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This paper explores how emotion is conveyed in spoken language based on a sample of three stories for children read aloud by a trained storyteller. It draws on both Martin & White's appraisal framework (2005) and a systematic account of vocal features. Interpreting and profiling emotion is a challenge both for researchers interested in spoken language and for English-as-an-additional-language teachers, when working to improve students' spoken expression of emotion. Underpinning this challenge is the absence of a unified theoretical stance and a consequent lack of shared analytical tools for describing how speakers use semiotic resources to convey emotion in their speech. A systemic functional semiotic approach can make visible the co-patterning of wordings and vocalisations that express emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistics has embraced the functional and contextual turn but, when building tools for systematic contextual description, we have not made as much use as we could of our own functional traditions. Rather, we have largely relied on the metaphors of law and rule, which do not adequately capture tensions between consistency and variability in how language and context relate to each other. Our aim in this paper is to show the economy and practicality of representing context as a pathway through a network, drawing on the network technique for mapping systems of grammatical choice introduced by Michael Halliday, and on its application to other linguistic strata first offered by Ruqaiya Hasan. The paper begins by outlining why alternative frameworks are needed for describing context-language relations. We then present a contextual network for one specific domain of the Systemic Functional Linguistic notion of Tenor, namely social distance, and use this to explore how different configurations of features of social distance influence the way that traditions of practice are passed on as a specialised legacy in two different professional collaborations. While the kind of context modelling discussed here is in a very early phase of development compared to phonetic, morphological and grammatical description, it has many advantages: contextual networks are paradigmatic in orientation; they help display and theorise metastability in language; they are "ad hoc" in Firth's positive sense; and they constitute a proposal to be tested against observed behaviour within specific cultural and situational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In applying linguistics to the task of analysing how agentivity is construed through verbal interaction, scholars often equate social agency with grammatical agency, and in particular with the grammar of transitivity. The difficulty I want to address in this paper is that we may miss other important, systematic and contrastive patterning in the agentivity with which social actors and other entities are depicted, because such agentivity is realized through a range of dispersed linguistic resources. Systemic Functional Linguistics can provide a useful framework for co-ordinating the contribution of these resources to the overall construal of agency in a text or set of texts. It does this best when it focusses on bringing out the particular stratal alignments that characterise different contexts. The paper draws on a study of treatment decision-making in HIV medicine as an example of a social context where choices in the construal of agency make a crucial difference to choices of professional and institutional practice. In this study the construal of agency was taken as a chief source of evidence about whether doctors and patients engage in shared decision-making, and it was also seen as a strategy which doctors and patients can use to open up or close down opportunities for shared decision-making. A key finding was that doctors and patients in HIV medicine often construe the agency of one participant as a resource for the agency of another, rather than construing the agency of one participant as competing with the agency of the other. In particular, it is where doctors and patients construe each other as semiotic agents that shared decision-making seems most likely to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]