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This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers' benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In the era of "Internet +," government new media plays an indispensable role in guiding positive public opinion. Despite the implementation of China’s Double Reduction policy, some local governments' responses to public opinion still need improvement. This study aimed to investigate the characteristics and patterns of the verbal and visual modes in public opinion response discourse on government new media and provide suggestions for these platforms to handle public events more effectively. Methodology: This study was conducted using multimodal analysis of 68 microblogs responding to the Double Reduction policy from the official Weibo of People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and CCTV News. Based on the systemic functional grammar and visual grammar, this research explored the verbal mode in terms of ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions and the visual mode in terms of the representational, interactive and compositional meanings of government new media discourse. Results: The findings indicated that verbal response from government new media mainly consisted of heading, hashtags and texts, and the visual includes images and videos. The visual mode was in line with the verbal mode to respond to public concerns at issue. The information conveyed was strengthened by the application of images or complemented by the images. Conclusion: This study contributes to establishing the image of government authority. By capturing the potential meaning of verbal and visual modes, this study also provides some suggestions for improving the discourse quality of government new media when responding to public events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Synthetic Model of Analysis has been proposed to address the complexities of advancing critical literacy through the teaching of narrative literary texts. This five-level model was designed as an assemblage of the Multiliteracies Model and Four Resources Model, which also combined systemic functional grammar, visual design grammar, and narrative discourse grammar with the dialogicality of language and reception theory approaches. In the light of new theory advancements in multiliteracies, we revisit our design to explore meaning transpositions across meaning forms and between meaning functions in literary narrative reading from an in-between standpoint. The complex transposition iterations charted are intended to inform discussions on transpositional grammar and online learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Moreana is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Advertisement allows for multimodal access to sounds, colors, picture animations, and diverse symbols. Little research has reported the interrelationship among multimodality, discursive practice, and media effects in English language education. This study aims to conduct a multimodal approach to discourse analysis on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) in TV advertisements and to explore the unique significance of the research methodology. The multimodality in three TV Ads (A, B, C) was investigated by referring to Halliday's systemic functional grammar, social semiotics’ visual grammar, and typography’s distinctive features. Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity was also employed as an analytic framework for the collected multimodal data from three domains (representational, interpersonal, and textual/compositional) of meaning-making schemes. It was found that different modes (language, typography, visual image) acted complementarily and efficiently to deliver the message of TOEIC: problem-solving ‘skill’ in A, financial 'support and return’ in B, and ‘AI database’ in C. Further research is also discussed, especially with regard to ‘critical’ approaches to multimodal discourse studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to gain knowledge of how School-Age EduCare (SAEC) staff in and through collegial conversations construe a child/children. Collegial conversations with two SAEC staff teams were analyzed using the theoretical concepts from the fields of discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar. The results show that children were repeatedly construed as a group subject by the staff and more rarely as individual subjects. The SAEC staff construed the children as group subjects in four different ways: as general groups, as pre-determined groups, as quantity-rela- ted groups, and as behavior-related groups. The children who were construed as individual subjects were mainly the ones who diverged from the group, often in negative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of the information age, language is no longer the only way to construct meaning. Besides language, a variety of social symbols, such as gestures, images, music, three-dimensional animation, and so on, are more and more involved in the social practice of meaning construction. Traditional single-modal sentiment analysis methods have a single expression form and cannot fully utilize multiple modal information, resulting in low sentiment classification accuracy. Deep learning technology can automatically mine emotional states in images, texts, and videos and can effectively combine multiple modal information. In the book Image Reading, the first systematic and comprehensive visual grammatical analysis framework is proposed and the expression of image meaning is discussed from the perspectives of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and composition meaning, compared with the three pure theoretical functions in Halliday's systemic functional grammar. In the past, people often discussed films from the macro perspectives of literary criticism, film criticism, psychology, aesthetics, and so on, and multimodal analysis theory provides film researchers with a set of methods to analyze images, music, and words at the same time. In view of the above considerations, Mu Wen adopts the perspective of social semiotics, based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and Gan He's "visual grammar," and builds a multimodal interaction model as a tool to analyze film discourse by referring to evaluation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with emphatic constructions in English and Arabic scientific texts. To the researcher's best knowledge, this topic received little attention from linguistic researchers, exceptionally in functional grammar analysis. The importance of this study arises from the fact that some syntactic forms are effective linguistic choices for conveying the meaning of emphasis to the readers. The study aims to identify and analyze different types of linguistic constructions in English and Arabic scientific texts and show the similarities and differences between the two types of scientific texts under investigation. The study intends to analyze the structure of complex clauses by adopting Halliday and Matthiessen's (2004) modal of 'Systemic Functional Grammar' of syntax and Prince's (1978) modal of 'Given-New' information of discourse analysis. These models analyze-samples of English 'Spaceport' magazine and pieces of Arabic 'Sadeem Bulletin' magazine. Moreover, the study depends on a qualitative approach to answer the research questions and confirm its hypothesis. The results show that both languages use some syntactic forms, but Arabic is rich in its constructions. This difference is due to the nature and flexibility of both languages. The findings will be helpful for researchers concerned with syntax and scientific issues because it provides a rigorous analysis of complex clauses into simple parts and shows the focus of information in its suitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates representation of male and female characters in the reading texts of English language coursebooks in the Turkish secondary and high school context. In order to examine the gender representation in reading texts, Hallidayan transitivity analysis was used; texts were analysed to to investigate representation of female and male characters as agents and the assignment of experiential processes to these characters. The findings show that as the students move up in their formal education and as the reading texts become more advanced and lengthier, the number of male agents increase radically. In addition, the agents in the most common two processes used in the reading texts are found to be predominantly male, while the remaining three processes identified were distributed between male and female agents more evenly. However, it is also found that there was still a general trend to assign agency to male characters in lengthier and more advanced texts of later years overall. The findings have implications for teachers as well as coursebook writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aim to describe and analyze the deontic modals expressions constituting President Donald Trump's speeches, under a functionalist approach, according to the postulates of Hengeveld (2004) and Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008). To understand the modality category, we will work with the Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), which seeks to integrate the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects. Starting from the understanding that deontic modals expressions are at the service of argumentation, we will also take the concept of Discourse Analysis (AD) ethos to understand President Trump's ethos, constructed discursively. Our corpus consists of four speeches, translated into Spanish, delivered by President Donald Trump after taking office, and disseminated on digital social media. We undertake reading of the speeches, according to the following aspects: (i) contextual: what is the theme of the speech and the type of audience to which the president is addressed; (ii) semantics: what is the installed semantic value and the source of the modal assessment; and (iii) discursive: what kind of ethos is projected by the speaker. We observed that the speeches aimed at a wide public, therefore more heterogeneous, favor the construction of attenuated deontic values, corroborating the construction of a non-authoritarian presidential ethos. In turn, speeches aimed at the American people, whose theme is the Trump administration platform, favor the construction of asserted deontic values, thus building an authoritarian image. We found that the semantic value of obligation and the deontic source of the enunciator type was the most frequent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) of headlines and leads in six online hard news about a traffic accident involving two Brazilian citizens that summarize two socioeconomic classes: the dominant class (ACTOR 1) and the working class (ACTOR 2). Using the transitivity system of the Systemic Functional Grammar (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2004) and the taxonomy for representation of social events (FAIRCLOUGH, 2003), we aim to analyze how the media recontextualize the social event and its actors in order to create particular representations of them. The analysis reveals a set of grammatical and discursive mechanisms that produce the invisibilization of ACTOR 2 as a fatal victim of the accident, while mitigating the ACTOR 1's responsability for provoking the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study attempts to investigate the function of modality in the Iraqi EFL learners’ essays at the college level based on discourse analysis theories It aims to identify the EFL University students' competence and knowledge of the types of modality and use them in writing to reach a high level of persuasion, hence, characterizing Iraqi learners’ peculiar communicative style. To achieve this aim, the study adopts Halliday’s (1985/1994) modal of SFG (Systemic Functional Grammar) to render a statistic of modality types, whereby thirty essays are chosen randomly as data of this study, Writing Essay Material, Third Year Class, English Department, College of Education for Humanities, University of Anbar, 2018-2019. The finding of the study reveals that since the subject under analysis is argumentative, students are free to use the types of modality, therefore, the types of modality are vital to help students express their opinions in persuasive way. This refers to the vital communicative value of modality types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study assesses how firms deployed language tactically to cope with crisis events. By applying the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) approach, we identify linguistic characteristics of Google and Apple's crisis communication in China and note that different discursive strategies were adopted to manage their organizational legitimacy. When facing a major constitutional crisis that threatens the organization's cognitive and moral legitimacy, the linguistic components consist of words and grammars with associative relationship, strong rhetoric, and inclusion of audience views to secure a wide range of support. When a legitimacy crisis is instrumental, the wording and grammars used are more with realistic relationships and technical rhetoric, with different expected outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an effective method of the discourse analysis. It is aimed at analyzing the special relationship between power and the traditional ideology in implied discourse. Traditional discourse analysis always analyzes the structure and composition of discourse in terms of linguistic features, CDA makes language analysis more creative. It deeply explores the inherent potential of language and systematically interprets the deep meaning of discourse. This paper will take the specific corpus, namely Trump's TV speech, as the language material, Halliday's systematic functional grammar as the theoretical basis, and physicality, modality and personal pronoun as the framework. This paper studies how speakers in political speech use language to shorten the distance between people and win people's affirmation and support from the aspects of transitivity analysis, modality analysis and personal pronoun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies on transitivity systems of languages have been conducted in the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Different linguists have described the transitivity systems of English, French, German, Japanese, Tagalog, Chinese, Vietnamese, Telugu, and Pitjantjatjara, adopting an upward approach which is not effective enough for discourse analysis. So far, there has been no description of the transitivity system of Myanmar in literature. The purpose of this paper is to put forward a clear description of the transitivity system of Myanmar that functions as one of the clause analysis methods from the experiential perspective. To construct a workable transitivity system of Myanmar, the present study follows He's (forthcoming) (He, Wei. forthcoming. Categorization of experience of the world and construction of transitivity system of Chinese) new description of the Chinese transitivity system containing 32 types of processes that represent our experience of the world. Unlike previous studies, He (forthcoming) proposes autonomous and influential processes of action, mental, and relational clauses with no description of ergativity hypothesized by Halliday (1985) (Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold) and Matthiessen (1995) (Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 1995. Lexicogrammatical cartography: English systems. Tokyo: International Language Sciences Publishers). This new model is more comprehensive and effective than previous ones because it adopts a downward approach which can smoothly be applied to discourse analysis. In this paper, the transitivity analysis of Myanmar clauses is performed in accordance with the theories put forward by He (forthcoming) and the semantic configurations of 32 processes in Myanmar transitivity system are illustrated with authentic examples. Findings show that the proposed transitivity system of Myanmar can analyze clauses effectively and it is compatible with the discourse analysis of Myanmar. These findings will make an important contribution to further study of the systemic functional grammar of Myanmar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of German International Journal of Modern Science / Deutsche Internationale Zeitschrift für Zeitgenössische Wissenschaft is the property of Artmedia24 and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Research problem: Discourse bridges between the speakers and the audience in product launches. However, how the verbals and the visuals work together in the construction of interpersonal meanings in such communication remains largely underexplored. Research question: How were interpersonal meanings constructed via verbal and visual semiotics in the iPhone 1 product launch presentation?. Literature review: Despite the recognized importance of innovation communication, communication at the launch phase is underexplored. Moreover, communication and management studies have generally neglected the role of grammar-based discourse in promoting innovation, while linguistic studies have paid inadequate attention to language's implications for innovation communication and management. Thus, we address the discursive building of interpersonal meanings in product launch presentations to fill such gaps. Methodology: Integrating Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen's Systemic Visual Grammar, we conduct both verbal and visual analyses to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Steve Jobs’ iPhone 1 launch presentation. Results: Analysis of the verbal strategies suggests that Jobs built different interactive roles as an authority innovation leader and as a close “friend” willing to engage with the audience. Moreover, by combining verbal semiotics with the delicate arrangement of image act, size of frame, and angle, the presentation video was carefully planned to create offer contact, produce close social distance, and present equal and objective attitudes to further enhance the construction of interpersonal meanings, thus contributing to the audience's understanding and recognition of the innovative product. Conclusions: This article offers insights into innovation discourse and communication by investigating the semiotic features of the iPhone 1 product launch presentation, thus adding to the extant literature on professional communication and innovation management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of College of Education / Wasit is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study explores LEGO and IKEA building instructions within the broader landscape of multisemiotic qualitative data visualization practices. Building instructions are defined as procedural texts, in which an encoder plans ahead how a practical action is to be undertaken in the real world, and as cognitive protocols, guiding users in the performing of complex tasks by way of rescaling the latter in a sequence of smaller problems, and therefore turning representation into action. The peculiarity of LEGO and IKEA building instructions lays however in the multisemiotic mix through which they perform their referential and instructional functions, which does not comprise verbal language. By way of multisemiotic visualization strategies, LEGO and IKEA building instructions present numerical, topographical, analytical and processual meanings in synoptic, integrated fashion, so as to allow the grasping of articulated data sets on the part of the user. Incorporating Systemic Functional Grammar, classic Social Semiotics and Cognitive Discourse Analysis, this study analyses and contrasts the ideational and interpersonal processes through which LEGO and IKEA building instructions codify empirical phenomena and procedures in such a way as to get unspecialized users to obtain a complete and concrete object from a box of scattered pieces. Attention is finally given to the overarching cultural and epistemological tendency that may be detected behind the fast-growing diffusion of visualization in today's information dissemination practices, i.e. the spatialization of temporal processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts a multimodal discourse analysis of a newspaper article during the Brexit campaign. The aim is to help the audience decode and evaluate photographs and texts from media by providing a few strategies as guidance. The approach adopted for this analytical research is inspired by Halliday and Matthiessen's An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2004). Consequently, the objects in a photograph and words in a text function similarly conveying information to the audience, and additionally, involve a similar strategy of analysis. To sum up, these strategies are intended to improve the audience's comprehension of decoding article meaning and journalist's intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the pivotal role of genre in text production and identity construction by an analysis of three high-stakes genres of public communication by presidents of the top universities in China, Peking University (PKU) and Tsinghua University (THU). A brief review of the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) research on identity indicates that the current approach did not take into account the role of text structure as an important means of identity construction, which can be attributed to flaws in the SFL theorization of genre. In view of this, the Genre as a Nexus of meaning making (GaN) model is proposed, followed by a reinforced analytical framework of text analysis encompassing Halliday (and Matthiessen)'s functional grammar and Martin (and Rose)'s discourse semantics, which is subsequently deployed to study the texts of concern from an SFL vantage point. The results indicate that not only are different aspects of the university represented in the different genres, but the generic structure of the texts is indispensable in the university's identity construction. Moreover, the comparison of the genres with those in other culture and of the results with previous research underscores culture's powerful impact on genre and the universities at the forefront of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Firstly the author introduces Systemic Functional Grammar in this paper, including the levels of language and their realization relationships, the systems of the three metafunctions and their submetafunctions, as well as the two levels of discourse analysis(DA). Then being based on different aspects of the systemic functional grammar, this paper analyzes the four discourses. Person system, mood and modality system, cohesion system in systemic function grammar are used in analysis of the first discourse “heal the world" which reveals some features of discourse of song. Understanding these characteristics can deepen understanding of the listener to the discourse of English song so as to improve the listener's ability to appreciate the song. When analyzing the other three discourses, the author uses the “context-text-commentary" method. Elaborate applicability of this linguistic theory to DA is the purpose. Finally, concluding that analysis of discourse with the systemic functional grammar analysis is not only a good way, but also it has very important significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a multimodality theory, this study attempted to investigate the various semiotic resources utilized by a giant Indonesian cigarette company, Sampoerna, and explore how these resources communicate meanings or messages in its billboard advertisements to persuade its potential customers to buy the product. The data were analyzed using Halliday's systemic functional grammar focusing on ideational meta-function or also known as a representational function in multimodal discourse analysis. The findings revealed that the billboard advertisements were designed to persuade the audience to buy the advertised products implicitly through representational functions attained using narrative and conceptual processes. Whereas the former was realized by employing its typical sub-processes, actional and reactional processes, the latter employed its sub-processes such as classificational, analytical, and symbolic processes. Implicationally, this study has illuminated the possible application of systemic functional grammar within a multimodal discourse analysis domain to investigate implicit message(s) conveyed by an advertisement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mackenzie (2020) is a defense of the position adopted by the architects of the standard model of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG): namely that the model cannot (and even could never) be considered a 'grammar of discourse'. The article examines the arguments given for rejecting the 'discourse' dimension from the FDG model, proposes an independent account of discourse, and suggests a means of dovetailing it within a model of the wider utterance context. On the one hand, the author's arguments are in the main valid: for 'discourse', as characterized in section 3, is not a formal, clearly delineated object amenable to systematic treatment within a grammatical model of a given language. Yet on the other, it is arguable that even the presence of the term 'discourse' in the model's name is not in fine justified. Notwithstanding, in order to include the 'discourse dimension' (section 3), it is argued that the Core FDG model could be integrated with a broader model of the utterance context involved. This would enable it to account more adequately, for example, for the ways in which indexical reference, the lexicon and adjectival modification operate in actual texts. In turn, it would influence certain of the other characterizations independently assigned within the Core model. • For its architects , Functional Discourse Grammar could never be a discourse grammar. • For discourse is not amenable to systematic treatment within a formal grammar model. • Yet in fact even the term 'discourse' in the model's name is not fully justified. • A solution: complement the model with one dealing with the broader context of use. • This in turn will impact on certain of the characterizations yielded by the Core model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the possibility of classifying traditional affixes as two groups, syntactic or lexical affixes, as proposed within Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). It is argued that the main challenge for the FDG approach to derivational morphology arises from properties which revolve around the semantic contribution of derivational affixes: i) the fact that derivational processes introduce unpredictable meaning components (semantic opacity), ii) the question of what constitutes lexical meaning vs. grammatical meaning, iii) the intrinsic polysemy of some affixes, and iv) affix competition. The authors conclude that FDG should treat lexical and grammatical affixes similarly, unless a clear distinction can be made in particular cases on clearly specified semantic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances a first systematic Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) treatment of reduplication. Building on cross-linguistic arguments for reduplication's iconic motivation and non-concatenative derivational nature, principled advantages of FDG's functional-typological orientation over formal reduplicative models are programmatically demonstrated: Reduplication is differentiated from repetition in FDG's architecture, the basics for implementing reduplicative iconicity into the model are outlined, and several formalizations of the process based on existing FDG work on morphological derivation are suggested. Phonological characteristics of reduplication are mentioned briefly and mostly left for future FDG research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts forward an analysis of productive combinations of agentive -er nouns and compounding within the Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) model, trying to account for the different kinds of lexico-semantic input to the process and discussing the relevance of Aktionsart and other semantic and pragmatic factors to constrain noun incorporation in synthetic compounding. It is here argued that the FDG theory can account for the compositional approach to predicate-argument formations such as truckdriver, while also allowing for a non-compositional use of these and other less predictable formations such as painkiller, where analogy is assumed to play a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the various discourse uses of view-point adverbs in - wise and to provide an account within the Functional Discourse Grammar model. Semantically, adverbs in - wise are generally regarded as identifying a relevant point of reference in respect of which the clause derives its truth value, that is, the scope of view-point adverbs is not the phrase but the whole clause. However, a closer look at their use in larger stretches of discourse and in conversational contexts reveals several functions other than restricting the scope of the proposition. The main concern of this paper will be to disentangle the semantics and discourse functions of this type of adverbs and to propose how they can be accounted for using the FDG architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effectiveness of 'Reading to Learn' (R2L) pedagogy (Rose & Martin, 2012) in teaching Chinese to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong. Junior secondary students were taught to read and write texts of different genres in Chinese in an after-hour class for a year using the R2L pedagogy. Students were asked to write a composition before and after each genre teaching cycle. During the teaching cycle, teachers scaffolded students' writing through preparing for reading, detailed reading, joint re-writing sentence-making, and joint construction. This paper selects writings from students representing the low, medium and high achievers. Their pre- and post- teaching scripts are analyzed for aspects of transitivity modality and cohesion using a Systemic Functional Linguistic (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) framework. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to reveal students' perceptions and teachers' reflections on R2L pedagogy. Text analysis of the pre- and post-teaching writing suggests that students with different learning abilities are capable of composing much longer and better organized texts with genre-based schematic structure and diversified lexicogrammatical resources after experiencing R2L pedagogy. It is hoped that the findings can provide information to improve the teaching of Chinese as a second language for non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that the notions generally grouped together under the heading of evidentiality actually belong to four different evidential subcategories, which are different from one another in terms of their semantic scope. The hierarchical, scopal architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar is used to define these four categories. After giving our arguments for this new classification, we test a number of predictions that follow from it concerning the coexistence of evidential subcategories within a language and the co-occurrence of evidential markers in a single clause. We investigate our predictions in a sample of 64 native languages of Brazil. The data from these languages show that the presence of one or more of the four evidential subcategories can be systematically described in terms of an implicational hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a case study in analyzing the strategies of a normal discourse and the maxims that it proposes in standardizing languages and subsequently in standardizing discourses in accordance to the maxim of quantity. It discusses the relation between text and context and its role in interpreting the content of discourse. Aḥmad al-Mutawakkil as a linguist had worked on the theorization of functional linguistic that had enabled him to attend to the issues of structure, semantic, lexis and pragmatics related to the Arabic language. His work ‘Toward a functional discourse’ in standardizing the discourses had benefited analyst of discourse to understand the strategies employed by the sender of discourse especially the discourse after the Arab Spring. The found that the debatable relation between the discourse and context became clear through the nature of the text itself due to the fact that communicativeness between the sender and receiver depends on the inclusion of context in order to overcome its ambiguity. This is related to the ability of discourse, the innate language competence and the understanding of the receiver. Functional linguistic had developed from the sentence linguistic to discourse linguistic and from there to standardization linguistics that warrants the standardization of discourses and languages. It also preserve the maxim of quantity and the theoretical template that governs functional grammar since Dyke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch nominalisations of the type het eten van vlees ('the eating of meat') have ergative alignment. The alignment is functionally motivated, in that it is a natural consequence of the flow of discourse. The functional account that is put forward here draws on the notion of Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 1987) and on the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded discourse (Hopper & Thompson 1980). Support for this account comes from other domains of ergativity in Dutch, such as causativised predicates and participial constructions and from the observation that the alignment in Dutch nominalisations is in fact split-ergative. The present study adduces corpus evidence to corroborate the claims. In the last section, the analysis is cast in a Functional Discourse Grammar model (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008), including its hitherto underdescribed Contextual Component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two issues related to the overarching question of how to integrate Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) into a wider theory of verbal interaction (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 1). First, it proposes an addressee-oriented version of the Grammatical Component, presenting a first attempt to develop an FDG account of language comprehension; second, it aims to shed light on the interaction between the Grammatical and Contextual Components of FDG by exploring this crucial aspect of verbal communication from the perspective of the addressee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including functional discourse grammar, discourse analysis and contextual analysis.

According to the systematic functional grammar model (for example, Halliday (1985) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), language is seen to serve three functions: the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. This article confines its discussion within the textual which expresses the discoursal meaning by drawing on the system and network of Theme (T) and Rheme (R) to create a text in actual communicative event. Therefore, this article attempts to apply the information structure (T and R) and syntactic theory in the translation of English political news-texts from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) into Arabic. In the presentation of the word order of the sentence constituents, this article will adopt Culicover (1997) syntactic and structural theory of Principle and Parameters in particular the X' theory along with Halliday's (1985) thematic structure. The study reveals that except for those differences embedded in the grammatical structures, the Theme (T) and Rheme ( R) structures bearing the author's intention have the tendency to be reproduced in the translation. Also culturally laden lexical items in the TT (target text) may provide a variation to the ST (source text) message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study investigates discourse strategies and ideology employed in selected radio lead news of Osun State Broadcasting Corporation (OSBC), Osogbo, Nigeria. The analysis is done within the framework of critical discourse analysis which uncovers implicit ideology and exposes ideological bias and the exercise of power in text; and Halliday's systemic functional grammar which emphasises the form/function relationship of language use in context. The data cover selected radio lead news purposively sampled based on the content from the period of January 2006 to December 2008. The analysis shows that journalists employ a variety of strategies to influence the way people understand issues or situations for the purpose of changing their actions and expectations in ways that are desirable to the political actors. The analysis reveals that media messages contain a lot of discourse strategies such as blame transfer, source avoidance, positive-self presentation and negative-other presentation, authoritarianism as a source of news making, foregrounding and informativeness, use of figures and statistics and metaphorisation. This study reveals that broadcast news contains hidden and subjective meanings displayed by a variety of strategies that highlight pro-government activities. It reveals that critical discourse analysis is relevant in interpreting and analyzing news discourse to discover hidden meanings, elicit meaning from news reports and to uncover ideological assumptions that are embedded in news texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to compare the treatment of syntactic functions, and more particularly those traditionally labelled as Subject and Object, in Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar. Relevant aspects of the overall structure of the two theories are briefly described. The concept of alignment between levels of the grammar in Functional Discourse Grammar is introduced and the role of syntactic functions in the morphosyntactic type of alignment is explained. The arguments put forward in Role and Reference Grammar against the adoption of Subject and Object and in favour of a single language-specific and construction-specific privileged syntactic argument are then discussed. The arguments against Subject are found to be persuasive, those against the need for any secondary syntactic function (in place of the traditional Object) rather less so. It is therefore proposed that Functional Discourse Grammar should abandon the notions of Subject and Object as valid categories in those languages which can be demonstrated to need syntactic functions, and should make it explicit that grammatical relations are specific to particular languages and even to constructions within those languages, while making appropriate generalisations wherever possible. The role played by syntactic functions in the two theories is then discussed in rather more detail, and it is concluded that while the Role and Reference Grammar system makes stronger predictions about the relationships between syntax and semantics, the Functional Discourse Grammar concept of alignment has greater overall scope and generality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An essential task for the morphosyntactic level within the grammatical component of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is the handling of constituent ordering. This area of grammar, which is known as positional syntax, constitutes the subject of the present paper, in which the ordering of constituents is examined within the framework of a dynamic implementation of the FDG model. First of all, an analysis is presented of how FDG differs from its predecessor, Functional Grammar, in the treatment of constituent order. Next, attention is focused upon the question of how a dynamic FDG-based account of positional syntax may be developed. A linearisation mechanism is proposed which reflects the basic principles of FDG theory, and the working of the mechanism is illustrated in relation to the positional syntax of the English Clause. Some problems are then discussed, and avenues are explored towards their solution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: It follows from the ordering principles that are applied in Functional Discourse Grammar that the positional possibilities of markers of agreement and those of crossreference are different. Markers of crossreference are predicted to occur closer to the verb stem, while markers of agreement would occupy peripheral positions. This paper tests these predictions using data from a variety of languages, and shows that for these languages the predictions indeed hold true. In demonstrating this, the paper furthermore proposes a new treatment for markers of agreement/crossreference in languages in which these optionally co-occur with a corresponding noun phrase. These markers are on a language-specific basis classified as either Contextual Agreement Markers or as Appositional Referential Markers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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This study examined written texts in English from the hospitality industry. Authentic printed hotel brochures together with ESP learners' productions from a genre-based writing instruction course were collected, forming the two corpuses to be examined. A corpus analysis generated wordlists as well as keywords. The results showed that the students' choices of lexis differed to some extent from the word use in the authentic texts. This finding suggests that in a genre writing class instructing ESP learners in how to compose authentic English informative and promotional texts, priority needs to be given to teaching keywords, as these are the words that an English-speaking audience would normally expect to read in such texts. In addition, the genre-based instruction of analysing keywords helps learners transform their personal-style texts into more conventionally-accepted texts. In conclusion, this paper argues that subtle choices and constraints make the information in hotel brochures authentic, persuasive, trustworthy, and motivating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting a contrastive-rhetorical stance, this study explores what we call thematic parentheticals in a comparable English-Dutch corpus comprising four written genres. Thematic parentheticals are parenthetical expressions, irrespective of form, which are marked off typographically and occur immediately after, and are triggered by, a thematic element, where the latter is defined in terms of its treatment in Systemic Functional Grammar. Our data suggest that English uses thematic parentheticals much more than Dutch. This quantitative picture is true across the genres studied, but we also see qualitative differences between Dutch and English in the use of parentheticals in news texts and academic texts in particular. In attempting to explain the quantitative difference between the languages, we conclude that an interplay between writing cultures and basic syntactic patterns contrives to facilitate the use of parentheticals in English, which also demonstrates a relatively broad range of discourse functions, whereas for Dutch this interplay leads to a dispreference for certain kinds of thematic parentheticals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking its point of departure in ten semi-structured interviews with ten members of staff in a Danish-owned, cross-border software company, Softia, this article analyzes how members of staff talk about and make sense of ways of ''doing culture'' in a corporate context. The article adopts a discourse analytical perspective and applies systemic functional grammar in order to identify the characteristics of three major discursive constructions which members of staff draw on interchangeably, and to a greater and lesser extent, to give expression to their intercultural practices in Softia. This text-focused, practitioneroriented, discursive approach provides valuable insights into the practitioners' understandings of intercultural practices, and, therefore, offers a welcome contribution to the ever-growing, but less text-focused, literature on intercultural business communication and cross-cultural management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper describes how the leaders of a group of English language teachers in a Hong Kong public education institute constructed various personal identities for themselves through the discourse of the request e-mails they sent to their subordinates. The request e-mails were analyzed at both clause and discourse levels to reveal the strategies the leaders employed for constructing desirable personal identities and ultimately achieving request compliance. At the clause level, first, the lexico-grammar was analyzed by drawing upon systemic functional grammar; and second the leaders’ management of the relationship with their subordinates was analyzed with reference to the constructs of rapport management and relational work. At the discourse level, the way the authors supported their request was analyzed by drawing upon the influence tactics framework. It is argued in the paper that the e-mail authors’ legitimate or position power intrinsically associated with their capacity as leaders was not sufficient in obtaining request compliance – additional elements like desirable personal identities were necessary in getting their subordinates to comply with the requests made via e-mails. The identities constructed included those of (1) an accountable leader, (2) a rational leader, (3) an authoritative leader, (4) an understanding, considerate and polite leader, and (5) a capable leader. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]