scholarly journals Readability and adaptation of children’s literary works from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Liu

Abstract Widely studied in fields like education, psychology, and linguistics, readability can be defined as (a) reader’s understanding of a reading text, (b) features of a text, or (c) the matching of a text to its reader. The existing research has been focused on the formulaic and multilevel discourse approaches, relatively neglecting others such as systemic functional linguistics oriented one. Moreover, contemporary reading materials pose as a challenge for average children in many ways. This study examines readability and adaptation of children’s literary works from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor inspired by systemic functional linguistics. Through case studies of metaphorical transferences involving zero, one, two, and three ideational grammatical metaphors used in the parallel excerpts in the original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its eight adapted ones published in China, it is concluded that addition, maintenance, revision, unpacking, and demetaphorization are five major strategies which are found to decrease, maintain, or increase readability of some parts in the adapted versions.

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Martin

Abstract This introduction comprises four main sections. Section 1 introduces the overall theoretical architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL) by way of contextualising the focus on interpersonal grammar in this special issue. Section 2 looks in more detail at the interpersonal discourse semantics underlying this work, briefly introducing the systems of negotiation and appraisal realised through interpersonal grammar. Section 3 turns to the concept of grammatical metaphor, a concept which bears critically on the realisation relationship between interpersonal discourse semantics and lexicogrammar in SFL. Section 4 comments on the challenge of intradisciplinary dialogue.


Author(s):  
Arsen Nahum Pasaribu ◽  
Erika Sinambela ◽  
Sondang Manik

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) refers to some kind of text analysis, including an analysis of literary language. Some research has verified the study of the literary text using this linguistic apparatus; however the use of SFL in literary text analysis is relatively rare. Therefore, this study investigated the contributions of SFL to literary text analysis. The data of the study were 20 scientific articles focusing on literary text analysis using SFL. The analysis used content analysis to expose the segments of the story analyzed and the components of SFL to analyze them. The findings showed that the method of analysis using SFL on the literary text has brought new perspectives to the researchers, and provided some possible future studies in literary works. Moreover, the study of literary texts is regarded not merely as interpretative practices but as explanatory categories for each segment of a literary text.


Author(s):  
Xiaodong Zhang

This short paper discusses the potential value of integrating linguistics theories with technological devices in English language teaching (ELT). In particular, the paper presents how systemic functional linguistics could be used to complement technology-based ELT. The paper ends with an innovative proposal of techno-linguistics (a term derived from the words technology and linguistics) as a research area to better benefit language learners in this digitalized world.


2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilia Djonov

Website hierarchy is a central principle for organizing information in websites with implications for user orientation on the Web. Employing websites for children as case studies, this paper proposes a conceptualization of website hierarchy developed by adapting a tool from systemic functional linguistics to the analysis of websites. This new conceptualization draws on the strengths and reconciles the differences of existing ones in order to reflect the fluidity of websites as hypermedia texts on the WWW and the role that the interaction between content organization, webpage and navigation design plays in revealing a website's hierarchical organization and thereby orienting users within it.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erikson Saragih ◽  
Syahron Lubis ◽  
Amrin Saragih ◽  
Roswita Silalahi, M.Hum

Grammatical Metaphor (GM) has become an interesting linguistic issue nowadays especially in the texts of science of technology. Even, the discussion of Grammatical Metaphors has touched other fields’ texts; politics, economics, and even religion. The study aims at: 1) describing deployment of experiential GMs in doctrinal verses of the Bible in Indonesian version, 2) describing deployment of logical GMs in doctrinal verses of the Bible in Indonesian version. To reach up the objectives of the research, the writer employs a qualitative study with content analysis design. The source of data is 50 doctrinal verses Alkitab Terjemahan Baru 1974 in 2014 edition. The theory underlying this research is Systemic Functional Linguistics. To identify and categorize grammatical metaphors from the data source, the researcher employs the Stratal Model proposed by Halliday and Martin (2015), while the data were analyzed by Content Analysis with Conceptual design proposed by Carley and Dale (2012). The findings show that 1) 69 experiential GMs from 8 types are well deployed in doctrinal verses while 5 types are not identified in Indonesian language. 2) 51 logical GMs from 3 types are well deployed in biblical doctrinal verses in Indonesian language. Due to the high frequency of ideational GMs the texts have the features of objectivity, impersonality, technicality and practicality.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Qingshun He

<p>English language learners may be confused in identifying the grammatical category of such conjunctive expressions as <em>before, after </em>and<em> since</em> introducing non-finite <em>-ing</em> clauses. In this article, we will conduct a corpus-based investigation of hypotactic conjunctions and conjunctive prepositions following the principle of unidirectional transfer in grammatical metaphor proposed by He and Yang (2014) within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The research concludes that hypotactic conjunctions tend to transfer to zero conjunctions and <em>before, after </em>and<em> since</em> introducing non-finite <em>-ing</em> clauses should be included into the grammatical category of conjunctive prepositions.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-302
Author(s):  
Alireza Jalilifar ◽  
Seyedeh Elham Elhambakhsh ◽  
Peter R. White

Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study explored variational use of nominalization in 600 textbook introductions and 200 book reviews in applied linguistics and medicine. The nominalized expressions were identified in the texts, the frequencies of the nominalization types were counted, and eventually a chi-square test was administered. Analysis of nominalization patterns across the different informational/promotional moves revealed divergent patterns in the two disciplines but insignificant differences across the genres in focus. The density of nominalizations was acknowledged in the applied linguistics introductions and book reviews. However, functional variations in the use of nominalizations were found only in the introductions. As for the proportion of nominalization to grammatical metaphor, results demonstrated a lower tendency towards nominalizing scientific information in the medicine corpus. Further research is needed to see how nominalization is exploited in other genres and other disciplines.


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