From Language to Multimodality

PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED JULY 2010

This book shares the recent debates by systemic functional linguistics and other linguistic forums. Its principal focus is on how we use language to make meaning of the world, on how the systems and structures of the ideational function of language represent the realisation of our experiences of the world around us. The volume captures the endeavours of scholars working in different contexts, disciplines and languages around the world. Their contributions explore what underlies experiential and logical meaning-making through specific analyses of recently-created, contextually diverse, single texts or collections of texts, from mono- to multimodal texts. The issues addressed are: layers of meaning through the transitivity system; agency and subjectivity; what kinds of participants and circumstances are associated with various processes and how these vary across languages; new ways of researching and capturing the interaction of the experiential function with the other functions of language – interpersonal, textual and logical – in communicative contexts; how multimodality and new ways of modelling experience semiotically influence the work of linguists, linguistic description and application. The book displays the dynamic dialogue on theoretical and applied interests of scholars interested in functional linguistics and working in a wide range of academic contexts. At post-graduate level advanced students will benefit from new perspectives, the innovative thinking and research accounts that make up the collection. The papers highlight the flexibility of systemic functional linguistic approach and exemplify how it can offer deeper and further insights into potential ways of exploring meaning-making by drawing on recent seminal developments in ideation.

Carys Jones is currently Materials Developer at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. She holds a University of London doctorate in Linguistics in Education and has many publications around issues to do with how language helps learning: the focus of her main research interests. She promotes an SFL approach across different subject disciplines, for teaching and research purposes, in Higher Education Institutions within the UK and beyond. Eija Ventola is Professor of International Business Communication at Aalto University, School of Economics, in Helsinki. Her published work on systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis and text linguistics includes studies on casual conversations, chats and service encounters of various kinds, as well as developing dynamic modelling of interactional discourse. Her current research and teaching interests include theoretical and applied issues of multisemiotics, for example videoconferencing and internetting, museums and tourism in multimodal and multimedial contexts, and research on globalised language of marketing and business.