Day 4 of ISFC40

Last updated:2013-07-19

The fourth day of the Congress began with a plenary speech by Professor Geoff Thompson entitled “Seeing double: complementarities of perspective on interpersonal grammatical metaphor”. Professor Thompson first highlighted the commonalities and differences across different areas within interpersonal grammatical metaphor. He explored the ways in which this kind of metaphor impacts on the analysis not only of interpersonal meaning but also of experiential and textual meanings in texts across a range of registers. Professor Thompson also pointed out that users of the language are able to exploit and respond to both the experientialized wording and the interpersonal meaning simultaneously.

                                                     Professor Geoff Thompson                                            Professor Randy La Rolla

The plenary speech delivered by Professor Randy La Rolla was entitled “Why Systemic Functional Grammar isn’t just for those working in SFG”. He talked about aspects of Halliday’s approach to communication. Professor Randy La Rolla pointed out aspects of Halliday’s approach that have influenced other approaches, and aspects that relate to concepts in other approaches.

Professor Robin Fawcett’s plenary speech “Forty years back, forty years forward: a brief history of the major concepts and the social structures of Systemic Functional Linguistics, with a look ahead of the future” evaluated the major conceptual developments in SFL and the social structures that have been developed to maintain and nourish the theory. He pointed out that it is important to establish and maintain all these types of infrastructure for the success of a theory. Professor Fawcett hoped that scholars will achieve more successes in establishing SFL as a leading theory in the scientific study of language.


Four workshops were held today: (1) Using Corpus Tools to Explore Intonation in Terms of the Eggins and Slade’s MOVE Network (Professor William Greaves and Meena Debashish), (2) Contexts and Registers through Network Representations: the Textures of Text and of Social Experience (Professor David Butt and Alison Moore), (3) Making Sense of Law: Broadening Pathways through Multidimensional Curriculum Design and Practice (Professor Peter Mickan and Ingrid Winter), and (4) Knowledge Representation Methods of SFG in Natural Language Processing (Li Xuening and Professor Zhang Delu). Topics of parallel sessions include multimodality, genre-based pedagogy, code-switching, e-discourse, grammatical metaphor, context and intonation.



Written by: Wen Suijun
Photographer: Wang Shaoli