Volume 33, Issue 4-5 - In honor of Michael Halliday

This paper is concerned with research on healthcare communication that draws on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Section 1 introduces Halliday's notion of appliable linguistics, with SFL as a particular manifestation. Section 2 deals with instances of healthcare communication in the form of medical consultations, and shows how they can be illuminated through SF text analysis. Section 3 relates medical consultations to institutions of healthcare along two dimensions, stratification and instantiation; and it suggests that institutions can be analyzed as aggregates of situation types. Section 4 considers the field of activity within healthcare contexts, suggesting how texts in situation types characterized by different fields complement one another. Section 5 adds tenor considerations in the form of the institutional healthcare roles across fields. Section 6 explores patient journeys through hospitals as sequences of situation types. Section 7 asks how risks and failures inherent in patient journeys can be interpreted, and then analyzed and addressed, in terms of the orders of systems in a hospital. Section 8 continues this systemic analysis, applying them to patients, and Section 9 extends the analysis to healthcare systems, as semo-technical systems. Section 10 shows how relationship-centered healthcare can be interpreted in terms of SFL.

This paper offers a multimodal perspective on how identities are performed and negotiated in discourse, concentrating on the interaction of language and body language within a particular genre, Youth Justice Conferencing. These conferences operate as a diversionary form of sentencing in the juvenile justice system of New South Wales, Australia. Typically, they involve a young person who has committed an offense coming face to face with the victim of their crime, in the presence of family members, community workers, police, and a conference “convenor.” We conduct close, multimodal discourse analysis of the interactions that occur during the Rejoinder step in a particular conference, and investigate an “angry boy” identity enacted by two young persons at this point in the proceedings. This persona is very different to the forthcoming and remorseful persona idealized by conference designers. The role of body language in intermodally proposing and negotiating bonds within the conference is explored.

Over the last decade, technological innovation has led to new pedagogic sites, such as online discussion forums and virtual 3D worlds. In these sites students and teachers use language and other meaning-making resources to engage in educational argumentation. However, there have been few studies which have systematically explored the role of lexicogrammatical and other semiotic resources in the making of meaning in these contexts. This is because the main body of research underpinning claims around the affordances and limits of online argumentation is located within sociocognitive paradigms. By drawing on the tools of systemic functional linguistics and, where relevant, systemic functional-multimodal analysis, this article therefore offers a fresh perspective. I show how such tools can illuminate both the overarching textual shape and structure of online discussion forums and the ways in which meanings are made through language and other semiotic resources.

Within the framework of Halliday's text and context relations, with key extensions of this model by Hasan, this paper presents an analysis of a TV news report by Australia's public broadcaster (the ABC) concerning the 2003 “Coalition” invasion of Iraq, in order to present a thesis about the context-construing work done by the register (i.e., functional variety) known as “news.” Sociologists have argued that news is a symbolic commodity, in the business of purveying forms of consciousness. How does news do this? And what, more specifically, can be said about the social process which news texts realize? This paper considers these questions, drawing on the analysis of the texture of the ABC TV news report, based on Hasan's “cohesive harmony” schema. The findings from the analysis are the basis on which I argue the news item relied for its continuity on the derived and abstract notion of “the Iraq war,” while failing to present a coherent picture of the actualized violence perpetrated by the “Coalition” as it rolled out its invasion of Iraq.

This paper explores conversational humor between friends and demonstrates through a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective how friends play with evaluative meanings in their humor to achieve bonding and affiliation. Sequences of talk that feature shared laughter are analyzed and it is shown that speakers make humorous contrasts between social values related to their friendship groups and community memberships. Using SFL tools like appraisal, the examples reveal contrasts as well as layering of evaluations of experiences, people, and things in the speakers' lives with underlying community values known to be shared with those with whom they are joking. It is argued that this “convivial conversational humor” is one kind of affiliation process in which friends manage their connections to each other and to the social world. This paper contributes to SFL theory by providing new insights into humor and conversational talk, and also builds on the theory by offering connections between humorous uses of appraisal and affiliation as a model for social bonding. By doing so, this paper aims to highlight the value of a systemic functional linguistic perspective on conversational humor.

From a systemic functional perspective, translation has been dealt with mostly by means of the hierarchy of realization and has been modeled against parameters of difference between language systems – equivalence and shift. Such a concern with equivalence between language systems reflects the primary focus of research on the supporting language theory itself. As recent developments in systemic functional linguistics have shifted focus from system to uses and users, proposing three complementary hierarchies – realization, instantiation, and individuation – a more comprehensive perspective on translation has been enabled, which includes the systems, uses, and users involved. In tune with recent developments in translation studies, it views translation as a negotiation of meanings (including the notion of “equivalence”) between users via a specific use – the translated text. This article introduces this new model, its foundations, proposed concepts, and suggested methodology, as well as a glimpse of the model at work.

In this paper we investigate whether the semantic development of text in free discursive writing distinguishes currently depressed, formerly depressed, and never depressed writers. Theoretically motivated linguistic categories of elaboration (restating, exemplifying), extension (adding, contrasting), and enhancement (qualifying with specific details) were used to code the semantic transitions in essays of 25 currently depressed, 24 formerly depressed, and 28 never depressed individuals diagnosed by Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, current symptoms of depression) and the Inventory to Diagnose Depression (IDD-L, lifetime depression). The currently depressed used more elaboration and extension and less enhancement. The severity of both current and lifetime depression is correlated positively with elaboration and extension and negatively with enhancement. The difficulty in concentrating and the self-focus in depression are associated with more elaborations, more extensions, and fewer enhancements. Writers with depression add less “color” that enriches their texts with details. Both mood state and cognitive processing are tracked in written language.

This paper considers the relationship between research using systemic functional linguistics and research of the kind referred to as corpus linguistics, specifically in a study of ideology in a popular science text. The paper argues that ideas in SFL and corpus linguistics may be regarded as parallel (register), divergent (grammar and phraseology), and complementary (lexis and taxonomy). Following a review of research in these areas, the paper presents a case study of evaluation of status in a popular science book ( The Rough Guide to Evolution ). “Status” draws on the grammatical concept of projection and on a set of lexis and phraseologies. The interaction between grammatical choice and lexical choice is quantified. It is argued that particular combinations of lexis and grammar are preferred when knowledge is presented as in the process of formation, and other combinations are preferred when knowledge is presented as in a state of completion. The case study reveals that concepts drawn from a systemic functional view of grammar and from a corpus linguistic view of phraseology are usefully combined in studying ideology.

Although linguistically inflected semiotic approaches to film were pursued in the 1960s and 1970s, they have since been almost universally rejected within film studies and film theory even though film is precisely the kind of intentionally produced communicative artifact for which one would have expected semiotics to have much to offer. Traditionally, forms of semiotics modeled on linguistics have offered some of the most finely articulated accounts available but, so far, this has not been shown convincingly for film. This paper argues that the semiotics of the 1960s and 1970s was just too undeveloped to deal with entities as complex as film. In contrast, the multidimensional account of verbal semiotic systems articulated within Hallidayan systemic-functional semiotics over the past forty years is now dissolving many of the original problems and provides renewed impetus for the semiotic analysis of film, reinstating much expanded notions of text and textuality securely at the center of attention.

A “multimodal digital semiotics” approach, involving the development and use of interactive digital media technology, mathematical techniques of analysis and scientific visualization for modeling and analyzing multimodal phenomena, is demonstrated through the analysis of an interview between a climate scientist and a climate denialist on Fox News. Prototype software for multimodal analysis and network visualizations are used in combination with Allen's interval algebra to model multimodal semantic data and identify significant patterns based on temporal relationships between different semiotic choices. The resulting semantic patterns reveal combinations of semiotic choices that were drawn upon by the different speakers during the interview, accounting for how the climate denialist emerges as the dominant and convincing interviewee. Such an approach combines the objectivity of mathematical modeling and scientific visualization with the interpretive power of Halliday's systemic theory.

This paper addresses the need for text visualization systems that can support discourse analysis. While fruitful work has been undertaken exploring the paradigmatic axis in systemic functional linguistics, there is much scope for complementary modeling along the syntagmatic axis. However, in exploring long-range text patterns we face the problem that it is difficult for a human analyst to track complex and unfolding relationships in what is high-dimensional data. I introduce AppAnn, a system designed to support linguists in undertaking such long-range analysis and demonstrate how it can be used to visualize patterns of appraisal in texts.