[Lecture] Whatever the grammar will allow, 23 May

Last updated:2016-05-17

Topic: Whatever the grammar will allow
Speaker: Professor Jonathan Webster (City University of Hong Kong)

Time: 16:15 - 17:45, Monday, May 23, 2016
Venue: Room 210, School of Foreign Languages Building
Organizer: School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University

Abstract: M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory (SFL) describes language as a resource for making meaning. We make meaning to construe the phenomena of experience; to enact social relationships; and to create discourse. What enables this meaning-making potential in language is the grammar, which is characterized by both functional diversity and a stratal organization. The richness of language derives from our ability to re-construe experience through exploiting the adjacent-possible across the stratal divide between meaning and wording, otherwise referred to as grammatical metaphor, combined with our use of linguistic patterning to construct cohesive and coherent texts.