Narrative and the origins of discourse

This paper summarises findings of discourse analyses of traditional stories from eleven language phyla around the world. The aim is a preliminary exploration of relationships amongst diverse languages in patterns of discourse, using a systemic functional language model. Several techniques were developed for managing and displaying the analyses, including translations of the stories, patterns of Theme and participant identities, staging of texts and conjunctive relations between messages, and relations between elements of clauses and between clauses in sequences. These techniques are exemplified with one story from the south Indian language Kodava. Some variations across languages, in strategies for realising these functions are then illustrated. Intriguing commonalities are found in discourse patterns in all the stories, realised by diverse but finite sets of options for grammatical strategies. Finally a map is displayed of relations between discourse features and the discourse systems they realise, and some suggestions are mooted for explaining commonality and diversity.

What is evaluated, and how, in academic research writing?

This study explores the ways in which academic writers employ expressions of attitude in the construction of evaluative stance in the introductory sections of research papers. The study draws on the theoretical base of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), and in particular on Appraisal theory as a modelling of interpersonal meaning at the level of discourse semantics (Martin, 1992, 2000; Martin & Rose, 2003; Martin & White, in press). Attitude is explored from two perspectives: how it is expressed in the discourse, and what it is employed to evaluate. In addressing the second issue, the focus is on the general field (subject matter being constructed in the text) rather than on specific entities. The study is also concerned therefore with how different fields are identified in the texts, and how they relate one to another. The research contributes some significant dimensions to the modelling of attitudinal meanings in the register. Analyses reveal that the register of academic research writing is characteristically constructive of two fields, the knowledge domain being investigated and the research activity conducted in relation to that domain; that these fields are in a relationship of projection one to the other; and that each field is evaluated in quite different ways. The findings contribute at a theoretical level to an explanation of the apparent contradiction between the dual demands of persuasion and ‘objectivity’ in the register, and at a practical level provide a new dimension to frameworks for deconstructing and negotiating evaluative stance with novice academic research writers.

Using the functional grammar to understand children’s written texts

This paper reports on an analysis of the assessment principles used in marking students’ written texts in the UK. It considers the assessment advice offered markers with respect to two stories written by 14 year old students in the Key Stage 3 English test in England. The observations offered on the written texts are shown to be general and lacking in much understanding of the ways the texts work linguistically. Using the functional grammar, an attempt is made to explore aspects of the grammatical organization of the two texts, and hence to reveal why one text was deemed superior to the other.

Modelling agency in HIV treatment decision-making

In applying linguistics to the task of analysing how agentivity is construed through verbal interaction, scholars often equate social agency with grammatical agency, and in particular with the grammar of transitivity. The difficulty I want to address in this paper is that we may miss other important, systematic and contrastive patterning in the agentivity with which social actors and other entities are depicted, because such agentivity is realized through a range of dispersed linguistic resources. Systemic Functional Linguistics can provide a useful framework for co-ordinating the contribution of these resources to the overall construal of agency in a text or set of texts. It does this best when it focusses on bringing out the particular stratal alignments that characterise different contexts. The paper draws on a study of treatment decision-making in HIV medicine as an example of a social context where choices in the construal of agency make a crucial difference to choices of professional and institutional practice. In this study the construal of agency was taken as a chief source of evidence about whether doctors and patients engage in shared decision-making, and it was also seen as a strategy which doctors and patients can use to open up or close down opportunities for shared decision-making. A key finding was that doctors and patients in HIV medicine often construe the agency of one participant as a resource for the agency of another, rather than construing the agency of one participant • as competing with the agency of the other. In particular, it is where doctors and patients construe each other as semiotic agents that shared decisionmaking seems most likely to occur.

A case study of multi-stratal analysis

The domains of application in applied linguistics have changed considerably since the early 1960s. In most of these domains, the fundamental property of language as a resource for making meaning has increasingly been foregrounded. This approach recognises, amongst other dimensions of language, its multi-stratal character, i.e. that a given instance of language consists of patterns of meaning (semantics), realized by patterns of wording (grammar), realized by patterns of sounding (phonology) or writing (graphology). The co-selection of these patterns both construes and expresses the kind of social context in which the language operates. There has not yet been a register of English described from the point of view of all four strata. In this paper, we report on a research project which is developing a multi-stratal description of a service encounter, namely the ordering of fast food by telephone. We present some of the findings here regarding the likely cross-stratal patterns for this kind of service encounter, and suggest areas of future research.

Grammatical complexity in letters written by people with acquired brain impairment

This study investigated written language in the form of personal and formal letters written by 10 people who sustained a stroke and 10 people who sustained traumatic brain injury, and compared their performance with 15 non brain-damaged people. In order to explore the writing skills of these individuals from a socio-cultural perspective, a functional linguistic theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics, was adopted as the framework for analysis. Features of grammatical complexity were examined to ascertain the differential demands of the two text types on the writers’ language resources, and the impact of stroke and traumatic brain injury on participants’ writing abilities. Results of the analysis revealed patterns of both strength and deficit in the groups with acquired brain impairment. Variation as a feature of ‘disordered’ and ‘normal’ performance is highlighted and clinical implications discussed.

Framing in online school discussions

This paper draws on Bernstein’s (1996) notion of framing to examine the variables which control the communication made possible in online discussion in one school context, and the particular forms of pedagogic consciousness (Bernstein, 1996) that are produced as students and teachers negotiate meanings around a literary text. Using genre analysis (Martin, 1992) I examine how students variously contribute in the collaborative construction of an online Discussion genre. Using appraisal analysis (Martin, 2000; White, 2002), I then identify how online interactants variously negotiate their judgements, feelings and appreciations of various aspects of the literary text being discussed, and of each other’s contributions, such that certain forms of reasoning around text are privileged over others. In so doing, I identify how different students have access to different forms of expertise in online discussion, with some students being more able to produce the “legitimate forms of communication” (Bernstein, 1996) in the online environment. I conclude by suggesting that, without a close examination of how online discussions are framed as emerging electronic genres, educators run the risk of validating a new mode of structural inequity and disadvantage.

Argumentation in a multi party asynchronous computer mediated conference

This paper draws on systemic functional linguistic genre analysis to illuminate the way in which postgraduate applied linguistics students structure their argumentation within a multi party asynchronous computer mediated conference. Two conference discussions within the same postgraduate course are compared in order to reveal the way in which computer-based argumentation may differ from that operating in written essays and to show the influence of tutor role and task set in shaping the discussions in this mode. The analysis undertaken demonstrates differences in both conferences between the ‘stages’ found in written argument and those found in the electronic discussion and also differences between the two conference discussions attributable to differences in the discussion task. In particular, in one conference, there was a higher frequency of counter-argumentation, while in the other there was a greater degree of disclosing personal and professional experiences on the basis of which participants (often collaboratively) constructed claims. It is hoped that these findings will point to fruitful new lines of enquiry both in terms of a) the special characteristics of computer mediated conferencing, particularly its use within an educational context, and b) the methods of analysis which we developed as a means of illuminating a relatively new form of communication.