • Summary

    This chapter highlights various correspondences between historical and contextual changes affecting enquiries into nature, and the ways such enquiries took up meaning potential offered by choices in the structure of language. The main focus is vernacular English after 1600, although the legacy of classical forms (rhetorical and morphological structures) that were the basis of Aristotelian and later Latin authority are also discussed. The period 1600–1700 is taken as the ‘watershed’ of change and development when speech and written forms responded to new semantic pressures. Beside the shift between Latin and exposition and argument in vernacular languages, there were registerial pressures. These created a vector character in the drift of English grammar that can be seen in shifts in the contexts of enquiry, and in the evolving and intensifying patterns of change that have influenced the idiom across sciences and other registers. Three issues are covered in the chapter: the role of language in the development and evolution of science; the current character of verbal science, with its dramatic ‘swerve’ into a favoured pattern for recoding experience and for reconstruing common-sense reasoning; and the paradoxical place of linguistics and its techniques in the history and present state of scientific discourse.

  • 29 - Language Typology

  • from Part III - SFL in Application
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 767-792

  • Summary

    Language typology as a branch of general linguistics has significantly grown in the past few decades. The field of linguistics that began as a method of linguistic inquiry into the philosophy of language and to explore crosslinguistic diversity and genetic relationships among languages has expanded to be much more inclusive and results-driven: typological insights are applied to strengthen other related fields, such as intercultural and cross-cultural communication, translation, and language learning and teaching, and to answer practical questions that language professionals, e.g. translators, interpreters, and forensic linguists, face on a day-to-day basis. This chapter presents a snapshot of the development of language typology and discusses key strands of typological research in language, e.g. what the term ‘language typology’ refers to and what difference typological insights make in our life. Specifically, this chapter aims to (1) explain the meaning of ‘language typology’ and what types of questions typologists engage in; (2) sketch the development of this field over time and through crosslinguistic and comparative works; (3) summarize key theoretical approaches to language typology, presenting a comparison of formal and functional approaches, with special attention to the SFL approach; and (4) discuss the application of typological insights to other related fields.

  • 18 - SFL and Critical Discourse Analysis

  • from Part II - Discourse Analysis within SFL
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 462-484

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the historical relationship between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). I describe Fairclough’s linguistic SFL approach to CDA focusing on his seminal 1989 work Language and Power and outline his three-stage methodology, which enables analysts to account for discourse as (i) text, (ii) discursive practice, and (iii) societal practice. Text samples are used to illustrate how SFL is able to analyze language use as text and practice. Furthermore, I show that the Marxist heritage underpinning the genesis of SFL is shown to fully harmonize linguistic theory with social theory. Various criticisms of SFL-flavoured CDA such as the unrepresentativeness of data, subjectivity of analyses, and an anti-mentalist theory of context are discussed and dismissed. A claim that cognitive linguistics is the missing link in the analysis of ideological patterns underpinning social action is considered and mostly rejected on the grounds of its seeming incompatibility with social theory and individual-centred focus. Finally, technological developments which have the potential to add to the power of CDA descriptions and explanations in language and other modes are briefly outlined, as are some of the tensions remaining between theory and practice.

  • 25 - Language and Medicine

  • from Part III - SFL in Application
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 651-689

  • Summary

    This chapter profiles the contribution of Systemic Functional Linguistics to the study of language and medicine from early in the history of SFL to the present. It outlines the health problems and settings on which such studies have focused, summarizes pertinent findings, reviews the theoretical and descriptive tools used, and considers how the role of language in healthcare has been conceptualised. A brief research example is given, from a study of genetic counselling for women with a family history of breast cancer, which combines contextual, semantic, and multimodal text analysis to account for unexpected overestimation of cancer risk among women who were provided with expert counselling. The chapter argues that SFL has generated a significant body of work around language and medicine, with some important impacts on theory and practice, but there is scope for this field to develop into a more prominent and strategic application of Systemic Functional Linguistics that makes a substantial contribution to improving health and healthcare. Crucial to such a goal are enhanced co-ordination between research groups and a broader conception of how discourse and health are related.

  • 28 - Theorizing and Modelling Translation

  • from Part III - SFL in Application
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 739-766

  • Summary

    This chapter characterizes the essentials of theorizing and modelling translation from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. After a brief review of historcial roots in early work by Malinowski, then Firth and later Scale-and-Category versions, the architecture of SFL is discussed in its implications for modelling translation. The developments traced here provide a significant extension of the range of options for translational activity, as well as a broadened range of phenomena and methods for research. This characterization of SFL is followed by an engagement with key concepts of translation studies and the specific SFL perspectives on them. We then turn to the development of some tools for (research into) the translation process based on SFL-related work. Finally, possible future contributions are identified, particularly in the areas of translational activity, and in basic research into translation as a crucial linguistic phenomenon. SFL is a linguistic theory, and so it adapts a specifically linguistic approach to its objects of study. However, it is also a theory with a very rich internal and semiotically inspired architectucre which opens contact both with linguistic approaches to translation and with approaches based on semiotics and literary studies.

  • 10 - SFL in Context

  • from Part I - SFL: The Model
  • Edited by Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, David Schönthal, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
    Published online:
    03 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 259-282

  • Summary

    This chapter situates SFL in functional-cognitive space, a multidimensional space based on a wide range of properties, in which various functional and/or cognitively oriented and/or constructionist approaches to language can be plotted. The discussion refers to the detailed comparison of sixteen such models presented in Butler and Gonzálvez-García (2014), based on a questionnaire in which experts in each model rated fifty-eight features for their importance, together with close reading of the literature on each model. The chapter first examines the SFL questionnaire data statistically in relation to that for other models. It then considers the final ratings of the authors for SFL in the light of those for other models. We then turn to a detailed analysis, with particular reference to SFL, of each group of questionnaire items: (i) fundamental features of functional approaches, e.g. the importance of communicative function; (ii) what range of phenomena the model is intended to cover; (iii) the database for description; (iv) explanatory connections between language and the factors which are considered to motivate its structure and function; (v) the form of the grammar itself; and (vi) applications. The concluding section summarises the similarities and differences between SFL and the other approaches.

Page 56 of 101