Webster and Thompson taught the 4th day workshop of ISFC40 Pre-Congress Institute

Last updated:2013-07-11

The 4^th day workshop of the ISFC40 Pre-Congress Institute was taught by Professor Jonathan Webster from the City University of Hong Kong and Professor Geoff Thompson from University of Liverpool, UK. Professor Webster demonstrated how Systemic Functional Linguistics and other discourse related theories (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory) step into and unveil the meaning of a text. He introduced 7 steps to conduct systemic functional discourse analysis, and showed how the patterning of relations between functionally significant text spans at both clause level and above plays a significant role in contributing to the reader’s response to the text.


In Geoff Thompson’s session, he emphasized the linguistic interaction and the enactment of social relationships by means of language from the interpersonal perspective. He explored the patterns of interpersonal choices across texts and their contribution to text, texture, architecture as well as interaction. The perspectives adopted by the two scholars are highly complementary, and participants got hands-on experience of functional discourse analysis in the workshop.


Written by: Kim Wong, Yan Xiaoqing, Qiu Qing
Photographer: Wang Shaoli