Offers a description of the Old English dialect on systemic functional principles. This book covers structures and functions within nominal, verbal and adverbial groups; relationships among clauses; embedding; and cohesion.

This book applies the techniques of systemic functional grammar to the description of the Old English historical dialect, 650-1150 CE. Systemic functional grammar is an approach to the description of language which distinguishes three separate functions in communication: language as representation, language as attitude, and language as the construction of text. Most applications of systemic functional theory have concentrated on modern English. This book is the first comprehensive description of the Old English dialect on systemic functional principles. The book begins with an outline of...

This book explores some of the developments in Stylistics since its pioneer, Roman Jakobson, identified the patterning of the message as the poetic function. It analyses in turn Golding's Pincher Martin, Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Housman's A Shropshire Lad, Elizabeth Jennings' poem 'One Flesh', Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and a range of poems by John Donne. The analyses show how Jakobson's emphasis on the message gives way to emphasis on the code or on undermining the code (in the Golding and Donne chapters), on the context...

Focuses on how we use language to make meaning of the world, on how the systems and structures of the ideational function of language represent the realisation of our experiences of the world around us. This title addresses issues such as layers of meaning through the transitivity system, and agency and subjectivity.

This volume brings together fourteen papers which explore the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, morphological and syntactic factors involved in English morphosyntactic alternations. The contributors to this volume deal with different types of diathesis alternations -broadly defined by Levin (English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation, 1993) as alternations in the expressions of arguments, sometimes accompanied by changes of meaning -i.e. transitivity alternations (such as the causative/inchoative alternation and the conative alternation), alternations involving arguments...

Contemporary children's picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children's earliest literature. Reading Visual Narratives uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual...

This long-awaited volume presents thirteen original contributions by some of the leading scholars in Systemic Phonology. The chapters present both theoretical and applied studies with analyses of wide-ranging texts including news readings, children's stories, literary classics, classroom discourse, and sung texts. The volume also includes some theoretical contributions, such as an explication of the generative model of intonation and punctuation of the Cardiff School of SFL. The last chapter in the volume is an interactive chapter where readers can listen to, read, and obtain a first-hand...

The notion of Choice provides a constant underlying theme to work in Systemic Functional Linguistics, whether this is concerned with in-depth description of the system of lexicogrammatical options available within specific languages or with the analysis of the semiotic and/or social implications of the choices taken within specific texts. Yet to date little has been published exploring the applicability of choice across various contexts. This book addresses this gap in the literature by presenting a selection of writings from internationally renowned authors that develop the analytical...

Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age explores the insights that SFL offers to help us understand and explain the new meanings afforded through digital channels and how they are shaped by and shape their digital contexts.