Search results for "functional linguistic"
showing 9 items of 9 documents
An experimental study on the effect of systemic functional linguistics applied through a genre-pedagogy approach to teaching writing
2016
Abstract In the tradition of teaching English as a second language, there has been an increased interest in how functional language descriptions and understandings of genres may be used as resources for making meaning. The present study investigates what impact writing instruction that draws upon systemic functional linguistics (SFL) applied through a genre-pedagogy approach has on students’ ability to write argumentative essays. This includes explicit grammar instruction inspired by SFL, as well as instruction on text structure. The study uses a mixed-methods approach, with a quasi-experiment followed up by quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collected material. Statistical analys…
Theresa May’s Representation of Reality in her Brexit Speeches
2020
This study analyses Theresa May’s three seminal Brexit speeches. These describe the kind of desirable post-Brexit EU-UK relationship that she envisioned, and together constitute a corpus of 18,532 words. The speeches can be considered as landmarks on a timeline that was initially meant to lead to the delivery of Brexit. It is hypothesized that there may be meaningful differences between the speeches, and that these affect the representation of reality. These in turn would have a bearing on May’s discursive self-representation as either an individualized or a collectivized social actor. To account for such representational values, the study draws on Halliday’s Transitivity System (1994), sta…
Introduction
2014
Studying Ancient Greek offers new insights for linguistic theory. Thanks to the amount of available written data of a large corpus at our disposal, it is possible for a linguist to test hypotheses from modern theories in order to explain language phenomena, without disregarding a description according to methodologies adopted in traditional analyses of ancient languages. In particular, the morphological complexity of the Greek verb with its highly intricate inflectional system provide a valuable basis for an in-depth-analysis of the mechanisms which regulate the functioning of a language in the mind of the speaker. Crucially, in recent times also deductive methodologies adopted in the gener…
Lexical cohesion revisited. A combined corpus and systemic-functional analysis
2018
In this chapter I argue for a refinement of the classic SFL approach to lexical cohesion. First, a literature overview is provided in which key principles and related categories are examined. In addition, the connection of cohesion and discourse co-herence is addressed and an overview is provided of the wide range of applications that the former has in such fields as genre studies, language teaching and learning, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics, among others. The core SFL models of cohesion are then revisited in order to propose a modified taxonomy of lexical co-hesion, involving five distinct types (repetition, synonymy, opposition, inclusion and association) that are cross…
Challenges concerning argumentative writing in a second language context
2018
The current study is based on parts of the data collected in a quasi-experiment conducted in four English classes of Norwegian upper secondary school students. The purpose of the quasi-experiment was to explore whether a teaching intervention based on systemic functional linguistics and genre-pedagogy would support students in improving their competence in writing argumentative texts in English. The improvement was measured by comparing evaluations of pre-and post-tests. The current study investigates what seemed to be the main challenges for Norwegian students concerning this type of genre in a second language context based on the pre-tests and the evaluations of the pre-tests. The most ch…
Reading data from graphs: a study on the role of language.
2015
International audience; The work described in this paper is framed in a larger study focused on written argumentations produced by university students in tasks regarding graphs, conversions between graphs and their analytic properties and relations among different graphs. Using the functional linguistics framework, we analyse difficulties related to an examination task on functions and their derivatives. The use of colloquial and literate registers in mathematics problem solving is the lens through which we analyse and discuss the errors. We draw attention to the difficulties concerning the use of literate registers and how these difficulties influence the errors in the interpretations of t…
Translating Migration in the Visual Arts: Calais Children and Project#RefugeeCameras as Collaborative Counter Narratives
2019
This study investigates the modalities through which the migrant crisis is portrayed in the creative artistic sector while accelerating the spread of political participatory and activist movements in the areas of subtitling and amateur translation. Participation and activism have stimulated the sphere of translation that has been acting as an important stimulus for the international mushrooming of artistic creativities on public spaces and digital platforms, and also for a different political and cultural reframing of the migrant crisis. 21 st -century mobility has made translation a crucial device for the negotiation of linguacultural transactions within cultural institutions, public space…
Tackling Online Disinformation. The Construction of 'Trustworthiness' and 'Best Practices' in the European Commission Discourse on COVID-19
2022
Over the last few decades, misleading healthcare information and deceptions with false claims, conspiracy theories (CTs) and consumer fraud have endangered public health on a global scale. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a substantial flow of false information and unceasing attempts by conspirators to influence debates in the official discourses, breeding on the fertile ground of people’s most basic anxieties and the present-day social and economic uncertainty. This paper investigates the discourse of the European Commission on disinformation in order to achieve institutional legitimation through the linguistic and discursive construction of ‘trustworthiness’, ‘…
The Greek Verb. Morphology, Syntax, Semantics. Proceedings of the 8th International Meeting on Greek Linguistics. Agrigento, October 1-3, 2009
2014
Despite the difficulties of reconstructing the grammar of a dead language, studying Ancient Greek offers new insights for linguistic theory. The morphological complexity of the Greek verb with its highly intricate inflectional system provide a valuable basis for an in-depth-analysis of the mechanisms which regulate the functioning of a language. Studies on the Ancient Greek verb have also contributed significantly to the reconstruction of the Indo-European language since the early history of Linguistics in the nineteenth century. The conservative features preserved in the oldest stages of Greek allow us to rely on a solid basis to which every linguist must refer in investigating a model of …