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Halliday (1978: 111) defines register as "the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type." Elsewhere, however, he stresses that when we talk of "a register" this is a term of convenience: register is more properly theorised as continuous variation along many linguistic dimensions. In this paper I review progress in our capacity to describe register and context of situation and ask whether the tension between discrete and continuous models of register might hinder such progress. I then consider Hasan's (1983, 2013) contextually-open networked model of message semantics, arguing that in conjunction with context networks it has potential to map register variation but still needs to be tested across a large and varied set of domains. Examples from healthcare interaction ground the discussion.

This paper explores one aspect of the operationalisation of a patient-centred ideology of care by examining an oncologist's answers to questions asked by her patient and his companion during a palliative oncology consultation and comparing her answers to the markedly different answers of another oncologist. Halliday's concept of register and Hasan's semantic networks are used to examine the oncologists' answers. Patients' questions create the semiotic environment for clinicians to provide the information patients need for informed decision-making - an important aspect of patient-centredness. The answers clinicians provide construe their position towards this ideology of care. Findings suggest that one way patient-centredness can be operationalised, at the level of semantics, is through providing elaborated answers that explicitly display the reasoning employed by the oncologist.

From early in its development Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has drawn on and contributed to the study of medical discourse (e.g. Halliday et al. 2007) and it was in the context of language and medicine in the 1970s that J. R. Martin first developed his work on discourse semantics (Martin 2014). Since then there has been a steady stream of theses and articles using SFL concepts and techniques to study the language of medicine. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, this work has never been brought together into a monograph, special issue, or edited collection, and research in this area has not yet gained the profile of a recognized specialism within SFL in the way that fields of application such as education or child language development have done. An important consideration here is that research on medical discourse has lacked the coordination of other major applications of SFL, which has affected the amount of work done, the degree to which initial projects are followed up, and the impact of such work and its visibility.

This essay looks at the paradigm shift underway in human relations with artefacts from an animal studies perspective. As the Internet of Things (IoT) produces objects that are smart, sensate and agentive, how does this impact the continuing struggle for recognition of these same qualities in nonhuman animals? As humans acquire new digital companions in the form of therapeutic robots, what happens to perceptions of other ‘companion species’? Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous in IoT discourse as researchers draw on animal metaphors, models and analogies to think through the social and ethical implications of these new technologies. Focusing on representative texts by Sherry Turkle and Julian Bleecker that offer two contrasting positions on the value of these technologies, we show how regardless of the position taken, the use made of nonhuman animals in this emergent field strengthens assumptions that are harmful to animals and that animal studies researchers have fought hard to end. Our title pays homage to an essay in literary feminism by Mary Jacobus entitled ‘Is There a Woman in this Text?’ that famously drew attention to the way women are sacrificed in philosophical exchanges between men. This essay seeks to do something similar for nonhuman animals in highlighting the ways they risk becoming an unrecognised casualty of discourse surrounding smart objects and robots.

Oncological care is going through a transformation from a practice in which the patient is the object of the medical practitioner's implementation of anti-tumour therapies to a multifaceted practice where the patient is an active participant in a dialogic relationship with a medical practitioner. The oncologist's role is far from simple. Surbone, Zwitter, Rajer and Stiefel (2012) suggest diagnostics, treatment and communication as the three pillars of oncology. Cherny and Catane (2011) add palliation to this list. The development of oncology practice management, psychooncology and palliative oncology as interdisciplinary fields of study and the introduction of palliative medicine into oncological care show the complexity and the diversity of the competing demands on the oncologist. This cultural shift entails a diversification in the range of business considered as part of the purview of the oncologist.

Migrants, ethnic minorities and people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities are often more vulnerable to natural disasters due to cultural barriers and limited proficiency in the dominant language, which sometimes undermine their ability to access, interpret and respond to warnings. Technology can assist in engendering culturally and linguistically appropriate communication with CALD communities if key challenges are identified. This study contributes by reviewing relevant literature with the aim of ascertaining the most pressing challenges requiring technological interventions. Three broad issues (i.e., trust, message tailoring, and message translation) are identified and discussed, and potential solutions for addressing these issues are recommended.

The term register has had considerable currency within and beyond systemic functional linguistics (SFL) for more than fifty years. But this currency masks a persistent conflation of disparate views, including views about the location and centrality of register in a functional theory of language, and views about the kinds of analytic methods that can best characterise register and 'capture' registerial variation. As a result of its position within the overall 'architecture' of SFL as a theory of language, the concept of register has been topicalised or implicated in most of the theory's development since the 1960s. Yet although the term register is still in frequent use, it has recently been argued that register classification itself is now 'in limbo' within SFL (Hasan 2014).

In this chapter we argue for a reframing of the essential character of surgery as a site of transaction between the realm of matter and the realm of meaning. A very prevalent view of surgery to-date has been to see it as a confrontation between sick tissue in a patient and technical skill in their surgeon - a confrontation played out almost entirely in the world of 'matter'. Under this view, issues of meaning are given a secondary and supporting role, arising in the discussion of how surgical skills are best taught, or of how to avoid 'communication breakdown' that might lead to surgical error. But generally issues of meaning are absent from discussions of what constitutes surgery proper, running smoothly. Recently, some scholarly attention has included a closer focus on meaning - for instance, emphasising how communication in surgery is always situated (Lingard 2011), showing how 'material' surgical activities themselves are always jointly accomplished through interaction (Bezemer et al. 2011), and demonstrating how such interaction integrates talk, touch, gesture and other semiotic modes (Moore, Butt and Cartmill 2010, Moore this volume, Bezemer et al. 2011). In our opinion, however, there is value in a more substantial reframing of surgery and its professional, institutional and historical context. What our alternative view offers is a model of surgical practice as an evolved, and therefore robust and adaptive, system where meaning is not outside the system but always in play; an inherent part of the system. Importantly, the robustness and symbolic complexity of such evolved systems contrasts with the relative simplicity and inflexibility of designed systems. This is partly because the former involve not only causal relations but relations of realization (which are explained below). The model has practical payoffs of some significance, such as helping to understand why highly standardized interventions that pertain only to one specific surgical context are often

Models for describing how body alignment contributes to the meaning-making of human social contexts have tended to yield elaborate but instance-bound 'thick descriptions'. While this allows for very rich accounts of particular cases, these approaches do not lend themselves to systematic empirical comparison, for instance of how participants in a highly charged endeavour like surgery align their bodies to each other in ways that may construe different meanings under different conditions - e.g., different types of surgery, different phases of surgery, different levels of fatigue, engagement or personal involvement in the procedure at hand, when taking different agentive roles, when working with different teams, or just the effects of working on different days. The need for such empirical analyses in areas like surgery is increasing as we find more and more evidence that a team's sense of engagement is crucial to its capacity to avert and reduce errors (Wilson et al. 2005; Healey et al. 2006; Bezemer et al. 2011; Weldon et al. 2013). Recently, systemically oriented accounts have been emerging which hold promise for dealing with these kinds of empirical analyses. In particular, Martinec (2001) has offered a framework for analyzing the means of construction and expression of interpersonal relations through action, drawing on Hall's (1959, 1966) classic analysis of spatial distance between bodies, and incorporating his own analysis of reciprocal body angle. Yet what is missing from the leading models of body alignment is a systematic account of how the same distance and orientation selections may have quite different meanings even in subtly different contexts; that is, there is no systematic account of the dynamic role of context in the meanings attributed to movement and position. In this chapter, I examine what we can gain by emphasising the stratal rapport between context, semantics and expression choices in multimodal analyses, starting with the issue of how body alig