Thresholds and Potentialities of Systemic Functional Linguistics: Multilingual, Multimodal and Other Specialised Discourses

This volume brings together fourteen papers by scholars from Europe and Australia, working within or close to the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) tradition. Twelve are revised versions of papers presented at the 18th Eurointernational SFL Conference in Gorizia, Italy, 2006. The year marked half a century since the publication of Michael Halliday’s 1956 description of modern Chinese grammar, widely considered as the ‘beginning’ of SFL. The conference location in Gorizia was also significant, on a border recently opened up (2004) as part of the EU enlargement process. This spatio-temporal coincidence inspired the theme of the conference, Thresholds and Potentialities of Systemic Functional Linguistics, conceived as a venue for re-affirming some of SFL’s past achievements and for reflecting on future directions it might take. Applying tried and tested tools to new contexts, the selected contributions presented here reflect this emphasis on continuity and change in SFL.

Elizabeth Swain is an applied linguist, who worked as a TESOL instructor at private and public institutions in France, Spain, England and Italy before taking up her current research and teaching post at Trieste University, in the Faculty of Political Science. She has taught English for a range of purposes and co-authored two ESP course books. Her university teaching combines English for specific purposes with domain-specific text analysis. Her research activities, conference presentations and publications have been in the fields of humour, literary translation, academic writing, diplomatic discourse and more recently, comparative journalistic discourse. Her ongoing project is the study of interpersonal meaning in diplomatic discourse.