Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age

Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age explores the insights that SFL offers to help us understand and explain the new meanings afforded through digital channels and how they are shaped by and shape their digital contexts.

SFL offers a sophisticated architecture for exploring how meanings are construed in context, and this volume focuses on three specific perspectives. Part 1 examines texts that are ‘born digital’ or digitally conceived, such as tweets and blogs. Part 2 focuses on texts that ‘achieve digitality’, or have come to replace or supplement non-digital texts with similar functions, such as an online university lecture or medical consultation. Part 3 examines and interprets texts singly or in corpora using digital tools and allows us to see patterns within and across texts that are generally not visible in single texts.

The volume offers contributions from international scholars which both initiate new and sustain current lines of enquiry in SFL research within the unifying context of digitality.

Sheena Gardner is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Coventry University. Sian Alsop teaches in the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University.