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Challenging Boundaries in Linguistics

Systemic Functional Perspectives

by Stella Neumann (Volume editor) Rebekah Wegener (Volume editor) Jennifer Fest (Volume editor) Paula Niemietz (Volume editor) Nicole Hützen (Volume editor)
©2017 Conference proceedings 493 Pages

Summary

Linguistics, like any discipline, is full of boundaries. However, in nature, as Ruqaiya Hasan points out, there are no clear cut boundaries. The participants of the 42nd International Systemic Functional Congress held at RWTH Aachen University addressed and challenged the notion of boundaries in linguistics in many creative ways. Twenty-one of the papers presented at the congress are collated in this volume. The six sections cover topics that challenge theoretical notions and stances, and explore historical, interpersonal and lexicogrammatical boundaries as well as those between languages and in language development. The volume presents a state of the art overview of systemic functional linguistic theorising with extensions into other theoretical frameworks.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the editors
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Challenging boundaries and bending rules: An introduction
  • References
  • Section 1 Challenging boundaries in theory
  • Fluid boundaries and the categorization of nominal expressions (Lise Fontaine)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Categories and their fluid nature
  • 3 Nominality
  • 3.1 Nominalization
  • 3.2 Noun – Verb conversion
  • 3.3 Nominal group versus clause
  • 4 Concluding remarks
  • References
  • Communication linguistics as a social and cognitive semiotic (Karen Malcolm)
  • References
  • Post-Deictic and grounding (Monika Kavalir)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Deixis in systemic functional linguistics and grounding in cognitive grammar
  • 3 Points of divergence
  • (i) Subjective construal
  • (ii) Schematic meaning
  • (iii) Grammatical status
  • 4 Post-Deictic and grammaticalization
  • 5 Grammaticalization in systemic functional linguistics and cognitive grammar
  • 6 Complex determiners
  • 7 Secondary Deixis
  • 8 My old school and the role of the relevant reference point
  • 9 Conclusion
  • References
  • Section 2 Challenging boundaries over time
  • Systemic functional diachronic linguistics: Theory and application (Michael Cummings)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 Principles of diachronic description
  • 2 The non-phrasal verbal group simplex in Present-Day English
  • 2.1 Functions of the verbal group unit
  • 2.2 Experiential and logical structures of the verbal group
  • 2.3 Classification of elements in the verbal group
  • 2.4 Systems of the verbal group
  • 3 The non-phrasal verbal group simplex in the earliest English
  • 3.1 Systems of the earlier Old English verbal group
  • 3.2 The principle of three
  • 4 The non-phrasal verbal group simplex in later Old English/early Middle English
  • 4.1 Structure and classes
  • 4.2 Systems of the later Old English/early Middle English verbal group
  • 5 The non-phrasal verbal group simplex in later Middle English
  • 5.1 Systems of the later Middle English verbal group
  • 6 The non-phrasal verbal group simplex in early Modern English
  • 6.1 Systems of the early Modern English verbal group
  • 7 Summary and conclusions
  • References
  • The dawn of the eighteenth century: A challenging boundary for the academic article (David Banks)
  • 1 Historical background
  • 2 Corpus
  • 3 Thematic structure
  • 4 Process types
  • 5 Modality
  • 6 Closing remarks
  • References
  • On the contentfulness of Themes in English historical medical texts (Ana Elina Martínez-Insua)
  • 1 Goal of the study
  • 2 Background: The Early Modern period
  • 3 Theoretical assumptions
  • 3.1 Relevance of context as a factor informing the users’ decisions
  • 3.2 The choice of theoretical framework
  • 3.3 The notion of Theme in this study
  • 3.4 The notion of content weight in this study
  • 4 The data
  • 4.1 The corpus
  • 4.1.1. Learned audience
  • 4.1.2. Unlearned audience
  • 4.1.3. Intermediate audience
  • 5 Analysis of the data
  • 5.1 Content weight of the Subject Themes
  • 5.2 Type of reference of the Subject Themes
  • 5.3 Diachrony: Content weight of the Subject Themes across time
  • 5.4 Further evidence on Theme in Early Modern English medical texts
  • 6 Concluding remarks
  • 7 Further research
  • References
  • An appliable linguistics indeed: SFL and the structural potential of ancient letters (Claire Urbach / Christopher Land)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Survey of epistolary research
  • (a) The social functions of ancient letters
  • (b) The structural conventions of ancient letters
  • (c) The language of ancient letters
  • 3 Evaluation of epistolary research
  • (a) Social functions and socio-semiotic context
  • (b) Structural conventions and register-specific structural potential
  • (c) Formulaic language and register-specific semantic potential
  • 4 A method of textual analysis
  • (a) Analytical approach
  • (b) Corpus, annotation, and analysis
  • (c) Contextual description of the corpus
  • 5 Focus on 1 Corinthians
  • (a) Context of situation
  • (i) Field
  • (ii) Tenor
  • (iii) Mode
  • (b) Segmentation
  • (i) Functions of interpersonal exchanges
  • (ii) Deictic orientation to time
  • (iii) Modal responsibility in the exchange
  • (iv) Experiential orientation of the exchange
  • 6 Concluding remarks
  • References
  • Section 3 Exploring boundaries of interpersonal expressions
  • Interpersonal meanings of the free-standing really in conversation (Haeyeon Kim)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Context of the research
  • 3 Database and the distribution of really in the spoken discourse
  • 4 Functions of really as an adverb at the clausal level
  • 5 The free-standing really and sharedness of information
  • 6 Interactional sequences and functions of the free-standing really
  • 7 Summary and conclusions
  • References
  • [English dictionaries]
  • [Database]
  • Attitude in student texts: Analysis of verbal, mental and relational clauses in Spanish (Natalia Ignatieva)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Theoretical framework
  • 3 Expressing evaluation
  • 4 Method
  • 5 Data and results
  • 6 Final remarks
  • References
  • From Cosmogirl to Cosmovoter: Appraisal analysis of Cosmopolitan’s coverage of the 2014 US midterm elections (María Aloy Mayo)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 The discourse of Cosmopolitan magazine
  • 2.1 The new section about politics: Cosmovotes
  • 3 Systemic functional linguistics approach
  • 4 Methodology of analysis
  • 4.1 Topics inside Cosmovotes
  • 4.2. Articles and comments selection
  • 4.3. The UAM Corpus Tool for the Appraisal annotation
  • 5 Results of subjectivity and Appraisal annotation
  • 5.1 Subjectivity results
  • 5.2 Attitude and graduation results
  • 6 Conclusions
  • References
  • Section 4 Challenging lexicogrammar
  • On the overlap of grammatical metaphor and conceptual metaphor in political discourse: A reconciliatory approach (Timo Lothmann / Tatiana Serbina)
  • 1 Introduction and scope
  • 2 Selected views on metaphor
  • 2.1 The systemic functional perspective
  • 2.2 The conceptual metaphor perspective
  • 2.3 Previous attempts to combine the two views on metaphor
  • 3 Methods
  • 4 Results
  • 5 Towards a reconciliatory model
  • 6 Conclusion
  • References
  • Grammatical metaphor: A window to understand rewriting in academic contexts (Lucia Rottava / Sulany Silveira dos Santos)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Grammatical Metaphor: a window to understand rewriting
  • 3 Study design: Data and procedure
  • 4 Data analysis and results
  • 5 Concluding remarks
  • References
  • Challenging Moves and Supporting Moves in discourse (Margaret Berry)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 The story so far
  • 3 The data
  • 4 Metafunctional distinctions
  • 5 Distinctions based on discourse consequences
  • 6 More on discourse consequences
  • 7 Distinctions based on ‘place’
  • 7.1 The structure of a supportively unfolding knowledge exchange
  • 7.2 The structure of a supportively unfolding action exchange
  • 7.3 Challenges in Knowledge Exchanges
  • 7.4 Challenges in action exchanges
  • 8 Concluding remarks
  • References
  • Section 5 Treading boundaries in translation
  • Explicitational enhancement in translation (Waleed Othman)
  • 1 Explicitation
  • 2 SFL-based translation research
  • 3 An SFL-based model for delimiting optional explicitations
  • • Systemic possibility
  • • Instantiation motivation
  • 4 Translators’ tendencies toward explicitation
  • 4.1 Ins_Loc_CT
  • 4.2 Alt_Loc_CT
  • 4.3 Alt_Loc_NT↔CT
  • 5 Conclusion
  • References
  • Operationalizing Appraisal multilingually (Marilena Di Bari)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 SentiML scheme: a link between the Appraisal framework and sentiment analysis
  • 3 SentiML corpus
  • 4 Quantitative analysis
  • 5 Qualitative analysis
  • 5.1 Affect
  • 5.2 Judgement
  • 5.3 Appreciation
  • 6 Discussion
  • 7 Conclusions
  • References
  • Shifts in Theme and Subject realization in English-German translation (Paula Niemietz / Stella Neumann / Jonas Freiwald)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Theme and Subject in English and German
  • 3 Methodology
  • 4 Results and Discussion
  • 5 Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Text production and produced texts (Daniel Couto-Vale)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Stratified instantiation
  • 2.1 Text as word sequence
  • 2.2 Text as character sequence
  • 2.3 Word type as term type predictor
  • 2.4 Text as phenomenon sequence
  • 2.5 Divergence in translation
  • 2.6 Alternation in translation
  • 2.7 Micro-units and macro-units
  • 2.8 Origin of meaning
  • 2.9 Construing experience through meaning
  • 3 Writing and rewriting
  • 3.1 Divergents as potential alternates
  • 4 Transformations
  • 4.1 Moving, typing, writing
  • 4.2 Lexical transformations
  • 4.3 Grammatical transformations
  • 4.4 Semantic transformation
  • 5 Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
  • Appendix I
  • Section 6 Learning: Boundaries and beyond
  • Language objectives beyond vocabulary: Working with content area teachers for linguistically responsive instruction (Margaret A. Berg / Jingzi Huang)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Background of the study
  • 3 The study
  • 4 Method
  • 4.1 Setting
  • 4.2 Participants
  • 4.3 Data collection and analysis
  • 5 Findings
  • 5.1 Lesson planning
  • C.C.: High-growth participant
  • R.B.: High-growth participant
  • L.H.: Medium-growth participant
  • L.A.: Low-growth participant
  • 5.2 Classroom observations
  • 6 Discussion and conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix A
  • Appendix B
  • Expansion in law student essays: The relationship between success and logical reasoning in the Legal Problem Question Answer genre (Jumani Clarke)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Register and rhetorical structure theory
  • 3 The essays
  • 4 Method and result: Comparing the essays
  • 4.1 Comparing the rhetorical organisation
  • 4.2 Comparing Clause Complexing
  • 4.3 Logical reasoning in the Transitivity of the clause
  • 4.4 Logical reasoning in the Nominal Group
  • 4.5 Summary of Results
  • 5 Discussion
  • References
  • Appendix (student essays)
  • Student B essay:
  • Student J essay:
  • Processing reality in picture books: A multimodal systemic functional and cognitive study (Arsenio Jesús Moya Guijarro)
  • 1 Aims and scope
  • 2 Cognitive linguistics and social semiotics
  • 2.1. Metonymy from a cognitive perspective
  • 2.2. Metonymy from a social semiotic view
  • 3 Sample texts
  • 4 Metonymies in picture books
  • 4.1. Metonymy in tales intended for 0–2 year-olds
  • 4.2. Metonymy in tales intended for 3–6 year-old children
  • 4.3. Metonymy in tales created for 7–9 year-old children
  • 4.4. Relationship between metonymic depictions and the age-factor
  • 5 Conclusions and discussions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Picture Books
  • Meeting the challenge of instructed language development: Reflections on systemic functional contributions (Heidi Byrnes)
  • Introduction
  • The status of L2 development in language studies
  • Coming to terms with language development over time
  • Development – acquisition – learning: Staking out the territory
  • Rejecting ‘acquisition’ – Rejecting what? A first take
  • Explicating learning and development in sociocultural theory
  • Notions of development in three theoretical approaches
  • Chaos/complexity theory
  • Dynamic Systems Theory
  • Usage-based theories
  • Taking steps toward SFL
  • Central assumptions and constructs in SFL with a developmental orientation
  • Interpreting language as a naturally functional system
  • The metafunctional quality of language: Register and genre
  • Exploring the dialectic between the system and the instance: The cline of instantiation
  • The hierarchy of stratification
  • Two forms of semiosis: Congruent and metaphorical
  • Taking SFL one step further: The challenge of curricular thinking
  • Detailing the benefits of an SFL-inspired curricular framework
  • Concluding comments
  • References

Stella Neumann / Rebekah Wegener / Jennifer Fest /
Paula Niemietz / Nicole Hützen (eds.)

Challenging Boundaries in Linguistics

Systemic Functional Perspectives

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About the editors

The editors, Stella Neumann, Rebekah Wegener, Jennifer Fest, Paula Niemietz and Nicole Hützen, work together at the chair of English linguistics at RWTH Aachen University and share a research interest in systemic functional linguistics.

About the book

Linguistics, like any discipline, is full of boundaries. However, in nature, as Ruqaiya Hasan points out, there are no clear cut boundaries. The participants of the 42nd International Systemic Functional Congress held at RWTH Aachen University addressed and challenged the notion of boundaries in linguistics in many creative ways. Twenty-one of the papers presented at the congress are collated in this volume. The six sections cover topics that challenge theoretical notions and stances, and explore historical, interpersonal and lexicogrammatical boundaries as well as those between languages and in language development. The volume presents a state of the art overview of systemic functional linguistic theorising with extensions into other theoretical frameworks.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Challenging boundaries and bending rules: An introduction

Section 1

Challenging boundaries in theory

Lise Fontaine

Fluid boundaries and the categorization of nominal expressions

Karen Malcolm

Communication linguistics as a social and cognitive semiotic

Monika Kavalir

Post-Deictic and grounding

Section 2

Challenging boundaries over time

Michael Cummings

Systemic functional diachronic linguistics: Theory and application

David Banks

The dawn of the eighteenth century: A challenging boundary for the academic article

Ana Elina Martínez-Insua

On the contentfulness of Themes in English historical medical texts

Claire Urbach, Christopher Land

An appliable linguistics indeed: SFL and the structural potential of ancient letters

Section 3

Exploring boundaries of interpersonal expressions

Haeyeon Kim

Interpersonal meanings of the free-standing really in conversation←5 | 6→

Natalia Ignatieva

Attitude in student texts: Analysis of verbal, mental and relational clauses in Spanish

María Aloy Mayo

From Cosmogirl to Cosmovoter: Appraisal analysis of Cosmopolitan’s coverage of the 2014 US midterm elections

Section 4

Challenging lexicogrammar

Timo Lothmann, Tatiana Serbina

On the overlap of grammatical metaphor and conceptual metaphor in political discourse: A reconciliatory approach

Lucia Rottava, Sulany Silveira dos Santos

Grammatical metaphor: A window to understand rewriting in academic contexts

Margaret Berry

Challenging Moves and Supporting Moves in discourse

Section 5

Treading boundaries in translation

Waleed Othman

Explicitational enhancement in translation

Marilena Di Bari

Operationalizing Appraisal multilingually

Paula Niemietz, Stella Neumann, Jonas Freiwald

Shifts in Theme and Subject realization in English-German translation

Daniel Couto-Vale

Text production and produced texts ←6 | 7→

Section 6

Learning: Boundaries and beyond

Margaret A. Berg, Jingzi Huang

Language objectives beyond vocabulary: Working with content area teachers for linguistically responsive instruction

Jumani Clarke

Expansion in law student essays: The relationship between success and logical reasoning in the Legal Problem Question Answer genre

Arsenio Jesús Moya Guijarro

Processing reality in picture books: A multimodal systemic functional and cognitive study

Heidi Byrnes

Meeting the challenge of instructed language development: Reflections on systemic functional contributions ←7 | 8→ ←8 | 9→

Challenging boundaries and bending rules:
An introduction

“The power gained from abstraction is to have to define data in such a manner that it does not include everything that may be going on, for in nature there are no clear cut, given boundaries.” (Hasan 1995, 187)

“In nature”, Hasan (1995) contends, “there are no clear cut, given boundaries”. And yet, for cognitive efficiency, if nothing else, we appear to need to reflect on existence as a series possessing boundaries. The same pressure to define the day by hours, minutes and seconds is reflected in our division of the flow of social processes into bounded contexts, but these boundaries are socially constructed and open to challenge.

Linguistics, like any discipline, is full of boundaries. We set boundaries, we live with boundaries, we push boundaries and we challenge and break boundaries. In theories which are organised around meaning, the boundaries that we work with are in most cases fuzzy. While most structural approaches can concentrate on language as an isolate, a meaning-based approach must go outside language and this, as Halliday (2003, 28) suggests, means working with fuzzy boundaries at all levels.

To challenge a boundary is not always to criticise it or tear it down. Challenging a boundary is a process of testing, and there are many boundaries that one might want to test or explore: we might, for instance, challenge boundaries of segments in sequences of language use, boundaries of categories when we are not certain whether a phenomenon is best characterised as categorical or gradual. We might want to explore the boundaries between modalities and semiotic systems or the boundaries between literary and non-literary language use. We might also want to challenge the boundaries of stages in the development of a given language or the boundaries between languages.

Boundaries are also something that we construct and learn from an early age and we might wish to understand and challenge the ways that we learn about and act within boundaries, or the ways that we teach boundaries to others. Regardless of our specific focus, most of these questions involve challenging the traditional fields of interest of linguistics – our own categories – and questioning and perhaps redefining the boundaries of what it means to be a linguist now and in the future.←9 | 10→

The participants of the 42nd International Systemic Functional Congress held at RWTH Aachen University in July 20151 took up the notion of boundaries in linguistics in many ways. Twenty-one of the papers presented at the Congress are collated in this volume. Like the Congress itself, these papers span many of the topics systemicists are concerned with world-wide: several papers discuss appraisal, several deal with language development and education from various perspectives, grammatical metaphor is investigated or at least touched upon variously, Theme and Theme structure are examined and, lastly, multimodality is taken into consideration. There is a welcome focus on historical analyses as well as on translation-related issues. Acting on the invitation in the call for papers, most papers discuss links between systemic functional linguistics and other functional frameworks, many of which with a cognitive orientation. While there is an overwhelming focus on the analysis of English, languages covered also include Arabic, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

We begin the volume with a section addressing some theoretical questions before zooming in to more fine-grained areas of linguistic inquiry, only to zoom out again to applied fields that cover a wider range – and combination – of linguistic phenomena. The volume is framed by two plenary papers.

Section 1 Challenging boundaries in theory opens with Lise Fontaine’s plenary paper on “Fluid boundaries and the categorization of nominal expressions”. In this paper, Fontaine puts the discussion of boundaries and the role of categories in linguistics at the center stage for the discussion of nominal expressions. Her discussion proceeds in three successive steps. First she shows how nominalisations are not necessarily – or even often not at all – linked in terms of word formation to the verbs to which they may still be semantically related. Second she discusses the distribution of nouns and verbs in noun-verb conversion, reporting results that indicate a prevalence of the nominal elements in the pairs. In the last step, she looks at the broader context of nominal groups and compares them to clauses. Fontaine provides a compelling argument for the fluidity of boundaries between accepted categories. In her discussion of the connections between systemic functional linguistics and communication linguistics Karen Malcolm addresses challenging boundaries between different linguistic schools. In particular, her paper “Communication linguistics as a social and cognitive semiotic” considers the way in which communication linguistics, extending beyond linguistics to all kinds of modalities and taking on board cognitive aspects as well, can enrich the analysis←10 | 11→ of humour. The last paper in this section, “Post-Deictic and grounding” by Monika Kavalir, returns to the nominal group. Kavalir takes the post-Deictic, according to Halliday and Matthiessen (2014, 373) a second deictic element in the nominal group that further specifies the identification of the head noun, as a test case for challenging the boundaries between the systemic functional account of the structure of the nominal group and Langacker’s account in the framework of cognitive grammar. Kavalir’s paper is especially welcome in showing how breaking boundaries between different functional theories can enrich our understanding of linguistic phenomena.

The papers in Section 2 Challenging boundaries over time adopt a diachronic perspective. Michael Cummings’s contribution “Systemic functional diachronic linguistics: Theory and application” opens the section with a diachronic exposition of the verbal system of English, proposing four principles for diachronic description and showing how they apply to the verb group simplex. He concludes that much of verbal deixis in Present-Day English is an expansion of possibilities formed by the early Modern English period and represents a modern phenomenon. In “The dawn of the eighteenth century: A challenging boundary for the academic article”, David Banks uses metafunctional analysis to evaluate the similarity of linguistic features among three journals, two French and one English, all published in 1699. His study compares Thematic structure, Process Types and modality across the journals, illustrating the close relationship between texts and their contexts. With the study “On the contentfulness of Themes in English historical medical texts”, Ana Elina Martinez-Insua contributes a diachronic characterization of medical writing from several perspectives. She analyses textual variation in the organisation of clause constituents in Early Modern English medical texts addressed at different types of audiences, providing evidence for the existence of an interconnection between aspects of tenor and intra-genre variation in weight and reference of Subject Themes and confirming that Subject Themes in medical texts addressed at a learned audience exhibit a high degree of contentfulness. Claire Urbach and Christopher Land, in the final paper of the section, contribute to biblical research in the sub-discipline of epistolary research in “An appliable linguistics indeed: SFL and the structural potential of ancient letters”. After an initial survey of descriptions of the register of the ancient letter, they provide a multidimensional analysis of five early Pauline letters, examining Mood, Polarity, Agency and Process Type. The results are used to identify semantically coherent segments of the text.

Section 3 Exploring boundaries of interpersonal expressions addresses interpersonal meanings with a focus on Appraisal. Haeyeon Kim’s paper on “Interper←11 | 12→sonal meanings of the free-standing really in conversation” characterises the use and meanings of free-standing really in a range of interactional contexts. Kim extends previous research to view really as an indicator of the need for additional information within the conversation. The work suggests that interactional context is an important component in explanations of the interpersonal functions of discourse markers. In “Attitude in student texts: Analysis of verbal, mental and relational clauses in Spanish”, Natalia Ignatieva draws on features across the boundaries between ideational and interpersonal meanings to examine how writers – in her case academic novices in a Spanish-speaking context – exploit different Process Types to express Attitude in Spanish. She provides corpus-based evidence for the ‘judgemental’ voice of student writers. In the final paper in this section, María Aloy Mayo’s “From Cosmogirl to Cosmovoter: Appraisal analysis of Cosmopolitan’s coverage of the 2014 US midterm elections” analyses linguistic features carrying positive and negative semantic meaning with the aim of evaluating linguistically the role of women in politics as presented in a series of articles in the magazine Cosmopolitan. Within the framework of Appraisal Aloy Mayo shows differences in negative Attitude and Intensification in the respective discourses of Cosmopolitan which are related to particular topics focussing on women’s rights.

The four papers in Section 4 Challenging lexicogrammar are concerned with lexicogrammar and challenging some accepted categories. The first two papers take stock of grammatical metaphor. In their corpus-based study “On the overlap of grammatical metaphor and conceptual metaphor in political discourse: A reconciliatory approach” Timo Lothmann and Tatiana Serbina examine instances of metaphors exhibiting potential intersections of two different theoretical approaches. They show that the systemic functional and the cognitive approach to metaphor combined offer a fruitful way to present a more diverse picture of different degrees of metaphor complexity. They emphasise the complementarity of systemic functional and cognitive frameworks and propose an integrative model for metaphor analysis, taking into account multiple discourse-functional layers. Lucia Rottava and Sulany Silveira dos Santos report on the preliminary findings of a qualitative-interpretative study examining how novice writers deal with academic literacy and focussing on the concepts of rewriting and grammatical metaphor. By focusing on the changes students introduced into the rewritten excerpts of their texts, the authors show that rewriting is most often conceived of as text expansion, and further, that ideational grammatical metaphors are used in the first version of the text, but not in the rewritten excerpts, where students instead show a preference for interpersonal metaphors. Foreshadowing Section 6, these←12 | 13→ findings suggest that there is a need for explicit teaching of lexicogrammatical resources to better equip students with the skills necessary for evaluating their own writing and the writing process. By way of linking the analysis of discourse Moves to metafunctional distinctions, Margaret Berry adopts the most literal meaning of the Congress theme in her contribution “Challenging Moves and Supporting Moves in discourse”. In her discussion of Moves in discourse that challenge the previous speaker’s Move, Berry also challenges existing classifications of Moves in discourse. Drawing on a wealth of instructive examples from different sources she argues that this type of Move, along with Queries and Dispreferred Moves, cross-classifies with the metafunctions and shows Challenges in operation in various contexts.

The two final sections broaden the scope to cover applied areas of linguistics. As its title suggests, Section 5 Treading boundaries in translation focusses on translation-related questions. Waleed Othman’s chapter “Explicitational enhancement in translation” draws on systemic functional linguistics to analyse aspects of translation and puts forward a model for identifying and classifying optional translational shifts of explicitation. Using a 50-page sample from translated data, he identifies recurrent patterns of optional explicitational shifts involving experiential enhancement and uses them to determine the extent to which translators differ in their tendencies toward explicitation. His preliminary analyses provide evidence for shifts that lead to meanings more explicit than in the source texts, with tendencies varying according to enhancing functions and translators. Marilena di Bari examines Appraisal, a framework already taken up in Section 3, from a multilingual and translation-related point of view in “Operationalizing Appraisal multilingually”. She reports on combined quantitative and qualitative analyses of a translation corpus consisting of English originals and translations into Italian and Russian as well as a comparable component containing originals in all three languages. Di Bari’s analysis shows differences in the expression of Appraisal in the three languages as well as shifts in the use of Appraisal devices in translations, especially in what she calls force, namely the intensity of a modifier. In “Shifts in Theme and Subject realization in English-German translation” Paula Niemietz, Stella Neumann and Jonas Freiwald offer insights into contrastive differences in Theme, using corpus data from the register of popular-scientific writings. Given that English and German show some incompatible constraints in the mapping of Subject and Theme, the focus is on the preferred choices made by translators in order to contend with these diverging restrictions. Their results show that translators have a range of options for changes in the Theme as a reaction to the requirements of the target language. In his contribution “Text production and←13 | 14→ produced texts”, Daniel Couto-Vale takes stock of elements in the translation process and how best to conceptualise these, drawing on systemic functional notions. Using data from keystroke logging experiments, he delineates different types of transformations during the text production process that allow the capturing of the notoriously hidden cognitive processes during translating.

Details

Pages
493
Year
2017
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631701409
ISBN (PDF)
9783653068382
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631701416
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631672334
DOI
10.3726/b10693
Language
English
Publication date
2017 (March)
Keywords
Linguistics Systemic functional linguistics Functional language theory Language development Translation Appraisal
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2017. 493 pp., 56 b/w graphs, 60 b/w tables

Biographical notes

Stella Neumann (Volume editor) Rebekah Wegener (Volume editor) Jennifer Fest (Volume editor) Paula Niemietz (Volume editor) Nicole Hützen (Volume editor)

The editors, Stella Neumann, Rebekah Wegener, Jennifer Fest, Paula Niemietz and Nicole Hützen, work together at the chair of English linguistics at RWTH Aachen University and share a research interest in systemic functional linguistics.

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496 pages