Abstracts

PLENARY LECTURES

Julia Lavid

The grammar of emotion in English and Spanish: a systemic-functional approach

The study of how emotions are conceptualized and expressed in different languages has been the object of extensive research within different trends of the cognitive linguistic paradigm. But in almost all recent work in this area language is treated as a kind of code in which pre-existing conceptual structures are expressed. 
In this presentation I adopt an alternative viewpoint, based on systemic-functional theory, according to which language is seen as the foundation of human experience. Using evidence from monolingual and bilingual corpora, this presentation aims to explore how the lexicogrammars of English and Spanish construe human emotional experience in everyday language. This is achieved by comparing certain general features which characterize the emotive domain in the two languages and analysing the language-specific preferences in the categorization of a certain emotions. It is expected that this lexicogrammatical exploration contributes to a better understanding of the grammar of emotion in the languages studied.

Kay O’Halloran
The Multimodal Construction of Experience

Language evolved in conjunction with other meaning making resources such as visual images, action and gesture, and written forms of semiosis, such as mathematical symbolism and specialized diagrams which led to the construction of the scientific view of the world.  The functions of language must therefore be theorized in relation to the functions of other semiotic resources (for example, Baldry, A. P. and Thibault, P. J. forthcoming; Kress 2003; Kress et. al. 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Lemke, 1998, 2002, 2003; O’Halloran, 2004, 2005; Royce, forthcoming ; Unsworth 2001; Ventola 2005). In this paper, the multimodal construction of experience is examined.  Close textual analyses of multimodal texts reveal the mechanisms through which the construction of experience takes place intersemiotically.  Semantic expansions take place as processes, participants and circumstance undergo metaphorical transformation, while concurrently co-contextualization and re-contextualization of semiotic choices function across the different forms of representation.  The resulting theoretical approach is conceptualized as ‘multimodal grammaticality’, a complex view of the construction of experience as inter-connected layered systems of meaning which unfold dynamically in conjunction with choices for logical, textual and interpersonal meaning.

References
Baldry, A. P. and Thibault, P. J. (forthcoming) Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. London: Equinox.
Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Ogborn, J. and Tsatsarelis, C. (2001) Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom. London: Continuum.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication Discourse. London: Arnold.

Paul J. Thibault

Mental processes, agency, and interpersonal moral orders:
 the grammar of remembering and forgetting

Mental process clauses are usually seen as relating to the representation of inner mental experience. The mental process verb “construes a quantum of change in the flow of events taking place in our consciousness” (Halliday-Matthiessen 2004: 197). Language is said to have an ideational function which represents human experience, including our experience of inner mental events. The various mental process verbs and their associated participant roles represent mental experiences in terms of abstract semantic categories. This view implies a kind of ‘theory of mind’ view of mental process clauses in which language ‘represents’ inner thoughts in propositional form. Language is then a way of accessing our own and other people’s mind. In this view, mental processes are a kind of reflection of cognitive access to one-‘s own and others minds. In this paper, I shall consider an alternative or complementary perspective with particular reference to the mental processes ‘remember’, ‘remind’, ‘forget’, and ‘escape and some related mental process lexemes. I shall argue that the use of mental processes is closely related to the way grammar is used to construct people as moral types in a particular interpersonal moral order. In this view, the focus is on the ways in which mental processes involve modal stances on the subjectivities of the self and others in discourse. Further, the subjectivities of the self and others are seen as being more or less accessible so that speakers can construct different subjective stances on their own and others minds. We will also see that mental processes are involved in the construction of the self and others as categories of moral agent.