Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective

Continuing Discourse on Language offers a selective account of the evolution of important aspects of M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics over the last couple of decades. This edition brings together the two volumes, originally published separately, as one book for the first time.

The range of topics covered here includes not only certain fundamental concepts at the level of theory but also an account of the range of applications enabled by the descriptive framework that the theory has generated.

Given its acclaimed perspective on language as social semiotic, SFL has always located semiotic activity in relation to human life. In this collection, internationally recognised authors demonstrate the ways in which SFL relates to recent research on cognition, on socio-cultural contexts, and in computational linguistics. A theory is only as good as the description and application it enables: conceptualising the relations of theory and practice as a dialectic, SFL has created a framework for the analysis of language from the level of cultural context to that of the media for semiotic expressions.

Continuing Discourse on Language provides an insight into the continuing evolution of the impressive range of frames of description and their applications. From typology to multi-modality; from models of discourse analysis to translation and stylistics; from the role of language in knowledge construal to language education; genre based pedagogy and web based learning: this collection provides a rich resource for students and researchers in language study for understanding, practicing and applying a linguistics keenly aware of the role of language in social life.

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is professor of linguistics at Complutense University of Madrid.