Abstracts

PAPERS

David Banks

The Position of Ideology in an SFL Model

The SFL model has traditionally been presented as a series of levels one within the other in Russian doll style. This is usually represented visually as concentric circles or triangles. The outer layer of this model is that of Ideology, within which are found those of Context (culture and/or situation). Comparison of appropriate texts suggests that the relationship of Ideology to the rest of the model may be somewhat different. Texts may have virtually the same Context of situation in terms of Field, Tenor, and Mode, but differ in both their Ideologies and in their semantic and lexicogrammatical features. Comparison of Newton's Opticks and Huygens' Traité de la lumière provides one such example. Political tracts (professions de foi) for French regional elections provide another. This means that it is necessary to reconsider the place of Ideology in the systemic model, including the possibility that it affects the semantic and lexicogrammatical levels independently of the level of context.

María Barrio

Developing the written style features of Spanish pre-university EFL students’ texts:
 experiential meaning-making resources and choices

This paper is part of a wider investigation of the oral style features usually found in Spanish pre-university EFL students’ written texts. Although research on spoken and written language reveals that written style is determined by a combination of choices across metafunctions (cf. Barrio 2004; Biber 1988), this paper focuses specifically on the experiential function and its contribution to the creation of prototypical written style through the achievement of high density of information in texts. Firstly, based on previous research and theoretical grounds (e.g. Biber 1988; Halliday 1989; Martin 1992; Matthiessen 2001), the paper describes the linguistic resources and choices that contribute to write a text with a high density of information. Secondly, it proposes a measurement instrument for text analysis which combines the writers’ linguistic choices in relation to the density of information of the text. Thirdly, applying the measurement tool to real corpus analysis, the paper presents the results of an experimental research with Spanish pre-university EFL students, whose texts display more appropriate selections of experiential meaning-making choices for the achievement of higher density of information in the texts after they received a specific pedagogical treatment.

References
Barrio Luis, María. 2004. Experimental study of textual development in Spanish students of English as a Foreign Language in “segundo de bachillerato”: Features of written register in compositions of argumentative genre. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. English Department. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1989. Spoken and Written Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martin, J. R. 1992. English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Matthiessen, M. I. M. C. 2001. “Combining clauses into clause complexes: A multi-faceted view”. J. Bybee and M. Nooman (eds.). Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 235-319.

Marta Carretero & Asunción Villamil Touriño

Lexical meaning and transitivity: a contrastive study of the REMEMBERING lexical system in English and Spanish

The aim of this presentation is to analyze the verbs belonging to the ‘remembering-forgetting’ lexical system in English and Spanish, covering the levels of lexis and transitivity. Concerning lexis, we will propose two networks, one for each language, in which the verbs will be classified according to a number of semantic features. It will turn out that, even though we all know that psychologically there is a gradation between vivid memory and total lack of memory, most lexical verbs refer straightforwardly to the mental processes of remembering or forgetting, not to intermediate states, which are conveyed by means of other clausal constituents. Concerning transitivity, we will analyze the different patterns allowed by each verb in the two languages, putting emphasis on the different kinds of participants which may fulfil each role (eg. the cases in which the Phenomenon may be either a concrete entity or a situation, or only one of these). After presenting these analyses, we will approach the relation between the levels of lexis and transitivity, by pointing out possible links between lexical and grammatical choices. Finally, we will discuss some implications for the teaching of these types of verbs to Spanish learners of English and vice versa. 

References
Cruse, D. A. (1986).Lexical semantics. Cambridge, England: University Press.
Palmer, F.R. (1981) Semantics: A New Outline. (2nd edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen (1999) Construing experience through meaning : a language-based approach to cognition, London, New York: Cassell, 1999.
Halliday, M.A.K. (2004)  An introduction to functional grammar. (Third edition, revised by Christian Matthiessen.)London: Edward Arnold.
Nida, E. (1975) Componential Analysis of Meaning. The Hague: Mouton.
Thibault, P.J. (2001). The delicate grammar of remembering and forgetting. Paper presented at the Second Workshop of the  Systemic Functional Research Community on Interpersonal and Ideational Grammar. Catholic University of Leuven. 
Tucker, G. (2001). Interpreting collocation: An exploration of collocational patterning in the modelling of cognitive process clauses.  Paper presented at the Second Workshop of the Systemic Functional Research Community on Interpersonal and Ideational Grammar. Catholic University of Leuven.

Martin Edwardes

The Ideational Metafunction and Nonhuman Signalling

The difference between human language and nonhuman signalling is qualitative as well as quantitative: language is not just a more complex form of signalling, it has a social dimension that is missing from nonhuman signals. Yet there remains, behind all signalling, a simple semiotic structure that is invariant: a sender produces a message for a receiver about a referent. This is the model that Halliday has expanded to express the metafunctional relationships between speaker and listener in linguistic discourse.
However, if all signalling is based upon the same principles, it should be possible to identify the metafunctions of language that are likely to be continuous with nonhuman signalling and those that are not. This paper examines the four metafunctions, and shows how the interpersonal and textual metafunctions do not have clear analogues in nonhuman signalling, while the ideational metafunctions do. 
By studying the signalling strategies used by other animals, particularly other primates, this paper will show that the signalling process itself creates the need for the ideational metafunctions. It will examine the experiential and logical aspects of nonhuman signals, and demonstrate an important continuity between human and nonhuman signalling. Rather than seeing language as an isolate with no predecessors, it will place language back into the spectrum of general signalling.

Jiska Marita Engelbert

Alternative manifestations of the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions in Labour’s post-1997 election broadcasts: A further investigation of multimodal affordances

Televised election broadcasts in the 1997 UK Labour Party campaign marked a radical change in terms of a further investigation of the affordances of multimodal communication; although multimodal communication had already been a common feature in pre-1997 broadcasts, configurations of the discourse type were usually embedded in the so-called ‘talking-head’ format. Labour’s post-1997 election broadcasts reflect the social semiotics of contemporary signifying practices; meaning-making potentials are no longer restricted to the verbal domain. In trying to account for this shift in terms of a further investigation of multimodal affordances, this paper argues that this investigation is reflected in an alternative manifestation of the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. 
This manifestation can be characterised as a process of backgrounding of the source; the role of the anchoring as a strategy of textual closure - allowing for relational sense-making - is no longer realized by the direct visualisation of the source of communication, but is to be inferred out of the nature of the way in which different modes interact with each other and construct a complex multimodal interplay. Backgrounding also allows for a more direct form of relational sense-making. Not only can ‘desired realities’ be represented through the interplay between verbal, visual and auditory modes of communication, the same resources allow for ‘undesired realities’ to independently represent themselves. Contesting realities are thus still able to appear within one and the same message, but the overarching framework of group-specific values and beliefs is less visible.

John Flowerdew

Signalling nouns and their relation to the Hallidayan metafunctions

Signalling nouns are nouns which have cohesive properties across and within clauses.  (Flowerdew, 2003a, 2003b). A signalling noun is potentially any abstract noun the meaning of which can only be made specific by reference to its context. Examples of signalling nouns are attitude, assistance, difficulty, endurance, process, reason, result etc.  The following is an example of a signalling noun functioning in an inter-clausal manner:

Electricity is used to drive the motor of an electric train, but inevitably some of the energy is lost as heat.  This unavoidable fact is of great importance in biology.

While the next example has a signalling noun functioning intra-clausally:

Transpiration is the inevitable result of the necessity for the inside of the leaf to be open to the atmosphere.

In both cases the full meaning of the noun has to be sought out in the cotext, either across clauses or within the clause. Based on a large corpus, this paper will demonstrate how the meaning potential of these nouns operates across the three meta-functions - ideational, interpersonal and textual - with special emphasis on the ideational.

Flowerdew, J. (2003a) Register specificity of signalling nouns in discourse.  In C. Meyer and P. Leistyna (Eds.) Corpus analysis: Language structure and language use.  Amsterdam: Rodopi Publishers. pp. 35-46. 2003.
Flowerdew, J. (2003b) Signalling nouns in discourse.  English for Specific Purposes Journal. 22(4):329-346

Lynne Flowerdew

Working from the APPRAISAL system to experiential meanings in analyzing apprentice and professional writing

This paper describes how the Solution element of the Problem-Solution pattern (Hoey 1983, 2001) in a 250,000-word corpus of recommendation-based reports and a comparable corpus of apprentice reports written by third-year undergraduates, was analysed, working from the APPRAISAL system on the interpersonal level (Martin 2000, 2003; White 2001). The first part of this paper will describe how the Attitude subtype of APPRAISAL was used as a starting point for categorizing keywords signaling the Solution element into Inscribed lexis (lexis that is explicitly evaluative) and Evoking lexis (items which evoke some kind of evaluative response in the reader). The second part of the paper will discuss how differences between the Inscribed and Evoking lexis in the apprentice and professional corpus affected choices realising the experiential function, specifically in the domain of material and relational processes.

Maria Freddi

Representing Scientific Knowledge: an analysis of Darwin’s prose

The proposed paper aims to reassess the issue of the accessibility of techno-scientific discourse to the general reader by reconsidering a scientific classic such as The Origin of Species by C. Darwin. 
Drawing from Halliday’s work on scientific language, in general (republished as vol. 5 of the “Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday” series, The Language of Science) and, in particular, from his famous 1993 analysis of the two closing paragraphs of The Origin, the study addresses the following two research questions:

To what extent does scientific jargon gain the lay-reader access to scientific meanings? 
How does the flow of argument, that is, the chains of reasoning, characterise the scientific semiosis as it is construed in The Origin?

Such questions are dealt with by Halliday in terms of the relationship between the ideational, i.e. the lexical choices construing technical taxonomies, and the logical,  i.e. the progression of the line of argument. The present study takes them up in an attempt to analyse those characteristics of Darwin’s style that make his prose accessible, that is, readable, to show that in such “train of reasoning through immense wealth of evidence” as The Origin has been defined (J.W. Burrow, editor of the Penguin edition), some features are peculiar to the author’s style, while others are common to scientific treatises in general.

Peter H. Fries 

Exploring the textual metafunction in problem-solution text segments

Fries 2004 proposed a functional approach to the exploration of the textual  metafunction, in which it is suggested that theoretical constructs can be validated by exploring their uses in texts or text segments about which we know a great deal before we encounter them.  One such class of text segments consists  of those text segments that express meanings that entail matching different portions of the text segment. Problem-solution texts offer one interesting  example of a text type that entails such matching.  Clearly, a text which describes  a problem and then describes a solution cannot randomly combine any problem  with any solution.  The solution must be seen to solve that particular problem. 
 Thus, examining the portion of the text which describes the problem should provide us with information to predict which sorts of information are likely to be emphasized in the solution.  This paper will report the results of an examination of the uses of the textual metafunction in several problem-solution texts.

Fries, Peter H. 2004.   The textual metafunction as a site for a discussion of the goals of linguistics and techniques of linguistic analysis.  Plenary paper presented to the thirty-first International Systemic Functional Congress,  August 30, 2004, Kyoto, Japan.

Yanjie Gao (Xiían Jiaotong University, China) & Mohsen Ghadessy (Zhongshan University, China)

Processes and Participants in Parallel Texts:
Martin Luther King’s speech in English and Chinese

Translation as a human activity has been with us since people from different cultures came into contact with one another. Translation as an academic discipline, however, has a much shorter time span. One area of study has been to compare and contrast source texts and target texts (parallel texts) in order to establish similarities and differences, i.e. translation equivalence. The purpose of this study is to consider a famous speech by Martin Luther King ‘I Have a Dream’ (1963) and its translation into Chinese in order to establish translation equivalence in relation to the Transitivity System by using Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Approach to the analysis of language. Processes and participants in the source text (English) are compared and contrasted with those in the target language (Chinese). It is concluded that SFG provides some powerful tools in the analysis of parallel texts for both translation students and professional translators in the field.

Sheena Gardner & Hilary Nesi

Ideational Meaning in a Corpus of Student Academic Writing

This paper explores two approaches to the comparison of ideational meaning across academic fields.  We will compare MacDonald’s classification of Sentence Subjects into seven sub-classes of Phenomenal and Epistemic (in her study of expert academic writing in Psychology, History and Literature) with Gosden’s model of Subject Role Domains (from his study of research articles from Physics, Chemistry and Biology with IMRD [Introduction – Methods – Results – Discussion] structures). We will consider the potential value of these approaches to our ESRC funded corpus development project, which aims to characterise genres of assessed writing produced by students in different disciplines and at different stages of university study.  In particular, the models will be evaluated for robustness of insights into disciplinary groupings or differences, and the relative merits of conducting analyses of Participants that go beyond Subject roles.

Angela Alameda Hernández

SFL and CDA: The transitivity system in the study of the discursive construction of national identity
 (Case study: Gibraltar)

Research in the last decades has illustrated the breadth of utility of applying the categories of systemic-functional linguistics in a broad range of areas. In this line, the present paper analyses SFL’s contributions to discourse studies.
My research adheres to the scholarly paradigm known as critical discourse analysis (CDA). It is based on the view that language, as social practice, is a central element in social life and, hence, it analyses discourse in relation to the social context in which it occurs. CDA is mainly aimed at making certain social situations more transparent based on linguistic evidence. Hence, a functional view of language is particularly useful.
This paper, part of a wider research on the discursive construction of the Gibraltarian identity, focuses on the representation of the Gibraltar issue as drawn from the linguistic analysis of the transitivity system in a body of texts taken from the printed media. Gibraltar is a community in which political conflicts are common but has quite frequently been ignored in the academic world, despite its great interest and uniqueness.
Hence, the application of SFL categories in this critical analysis can shed light on a controversial situation: the Gibraltarian community and its socio-political status. 

Caldas-Coulthard, M.R and M. Coulthard (eds) (1996). Texts and Practices: Readings in CDA. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, N (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis: the Critical Study of Language. London: Longman.
Fairclough, N (1995b). Media Discourse. London: Arnold.
Fowler, R., Kress, G., Hodge, R. and T. Trew (1979). Language and Control. London: Routledge.
Kellermann, A (2001). A New, New English. Language, Politics and Identity in Gibraltar. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Schriften zur Sprache und Kultur.
Kramer, J (1986). English and Spanish in Gibraltar. Hamburg: Buske.
Martin, J.R. (2000). “Close reading: functional linguistics as a tool for critical discourse analysis”. In Unsworth, L. (ed). Researching Language in Schools and Communities. Functional Linguistic Perspectives. London: Cassell.
Morris, D and R Haigh (eds) (1992). Britain, Spain and Gibraltar 1945-1990. The Eternal Triangle. London: Routledge.
Oktar, L (2001). “The ideological organization of representational processes in the presentation of us and them”. Discourse and Society 12 (3): 313-346.
Van Dijk, T (1993). “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis”. Discourse and Society 4 (2): 249-289.
Wodak, R and M Meyer (2001). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage Publications.
Wodak, R et al. (1999). The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Birgit Huemer

Analyzing digital art: modelling experience through multiple modes

“Listening Post” is a multimedia art installation that culls English text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are ordered by lexical phrases or key words, read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens. These constructed texts are read by the voice synthesizer in two different ways: First, by a single voice that realizes all text fragments within either mental or relational processes (I like…, I am…); Then, by simultaneously occurring multiple voices that realize text fragments within material clauses, producing a “polyphonic choir” of varying construals of experience. In this paper, I argue that these two different ‘readings’ and ‘visualizations’ of these text fragments realize a contrast and tension between individual, private space, isolation and mass, public space and communication. By using a multimodal approach (Kress, van Leuween; Lemke) to explore how different semiotic modes (e.g. language, image, sound and music) act in concert to model experience, I will show that the ideational metafunction plays a principal role in realizing an individual and mass voice in these texts.

Martin Kaltenbacher

Identification and other processes in web-sites of tourism

Concerning the analysis of intensive identifying processes Geoff Thompson (1996: 91) pointed out that "a Token/Value analysis can be particularly revealing in analysing cultural ideologies of what is being valued in the identification of certain tokens. Essentially the Value reveals what values the writer (and ultimately the culture that s/he is part of) uses to measure the Tokens that s/he deals with." The present paper looks at processes in Scottish, American and Austrian web-sites of tourism and takes a contrastive look at which meanings are highlighted in the different national tourist board web-sites. The paper shall start with a look at intensive identifying processes, which are followed by particularly marked Values containing some kind of Augmentation, as in "Salzburg is the first city in the world in which it is possible to book your complete stay in advance". In a second step the relative proportion of different types of processes and the prevailing choices of participants in tourist texts shall be investigated and related to aspects of national and cultural identity underlying these web-sites.

Li LI

The Grammar of Linguistic Awareness in English and Chinese: Meaning Layers of Transitivity

This paper explores the interactive reaction between the expected elements like the participants and the unexpected elements like the circumstantial roles, assuming that linguistic awareness is the essential variable that determines the behaviour of the expected elements as well as the unexpected ones in English and Chinese but with different orientations. From participants, we reveal features about the circumstantial role in the linguistic awareness that might control the behaviour of participants. Both the linguistic awareness and the circumstantial role condition the orientations of expected elements inwardly and from outside but within system. The significance of the research is three-fold: to provide a means in the prediction of unexpected elements through the meaning of the expected elements, to prepare the necessary condition of meaning output even in case of two different languages with the presumed control variable of  linguistic awareness as a parameter, to display the potential layout of the meaning layers of transitivity, while handling the varieties of linguistic awareness in different tongues, exposing more about meaning arrays in the interaction of transitivity proper and men’s mind.

María Martínez Lirola

A Critical Analysis Of The Image Of Immigrants In Multimodal Texts:
Exploring How The Ideational Function Is Created

In this presentation we will explore the main strategies used to make meaning in different multimodal texts related to immigration. The analysis will claim the different ways in which we can observe inappropriate meaning construction in articles related to immigrants. We will pay attention to the way in which each semiotic resource has evolved to be used with other semiotic resources, which has implications in the ideational function of language and in the way readers create meaning.
Our corpus of examples belongs to local newspapers in Alicante, one of the cities with more immigrants in Spain. We will explore the reasons why the journalist chooses some linguistic and visual forms instead of others and the influence of these forms in the creation of meaning. We will also pay attention to the way in which the field and the ideational function are created and the effect that they have on the readers of these articles. 
A visual grammar analysis will be used to investigate how readers are positioned. In this way we will point out some of the ways in which the ideational function links with the interpersonal and the textual functions.

Halliday, M.A.K & C.M.I.M Matthiessen (20043) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Hodder Arnold.
Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
Kress, G. & van Leeuven, T. (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge Press.
O’Halloran K.L. (ed.) (2004) Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Systemic Functional Perspectives. London: Continuum.
Reah, D. (2002) The Language of Newspapers. London: Routledge.

Alison Love

‘Demonstrate that you understand the difference':
ESL student transitivity choices in a short answer test in Sociology

Students’ ability to make meaning within a newly encountered discipline obviously includes their understanding of technical terms, both their meaning and the distinctions between them. This study explores the ways in which ESL students at the end of their first semester of Sociology responded to a question requiring them to ‘Make brief notes to demonstrate’ their ‘understanding of the difference’ between pairs of related technical Sociological concepts. Taking the answers on the pair ‘deviance and crime’, I shall examine first the transitivity choices made in the students’ definitions of the two terms, focusing on how distinctions between the terms were established in the Value of Relational processes. I shall then examine how a small sample of students, ranging through High, Middle and Low graded answers, chose to expand on the definitions to clarify their interpretation and application of the distinctions  between the two terms. Use of Elaboration, Extension and Enhancement of the definitions will be examined, applying these terms to relations between as well as within clause complexes. Attention will be paid to choices which appeared to attract higher grades.

Alison Love

Taking The Viewer Into The Field

The BBC television series ‘Earth Story’  sets out to answer questions about the formation of the Earth and the forces that change it over time. Thus it is concerned with introducing viewers to the ‘Field’ of Geology, one which can seem dry and inaccessible to non-initiates. However, a viewing of the series suggests that this difficulty has been overcome by attempts to draw the viewer into sharing the experience of being a geologist. Three aspects of this are striking: the emphasis on the need to ‘see’ in a particular way ‘in the field’, the sense of mystery and the need to interpret clues, and geologists’ emotional engagement with  their field of study. This presentation will examine: 

-      the verbal commentary of the series, particularly the transitivity choices,
-      the visual content, particularly the visual presentation of ‘geological field data’, and also on the cuts between locations in a sequence,
-      the part played by the musical soundtrack, especially in establishing intertextual links.

I shall suggest that the series uses the available multimodal resources not only to introduce viewers to geological meaning, but to the experience of geological meaning making.

Arianna Maiorani

‘Reloading’ movies into commercial reality: a multimodal analysis of representational structures in “The Matrix” trilogy promotional posters

In 1999, the first episode of The Matrix movie trilogy was released: it would mark the beginning of a new trend in science fiction movies and also in the perception of motion pictures as interactive social and commercial events. 
The Matrix movies were ‘born’ and released in the internet era, where everybody can actually connect to a virtual, and virtually alternative reality, and is potentially able to do and say things one could or would never be able to do in the real world. These movies, with their use of the internet terminology and devices, addressed in particular the very large public of internet users; for the first time, they brought this virtual world and virtual community on the big screen and turned things upside down: in the first movie, in fact, we find out that what at the beginning seems to be the present-day real world is actually a program where people unconsciously live a virtual life while functioning as energy providers for the artificial intelligences who created it.
Unlike what happens in other science fiction movie trilogies or saga, (i.e. Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Star Trek) The Matrix movies are set in a present (not future) ‘real’ world which is actually a ‘fiction of science’, rather than a science fiction version of a future reality. 
This paper will analyse an aspect of this trilogy promotional campaign (The Matrix, 1999; The Matrix Reloaded, 2003; The Matrix Revolutions, 2003) focussing on the way the interplay between textual and visual semiotics develops through a select corpus of posters. The method of analysis will be based both on the grammar of visual design developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), and on the Hallidayan model of analysis (1985; 1994). Analysis will particularly focus on representational structures (both narrative and conceptual), which, in terms of visual semiotics, realize what Halliday calls the ideational metafunction. Select posters have been divided into six different groups, according to the different typologies of their representational structures: analysis will try to show how these structures are used to create different kinds of promotional messages, which seem to vary for each of the three movies, and actually turn motion pictures into some sort of interactive social events, especially for an audience of ‘fans’ who are well aware of the internet ways and means.

Ana Martín, María Barrio, Laura Hidalgo, Susana Murcia, Karina Vidal, Rachel Whittaker

The expression of experiential meaning in EFL students’ texts:
an analysis of secondary school recounts

This paper is part of a larger project in composition writing in English conducted in three Spanish Secondary Schools with pre-university students (Council of Education, Autonomous Region of  Madrid 06/0020/2001;  Ministry of Education, National Government: HUM2004-06228). A corpus of 300 compositions written in response to three tasks eliciting three different genres (recount, exposition and report) were collected in five classes. The learning context is that of English as a foreign language, which our subjects take as an obligatory subject. The English language, then, is learnt for communicative purposes, and is not used as a vehicle for learning the disciplines. 
We have already studied textual features of the genres and grammatical features of registers in a sample from the corpus, and are now in the process of analysing field in the students’ texts.
In this paper we focus on the recount, looking at how experiential meaning is realised. We present the tool we have designed for this purpose, which was tested on a pilot sample of texts from the different schools at different levels of proficiency,  and the results of the analysis of the complete corpus.

Merja de Mattos-Parreira

Meaning-making in the Finnish epic Kalevala: on transitivity

The Finnish epic poem Kalevala (1849) is a written transcription leaning mainly on a collection of ancient narrative songs of the Finnish people. This means that when trying to translate the written Kalevala into another language, the relationship between the content-text and the organization of the texture – that is, the way the particular linguistic realizations fit the goings-on as a whole – shifts from a singer’s memory‑based creative process in front of a live audience to a translator’s reaction in the presence of a written product.
The archaic, song‑like Finnish language behind the written Kalevala is widely acknowledged for its extremely iconic features, a quality that works at all levels of the main ranks of linguistic realizations, whether phonetic, lexical, syntactic or textual. It is my thesis that although this collection of traditional folk songs put into written form only some 150 years ago is often referentially incomprehensible to a contemporary literate urban Finnish reader, it is nevertheless somehow understandable to him (see Note 1). In other words, the general idea of the text is usually captured, even though a present-day Finn may not be able to tell the precise meanings of the words, or to distinguish words referring to actions (processes) from those referring to qualities or states (participants or circumstances). In order to illustrate my viewpoint, I am going to discuss and compare some of the choices made by the translators of the four complete English-language versions of the Kalevala, as far as the transitivity of the source-text is concerned.

Note 1: It is evident that arbitrariness in the case of the Kalevala is also challenged by an extreme social motivation, since this text is omnipresent in Finnish daily culture (i.e., people’s names, toponymies, contemporary cultural products, names of enterprises, food items, the list goes on). Thus the iconicity on the level of language is also naturalized through the processes of everyday social semiotics (see for instance Halliday’s Language as social semiotic, 1978, passim).

Anne McCabe & Christopher Gallagher

Approximating Academic Register: The Function of the Nominal Group

M.A.K. Halliday has suggested that a “significant feature of written language is the way its ideational meanings are organized” and “the written language is organized around the nominal group” (Halliday, 1996). In academic writing, complex and/or dense nominal groups tend to predominate; however, novice writers often use simpler nominal groups, along with combinations of clause complexes, a feature more commonly found in informal (often spoken) language.
This paper provides the results of a comprehensive analysis of developing and advanced student writing (from both first and second language writers) at the undergraduate level, focusing on nominal groups. A more quantitative part of the analysis provides counts as to the number of words used in all the nominal groups in the texts. A more qualitative analysis looks at the role of each nominal group in the transitivity of the clause (if they are direct or indirect participants, their participant roles, etc.), and their role in the textual metafunction, i.e. whether they are thematic or not. The results from each of the student groups are compared in order to provide a sense of how writers develop a more “academic” use of the nominal group. Thus, activities which focus developing writers on this aspect of written text can help them approximate a more academic register, while also helping them to decode academic texts.

Sky McLaughlin

Making Palestine Mean: 
West Bank children’s writings viewed from a linguistic perspective

This paper, situated within a Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, stems from research conducted with children in the West Bank city of Ramallah during the first two years of the second Palestinian uprising for independence, or Intifada. The aim of the research was to uncover how these children make sense of their experiences living both under occupation and through the Intifada. The paper will explore how the children draw on the resources of the system of transitivity, through their choices of processes and allocation of grammatical roles to textual participants, to reflect and construct their experiences of the world. Particular attention will be paid to attributive and identifying relational processes in an attempt to discover more about how the children, in a state of statelessness, define themselves, define what it means to be Palestinian, and identify the types of entities which carry most value, or meaning, for the community.

Ann Montemayor-Borsinger

Meaning making in research writing:
Instantial and Conventional wordings in thematic position

The present study establishes the notions of Instantial and Conventional wordings and applies them to a study of thematic elements in research writing. Instantial wordings are identified as multifunctional expressions especially formulated to create new combinations of meanings. These expressions may be used for issues that are concerned with interpretation or controversy, and often involve additional strands of interpersonal meanings. In contrast, Conventional wordings are identified as well established expressions that are commonly used in a given field of research.
The notions of Instantial and Conventional wordings are applied to the analysis of a corpus of physics papers published in international journals. An interesting finding is the different use of these wordings with increased experience in publishing. The analysis shows that with time practised researchers develop their use of multifunctional Instantial wordings in Subject position, and of Conventional wordings with a strong logical flavour in pre-Subject position. These trends point towards an increased use of unmarked Theme for new, sometimes controversial, Instantial meanings that become the ‘nub of the argument’, and of marked Theme for Conventional meanings that scaffold optimum text flow.

N.A.J. Moore

Crossing the Metafunctions: Bridging inference and cohesion

The concept of bridging has been widely employed in SFL and psycholinguistics when cohesive ties require an inference to be made. However, bridging has done little to explain the actual processes or relations involved in creating these ties. Following Martin’s ‘English Text’ (1992), semantic relations can be employed to demystify these processes. Cohesive ties often depend on lexical relations other than repetition and derivation. The resources of the Ideational metafunction, including the relations of Superordination, Composition, and Nuclear Relations, are thus exploited by the Textual metafunction, alongside or instead of unmarked cohesion devices. Using examples from seminal papers on ‘bridging’ and a corpus of technical text, this paper reveals a more effective approach based on ideational resources to defining the relations that contribute to cohesion, abandoning the need for bridging.

A.I. Moreno (Dr. in English Studies, University of León) & L. Suárez-Tejerina

Meaning Interaction in the Expression of Evaluation in Academic Book Reviews

The number of studies on the concept and expression of evaluation has increased lately. However, an important question still remains to be clarified: does evaluation belong within the ideational or the interpersonal functions of language (cf. Halliday, 1985b)? The present study aims at elucidating this question by looking at the expression of evaluation in book reviews. To do so, it analyses 20 academic literature book reviews in English. The study first distinguishes between ideational material, which develops propositional content, and metadiscourse, which does not add propositional meaning (cf. Vande Kopple, 1985). Metadiscourse includes interpersonal and textual metadiscourse. Most scholars situate evaluation on the interpersonal plane (Thompson & Hunston, 2000). Thus, the term evaluation is very much associated to the concept of metadiscourse in its interpersonal function (cf. Vande Kopple, 1985). Drawing on Pragmatics and Relevance Theory (cf. Grice, 1975; Blakemore, 1992), the present paper discusses how evaluation is not only expressed at the interpersonal level of metadiscourse but evaluative meaning is also derived from the ideational plane of language. Having shown how readers infer the pragmatic role of a given utterance as an act of evaluation, the paper will show how mediscourse interacts with the meaning derived from propositional content. 

References
Blakemore, D. (1992). Understanding Utterances. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.
Grice, H.P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41-58. New York: Academic.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985b). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Thompson, G. & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: an introduction. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in Text, pp. 1-27. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vande Kopple, W.J. (1985). Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication, 36: 82-93.

Peter Muntigl

Ideational or Interpersonal First?
Which Metafunction is Responsible for Facilitating Change in Psychotherapy?

Painter (2003, 2004) has argued that in child language development the interpersonal metafunction tends to drive forward the language learner’s meaning potential. A comparable view on the importance of interpersonal meanings may be found in Bernstein (1990) on pedagogic discourses, in which regulation provides a frame for instruction. However, if we turn our attention to ‘adult’ learning in a psychotherapy context, a somewhat different picture of the role of the various metafunctions in language development may emerge. From an examination of 18 hours of audio-taped narrative therapy sessions, I argue that ideational resources play a key role in bringing about changes in the client’s potential to make meanings in problem contexts. The client change process is usually set off by therapist reformulations of client problems. Formulating the problem ‘in different words’ allows clients to reconstrue problem events. And it is through these reconstruals that clients are eventually able to ‘reauthor’ their lives and social relationships.

Sarah North

Texture, humour, and online chat

Linguistic analysis of online chat has tended to focus on its status as spoken or written mode and on the conventions that have developed for interaction management online. Although these approaches help us to understand how participants adjust to a new medium, they do not explain the extraordinary capacity of online chat to enthral participants in extended conversations around what often appears to be trivial content. In this talk, I will use the concept of texture to explore the way that humour is used in online chat to build rapport and maintain conversational momentum. The main focus will be the role of cohesive elements in creating humour, but I will also consider the way that participants draw on context as well as co-text in interpreting implicit meaning. The data I use is taken from an asynchronous chat group, and I will briefly discuss the ethical issues underlying the decision to use this rather than synchronous chat.  Although my research looks at the more frivolous side of online chat, it may have implications for improving the quality of interaction in online discussions with a more serious purpose, particularly computer conferencing in educational settings.

Mick O'Donnell, Michele Zappavigna-Lee & Casey Whitelaw

A survey of process type classification over difficult cases

During 2004 we conducted an online study where we asked Systemicists to code 32 clauses in terms of their primary process type. An examination of the 72 responses in terms of inter-coder reliability was presented at the prior meeting. Here we wish to look at these responses in more depth, trying to explain the differences in response in terms of distinct underlying classification criteria. We use the responses, and the coder's comments on their responses, to hypothesise distinct coder positions which exist within our community. These positions take forms such as: look first to the conceptual situation (is verbal activity taking place?) or look first to the grammatical form (is projection possible?).

Issra Pramoolsook

Field and effects of genre transfer:
An investigation of changes in field from dissertation to research article in two disciplines

This paper investigates the effects of genre transfer from dissertation to research article in two scientific disciplines. The corpus consists of twelve authentic texts: three dissertations and three corresponding research articles in each of Biotechnology and Environmental Engineering, written by Thai scientists.  Following an overview of the general changes in field (e.g. the omission of much or all of the literature review in the published articles), there is a more detailed analysis of specific sections for changes in processes and participants.  For instance, comparison of the Environmental Engineering dissertation and research article abstracts shows they maintain a conventional IMRD structure (Introduction-Materials and Method-Results-Discussion) of research article through the transfer, and that there are more significant changes made in the choice and realization of participants than processes. Details of these changes which occur during genre transfer will be given, and explanations offered.  The long-term aim of this research is to develop implications for teaching professional writing to Thai academics. 

Kimberley Safford, Tracey Costley & Constant Leung

Presenting students’ experience: working out a sociocultural puzzle

In Britain, university applicants are required to present their experiences and identities in a brief written text as part of their application.  This personal statement is widely regarded as a key factor in gaining admission to university.  Students negotiate complex and often implicit sociocultural and linguistic expectations in writing this important text, with the knowledge that university tutors look for qualities in potential candidates beyond good A-level (matriculation) examination results. 
This writing task is very demanding for linguistic minority and non-traditional students who may be unfamiliar with the language and cultural expectations of the ‘personal statement’. In this study, we explore and analyse themes and structures in these statements written by students who use English as an Additional Language, and we discuss the challenges for these students in organising their written self-representation appropriately to express agency, experience and goals.

María Jesús Pinar Sanz

Multimodality and Political Discourse

The aim of this paper is to analyse the importance of visual communication as a way of producing multiple modes of expression. The ever-increasing presence of image in all forms of contemporary messages is leading to the loss of importance of the written medium. However, both images and writing appear together in different media and complement each other. This is true for political discourse, which is being greatly influenced by these changes. Political speeches and the different manifestations of political discourse in election campaigns have to be analysed in a multimodal way, taking into account the interrelationship between the written texts and the image. Different modes of expression appear in different media, depending on the specific needs of the speaker/writer. In this paper, I will focus my attention on the multimodal analysis of three posters published in the 2001 British election campaign, three posters published in 2005 on the way to the general election and cartoons on the same topics developed in the posters. The analysis will show similarities and differences in the use of images and text and the different ways in which the same message is transmitted.

Kress, G. (2003) Literacy In The New Media Age. Routledge.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005) Introducing Social Semiotics. Routledge.
Ventola, E. et. al. (2004) Perspectives on Multimodality. John Benjamins.

Claire Scott

“A mother’s choice”: The grammar of a survivor story from the South-East Asia tsunamis
In the first few days following the tsunamis in South-East Asia on December 26, 2004, press coverage in Australia was of two principal kinds: reporting on the mounting toll of death and destruction, and salvaging stories of survival. The story of Australian woman Jillian Searle and her family, who had been holidaying on Phuket, Thailand, attracted considerable attention. It was broadcast across the Australian news media and current affairs programmes, and also became the subject of discussion in a number of online forums, particularly those discussing parenting. This paper aims to describe the grammar of some of the discourse surrounding the story, in particular the terms in which Jillian Searle is given agency and appraised by speakers in the various contexts. Texts from newspaper reports and online discussions are analysed for experiential meanings and Appraisal. It is demonstrated that the different contexts in which the story is discussed impact on the way Jillian Searle is constructed in the grammar of experience and judged in terms of Social Esteem and Social Sanction. The grammar is shown to foreground her status as a rational human, and also as a mother. The implications for ideological positions on motherhood and rational choice are discussed.

Serge Sharoff

What's really bugging you? How to translate emotions between English and Russian

Novice translators are not always aware of the variety of expressions available for translating a set of similar concepts in specific contexts; instead they tend to rely on the set offered by dictionaries. However, words taken in their contexts can be translated in many more ways. For instance, the following example: the possibility for thousands of frustrated commuters to air their grievances, or the question in the title cannot be adequately translated into Russian using translations offered in major Russian-English dictionaries.
The paper discusses a functional approach to the lexicon: words can be described as resources used to realise the communicative intentions of the speaker. Computationally this corresponds to a dictionary combined with the systemic network. Concordance lines for a group of related words (such as expressions of one's anger or anxiety) in various contexts in two languages are classified according to simple functional categories (both generic ones, such as agency or diathesis, and topic-specific ones, such as the intensity of emotions or kinds of evaluation).  For instance, in What'sreally bugging you? the direct object expresses the Senser, whereas the Phenomenon (the cause) is non-human, most probably someone's behaviour. This adds functional restrictions on the set of possible Russian translations.

Sridevi Sriniwass

Tactic Augmentation and Circumstantial Augmentation in the Creation of Field Meanings

The study seeks to uncover the representation of the logical relations of enhancement and its relationship with the experiential metafunction. Specifically, this study compares tactic augmentation and circumstantial augmentation in relation to the meaning-making resources of the ideational metafunction. While both have to do with the augmentation of the clause, the former makes use of the resources of clause complexing whereas the later exploits the resources of circumstantial transitivity (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). In order to capture these distinctions, the theoretical framework of the logical metafunction within the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) model is deployed ((Halliday & Matthiessen (2004), Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (1997), Halliday (1994), Martin (1992) and Matthiessen (1992)). Previous literature on the linguistic characteristics of the scientific genre have noted that the tactic augmentation of hypotactic enhancement relations are a favoured type of relation  (e.g. Martin & Rose (2003), Martin & Veel (1998), Halliday (1998), Rose (1997), Veel (1997) and Halliday & Martin (1993)). The present study attempts to shed some light on the semantic load carried by the grammatical resources of complexing and circumstantial transitivity to create field meanings in chemistry.  The data for the study is drawn from tertiary chemistry textbooks (e.g. Christian 2004).

Sonja Starc

Instructions As A Goal-Achievement Pattern Of The Text

The paper deals with text analysis based on the Goal-Achievement Pattern of the text, as discussed by Michael Hoey, and tackles the problem of how  to teach in school (and if it is necessary) the culturally popular patterns of the texts.
The participants of the case study were kindergarten teachers with work experience. Their task was to write the instructions for a common Slovene parlour game. Thus they had to write a text of the Goal-Achievement Pattern in which the Goal was to play a parlour game and the word game being the trigger of the pattern to be followed, using the matrix of the text (instructions) that includes time sequence as the most important parameter, i.e. in the process of building up the instructions, the sentences in the relationship should answer the question What to do next. 
The students were familiar with the game instructions as they used them in their every-day spoken discourse even if they never learnt them in school, but the task to write them caused quite a few problems. Their texts were open to many inferences and lacked coherence because their imaginative readers were their kindergarten children who would understand the teachers from the context and the paralanguage they were using.
This study proves the importance that students are taught to write the culturally popular patterns of the texts so that they become competent in using appropriate pattern and matrix of the text that includes the proper parameters.

Erich Steiner

Building a corpus for investigating properties of translated texts

In spite of the emergence of world-wide initiatives towards linguistically annotated and enriched corpora, research in translation studies involving bilingual corpora still tend to rely on raw data in most cases. The project summarized here is an attempt to create a translation corpus for English – German, with data linguistically interpreted on several levels and larger coverage than currently available. The overall purpose is a linguistically oriented investigation of selected properties of translated texts between English and German. Focussing on the phenomenon of “explicitation”, and here on explicitation of ideational meanings, we investigate properties of translations which are due to the specific language combination and to the direction of translation on the one hand, and which are cross-linguistic by being results of the translation process on the other. Our further interests will be in explanations of these properties in terms of language typology, text-typology, and processes of understanding during the translation process. The investigation will apply both quantitative and qualitative methods, many of which are motivated by SFL-modelling. The project is in its early stages and is funded by the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” (German Research Fund).

Elizabeth Swain

Field as the genesis of ‘situational’ humour

 Apart from Eggins & Slade (1997) and Eggins (2000), humour seems to have been relatively unexplored within SFL, though Cloran (1987:100-1), Hasan (1994:156-7) and Martin (2000: 164) make passing reference to it.    
   This paper investigates the relevance of field (Halliday & Hasan, 1989: 12) to a type of humour which is ‘situational’ as opposed to ‘canned’ (Attardo, 1994: 293-331), occurring in a situation which permits rather than prescribes humour (Palmer, 1994: 51, 106): a comic narrative, interposed during a British parliamentary debate. 
   Like much humour in this institutional setting, the narrative in question fulfils a political as well as an entertainment function, for it represents, metaphorically, the failings of a politician. It thus provides not only ‘comic relief’ but is clearly related to the field of political debate in which it arises. I suggest that this dual functionality is best understood if the narrative is seen as constituting a fictional context, projected through the field of the real-life situational context, within or against which it has to be read in order for its humorous meaning to be grasped. Anchored in the field of parliamentary debate, the projected fictional context presents a number of shifts away from the contextual norms governing that situation type, and the resulting intertextual discordances are largely responsible for the text’s humorous effects.
	
Attardo, S. (1994) Linguistic Theories Of Humor  Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter
Cloran, C.  (1987) ‘Negotiating New Contexts In Conversation’ In Occasional Papers In Systemic  Linguistics Vol 1
Eggins S And D Slade (1997) London, Cassell Academic
Eggins, S. (2002) ‘Theorising Humour Within A Social Semiotic Perspective: Humour As Metaphor In Texts By And For Children’ Plenary Given At The 29th Isf Congress, Liverpool, 15th-19th July 2002.
Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, R.   (1989) Language, Context And Text: Aspects Of Language In A Social Semiotic Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Hasan, R.   (1994) ‘Situation And The Definition Of Genres’ In A.Grimshaw (Ed.), What’s Going On Here? Complementary Studies Of Professional Talk, Norwood, N.J., Ablex, 127-67
Martin, J. (2000) ‘Beyond Exchange: Appraisal Systems In English’ In Hunston, S., Thompson, G. (Eds), Evaluation  In Text, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 142-175 
Thibault, P. (1990) “Questions Of Genre And Intertextuality In Some Australian Television Advertisements” In Favretti, R. “The Televised Text”, Bologna, Patron

Christopher Taylor

Meaning-making in film: the metafunctions in and beyond the word

From the silent movie era to present-day television services for the deaf, the cinema medium has always relied on numerous meaning-making devices in addition to the spoken or written word. This paper intends to explore how meaning is relayed through non-verbal channels or through complementary verbal channels (spoken for written or vice versa) and how the film medium is able to exploit this phenomenon. It has been shown in previous research projects reported at ISFC conferences that film language is predominantly ideational in nature, but also that this language does not truly reflect real language use. From this premise, it may be supposed that the non-verbal elements in meaning-making in film are also to some extent ‘contrived’ in that, like the words, they have to keep the viewer constantly aware of the unfolding of the plot and have to make sure that only the salient points of a potentially enormous mass of meaning are condensed into the two hours of a feature film or the half-hour of a TV episode.  
In particular such features as gesture, symbol, music and alternative verbal input will be analysed to see how they work as meaning-making devices and whether, in fact, they provide a predominantly ideational gloss or whether they have wider functions.

Eija Ventola

Exploring field and ideational metafunction in Service Encounter learning materials?

Service encounters between the customer and the server are everyday interactions whereby some commodity ‘material and/or linguistic goods’ will be exchanged. Giving and getting service successfully is a complex interaction which deserves researchers’ linguistic and multimodal attention; in other words, not only language matters when we interact in service encounters, but we have to perceive the interaction as a communicative situation where all semiotic resources are applied in a unified manner, if we aim to succeed. 
Participating in a service encounter in a foreign language is always more strenuous than in one’s own language (even speaking the same language does not guarantee success in the encounter). Learning materials, specifically textbooks, have always tried to instruct learners how to conduct a service interaction. Some learning materials are more successful in this task than others. This paper looks at how field and ideational metafunction is dealt with in the past and present learning materials from a unified semiotic perspective where both multimodal aspects and linguistic aspects are considered. It shows that many of our learning materials of service encounters in foreign languages are still relatively awkward and stilted. The question then arises whether such dialogues in fact help the learner and whether it is worthwhile producing them at all? Should we just leave the learners to function the best they can in service encounters … e.g. for realizing their needs by multimodally by pointing?

Alyson E. R. Steele G. Weickert (Grantee - CAPES, Brazil) &
Apóstolo T. Nicolacópulos (PhD)

Linguistic marks of power at the clause level of representation

Our work, an interface with Systemic Functional Linguistics, focuses on the ideational meta-function and proposes a refinement to the ‘experiential level of representation’ (Halliday, 1985, 1994, 2004) to incorporate an extension of Fillmore’s (1968, 1975) proposition, broadened to consider context. In order to represent the notion of power at the sentence level we propose the power Benefactive subdomain (Steele Weickert & Nicolacópulos, 2005), a new facet to the semantic-pragmatic model (Nicolacópulos, 1992, 1995) under development at UFSC. Encompassing the notion of power, this subdomain arises as a subdivision of the Benefactive semantic domain, which conveys the notions of possession, gain or loss, or of benefit (Oliveira, 1999). This research seeks to confirm the viability of the ‘power Benefactive subdomain’ (to perceive and register linguistic marks of power at the clause level. In a pilot study on 10 Washington Post on-line news reports on ‘war and politics’, the power Benefactive subdomain detected and accounted for 76 power Benefactive predicators. A percentage emerged as power Benefactive in their basic sense, while the remainder revealed polysemic characteristics having metaphorised from other semantic domains. Our initial results are noteworthy and affirm that the power Benefactive predicators under examination are linguistic marks of power.

Keywords: 
experiential level,   linguistic marks of power ,  semantic-pragmatic model,   metaphor

(Both presenters are members of PGI / NUPdiscurso - UFSC (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil)

Ingrid Westhoff

A snapshot into the “meaning making” of reading textbooks

In a non-English speaking country, training future English language teachers at undergraduate level is not an endeavour without challenges. More specifically, teaching reading and writing is a task that not all teachers want to engage in. Some of the reasons for this may be that teachers are not always aware of the influence of the social context and/or the linguistic co-text present in texts, therefore they focus mainly on teaching lexis, punctuation and spelling. Another reason could be that some of the textbooks they rely upon to help them in their teaching, do not always highlight the linguistic evidence of the meanings realised  in the texts or use a systematic approach to teach, thus leaving learners prompted to discover by themselves how the language works.
This paper describes a sample of how reading textbooks used in a second language teacher training degree provide reading instruction. Then it describes a reading methodology informed by a Systemic-Functional approach to language and Genre based literacy which the author believes supports teachers in a better way.

References
Halliday, M.A.K. 1992. The notion of 'context' in language education. Thao Le & Mike McCausland (eds.), Language Education: Interaction and Development: Proceedings of the International Conference, Vietnam, 30 March - 1 April 1991. University of Tasmania: Language Education
James R. Martin & David Rose. 2003. Working With Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause (Open Linguistics Series) London/ New York: Continuum Press
Rose, D., Lui-Chivizhe, L., McKnight, A. & Smith, A. 2004. Scaffolding Academic Reading and Writing at the Koori Centre. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 30th Anniversary Edition

Philip Windridge

Distinguishing Ambiguity and Contestation in Transcripts using Instantial Taxonomy Relations

The purpose of the research reported on in this paper is to identify misunderstandings and disagreements in decision-making activities. Specifically, it seeks to identify contradictory ideational meanings within a spoken language text, comprising transcripts of project meetings. In the analysis of these transcripts Systemic Functional Linguistics is used as a model of language with which instantial taxonomy relations between ideationally functional lexical units can be identified.
Following Matthiessen (1995), we can say that a text is organised into smaller ideational semantic units called phenomena which are categorised as sequence, figure and element (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999). Of particular interest are participant and circumstance elements that realise indexical lexical items. From these nuclei, and associated phoric references, it is possible to identify taxonomic relationships (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999; Martin & Rose, 2003). The resulting taxonomy structures, which reflect important aspects of a speaker’s representation of the issues involved in the decision, can be ascribed to an individual decision-maker either directly in his/her utterances or by the speaker ‘buying into’ the meanings construed from the utterances of another.
The negotiation of ideational meanings is reflected as dynamic taxonomies. These taxonomies, associated with individual decision-makers, contain comparable points of meaning that exhibit varying degrees of equivalence or contestation. The intention is that a comparison of these taxonomies should reveal the degree of misunderstanding and disagreement that exists between decision-makers over the course of a decision-making activity.

Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 1999, Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach to Cognition, Continuum, London.
Martin, J. R. & Rose, D. 2003, Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the clause, Continuum, London ; New York.
Matthiessen, C. 1995, Lexicogrammatical Cartography, International Language Sciences Publishers, Tokyo.

Dai Fei Yang

Multimodality: three levels of image analysis in meaning making

Multimodal literacy is concerned with the deployment of multi semiotic resources in meaning making in the realisation of social goals and purposes. In this paper the author explores how an article in a Sydney newspaper co-deployed text and images in addressing the social concerns of terrorism and its impact on Australian children. 
The paper first applies the concept of rhetorical connections of time and space in critical historical event development (Bakhtin, 1981) to introduce the social context of the connection between September 11th event and the current global anti terrorism movement.
The paper then examines how images construct meanings in multimodal texts applying three levels of analysis: Barthes’ concept of levels of meaning (1977), Batemen and Delin’s five levels of structure (2001) and Kress & van Leeuwen’s reading images (1996). The multi faceted approach gives greater in-depth understanding of the complex multimodal construction from the perspectives of rhetorical significance, structural presentation and grammar of images in the modeling of children’s experience in critical social events. The three levels provide a comprehensive view accounting for how images are deployed to enhance the richness of multimodal texts.

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bateman, J., & Delin, J. (2001). From Genre to Text Critiquing in Multimodal Documents. MAD 2001: the 4th International Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse: Improving text: From text structure to text type. Yttre, Belgium.
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, Music, Text: essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The grammar of visual design. London, Routledge.