This innovative collection brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars highlighting the "appliability" of Systemic Functional Linguistics and the ways in which theoretical and analytical conclusions drawn from its applications can inform and advance the study of language. The book discusses SFL’s theoretical foundations and development in recent years to demonstrate its evolution into a more effective analytical tool. Building on this theoretical framework, the volume showcases the theory’s applications in case studies exploring four sub-disciplines of language study: multilingual studies; translation studies; language learning and language teaching; and genre analysis. This all-inclusive volume demonstrates both Systemic Functional Linguistics’ efficacy as a means of theoretical analysis, but also its value as a unique approach to the study of language and meaning, making this an indispensable resource for researchers and scholars in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, genre studies, translation studies, and multilingualism.

This book describes the discourse of biology from a systemic functional linguistic perspective. It offers a detailed description of resources based on text analysis. The description reveals co-textual patterns of language features, their expressions through grammatical resources, as well as their functions in the disciplinary context. The book also applies the description to analyse student texts in undergraduate biology, revealing characteristics of language and knowledge development. Although the discussion in this book focuses on the discourse of biology, both the language description and the descriptive principle can be used to inform the examination of knowledge in academic discourse in general, making this key reading for students and researchers in systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis, English for academic purposes, applied linguistics, and science education.

The field of translation studies has grown rapidly over recent decades, with critical questions being investigated across the globe. Drawing together this scattered research, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies consolidates important propositions by drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Using the SFL dimensions of stratification, rank, axis and delicacy to show how languages are more similar or more different, this book provides a state-of-the-art critical assessment of the interaction between SFL and translation studies. Highlighting the major contribution SFL can make in developing translation theories, a team of world-leading experts investigate how intricate and wide-ranging translation questions, such as re-instantiation and multimodality, can be most efficiently explored through a detailed meaning- and function-oriented linguistic theory. Examining the theoretical concepts and practical applications of SFL in the translation of a range of languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies provides a stimulus for new work spanning the two fields and suggests new directions for future research.

Disciplinary knowledge is under threat in the modern world. Claims abound that we are entering a landscape in which the division of disciplines is obsolete, implying a commitment to outdated values in scholarship. Notions of 'discipline' are critiqued as reflecting social power and representing the worldview of dominant social groups. By addressing and challenging such claims, this edited collection argues that proclamations of the death of disciplines have been greatly overstated. Not only are the notions of disciplinarity still important for understanding how we come to know the world, but this volume demonstrates how significant disciplinarity is to understanding different forms of knowledge if we wish to improve the building of knowledge and educational practice. Using analytical tools from systemic functional linguistics theory and social realist sociology, this volume illustrates how different disciplines can collaborate and cross-fertilize successfully, without losing their distinctive insights and disciplinary integrity. The subsequent theory developed will thereby extend both linguistic and sociological approaches to the topic and make a major contribution to educational theory.

This volume showcases previously unpublished research on theoretical, descriptive, and methodological innovations for understanding language patterns grounded in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective. Featuring contributions from an international range of scholars, the book demonstrates how advances in SFL have developed to reflect the breadth of variation in language and how descriptive methodologies for language have evolved in turn. Taken together, the volume offers a comprehensive account of Systemic Functional Language description, providing a foundation for practice and further research for students and scholars in descriptive linguistics, SFL, and theoretical linguistics.

This book is a cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary exploration of modality within systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Drawing upon the broad SFL notion of modality that refers to the intermediate degrees between the positive and negative poles, the individual papers probe into the modality systems in English and Japanese. The papers cover issues such as the conceptual nature of modality in both languages, the characterization of modulation in Japanese, the trans-grammatical aspects of modality in relation to mood and grammatical metaphor in both languages, and the modality uses and pragmatic impairment by individuals with a developmental disorder from a neurocognitive perspective. The book demonstrates a functional account of Japanese within an SFL model of language with a fresh perspective to Japanese linguistics. It also refers to cross-linguistic issues concerning how the principles and theories of SFL serve to empirically elaborate descriptions of individual languages, which will lead to the enrichment of the theory and practice of linguistics and beyond.

One of many natural sign languages in use around the world, British Sign Language (BSL) operates as a fully-fledged semiotic system in the visual-spatial modality, through the simultaneous use of embodied articulators. Filling a gap in current research, this book investigates visual-spatial communications from a functional perspective. Presenting a description and analysis of BSL from the perspective of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, Luke A. Rudge explores how BSL users make meaning from three different yet interrelated perspectives: - How exchanges of information are managed at a social level (the interpersonal metafunction) - How experience is encoded in the language (the experiential metafunction) - How communications are organised into coherent parts and wholes (the textual metafunction) Examining these perspectives both separately and together, Exploring British Sign Language via Systemic Functional Linguistics places them within the context of current observations in sign linguistics, providing a complementary viewpoint on how visual-spatial communications may be understood as social semiosis.

​This book focuses on the structural diversity, semantic variability, case choice, stylistic characteristics and diachronic distribution of English absolute clauses. The syntactic roles assumed by absolute clauses in the traditional sense can be categorized into clausal adjuncts, attendant circumstances and appositives. These three types of function correspond to the three hypotactic expansions in the relation system of clause complexes in Systemic Functional Linguistics, i.e., elaboration, extension and enhancement. This research, therefore, redefines absolute clauses in the framework of SFL and proposes four syntactic types of absolute clauses: absolute paratactic clauses (elaboration), absolute hypotactic clauses (extension and enhancement), absolute projected clauses (fact and act) and absolute embedded clauses (subject). Based on the Brown family corpora, BNC and COHA, this research finds that different function types of absolute clauses differ in terms of their stylistic and diachronic distributions, and both nominative and accusative cases are acceptable.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a usage-based theory of language, founded on the assumption that language is shaped entirely by its various functions in the contexts in which it used. The first of its kind, this book advances SFL by applying it comparatively to English, Spanish and Chinese. By analysing English alongside two other, typologically very different major world languages, it shows how SFL can effectively address two central issues in linguistics – namely typology and universals. It concentrates in particular on argumentation, carefully explaining how descriptions of nominal group, verbal group and clause systems and structures are motivated, and draws on examples from key texts which display a full range of ideational, interpersonal and textual grammar resources. By working across three world languages from a text-based perspective, and demonstrating how grammar descriptions can be developed and improved, the book establishes the foundations for a groundbreaking functional approach to language typology.

This user-friendly student guide is the essential resource for all those engaged in studying systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Assuming no prior knowledge, this guide is divided into nine chapters which can be read independently of one another and used for purposes of reference. The reading section maps out and mediates the key SFL literature. The application guides show how SFL has been and can be applied to various domains, from translation to healthcare communication. The term guides demystify the core terminology and the vocabulary guides aid readers in dealing with the most commonly used terms in text analysis. Systemic Functional Linguistics is an invaluable guidebook for all those studying functional grammar and SFL within linguistics, applied linguistics and related courses.