Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics : Grammar, Text and Discursive Context

The term ‘hybridity’ has been around for a long time and, for most of its history of use, has been pressed into the most disparate – and often dubious – services. In recent times it has become a sort of transdisciplinary ‘buzz word’ and it was about time that Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) also raised its voice on the subject.

This volume addresses the increasingly typical hybrid nature of text and discourse. In an SFL perspective, this also means that cultural and situational contexts must be seen as being always potentially hybrid or, as Hasan has fittingly put it, ‘permeable’, such permeability being based on the powerful activation/construal dialectic between discursive situation and language, system and instance. The authors of the papers in this collection variously focus on hybridity within sociocultural contexts in which discourse occurs, investigate hybridity of discourse types (in a wide range of genres, registers, text-types, etc.), but also examine hybridity within the stratum of lexicogrammar itself. Moreover, the implications of hybridity for education and the professions are explored. The volume makes plain the multifaceted complexity of the phenomenon, as well as its rich potential as a theoretical construct in SFL.

Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of 'verbal art'. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).Paul Bayley is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna. He is head of teaching and learning activities at the Bologna University Language Centre. He is co-editor of European Identity: What the Media Say (with Geoffrey Williams, OUP, 2012) and Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict (with John Morley, Routledge, 2009).