讲座：Whatever the grammar will allow

Topic: Whatever the grammar will allow

Speaker: Professor Jonathan Webster (City University of Hong Kong)

Time: 4:15 - 5:45pm, Monday 23 May 2016

Venue: Room 210, School of Foreign Languages Building

Abstract: M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory (SFL) describes language as a resource for making meaning. We make meaning to construe the phenomena of experience; to enact social relationships; and to create discourse.  What enables this meaning-making potential in language is the grammar, which is characterized by both functional diversity and a stratal organization. The richness of language derives from our ability to re-construe experience through exploiting the adjacent-possible across the stratal divide between meaning and wording, otherwise referred to as grammatical metaphor, combined with our use of linguistic patterning to construct cohesive and coherent texts.

Organizer: School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University