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.

Jonathan Webster is currently Acting Head, Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, and Associate Dean (Research and Administration), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. In addition to being General Editor of the new journal from Equinox called Linguistics and the Human Sciences (coming in April 2005), he is the Series Editor for the ten volume Collected Works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday (Continuum Books); and also the seven volume Collected Works for Professor Ruqaiya Hasan published by Equinox. Ruqaiya Hasan has taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England, America and Australia. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she has researched and published widely in the areas of stylistics, culture, context and text, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues. Christian Matthiessen is Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Australia. He is the editor and author of a number of books, most recently Introduction to Functional Grammar (co-edited with Michael Halliday, Hodder Arnold 2004) and Construing Experience Through Meaning (co-edited with Michael Halliday, et. al., Continuum 1999).