Hello all,
The first Sydney Friday seminar of the semester is this Friday, with Jim Martin
kicking us off: 4pm Sydney time Friday 13th August.
With lockdown happening at the moment in Sydney, we’ll be online, but hopefully
toward the end of semester we will be able to come together face to face again.
The link is: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84093744071
All welcome. Below is Jim’s abstract and the schedule for the semester.
Yaegan
Construing entities: types of structure
J. R. Martin
In this talk I address some issues arising from recent SFL work on language
description, focusing on types of structure. In particular I will look at SFG's
traditional distinction between multivariate and univariate structures and
their association with non-recursive and recursive systems respectively
(Halliday 1981, 1979). Drawing on descriptions of nominal group structure (in
English, Tagalog, Spanish and Korean), I'll suggest that the association of
multivariate structure with non-recursive systems and univariate structure with
recursive systems needs to be relaxed. Doing so makes room for recognition of
non-iterative dependency structure, which I'll refer to as subjacency structure
(first foregrounded as duplexes in Rose's work on Pitjantjatjara; 2001) – a
structure which can be usefully applied to the analysis of what are often
fudged as 'structure markers' in SFG descriptions (i.e. adpositions and
linkers).
Halliday, M A K 1981 (1965) Types of Structure. M A K Halliday & J R Martin
[Eds.] Readings in Systemic Linguistics. London: Batsford. 29-41.
Halliday, M A K 1979 Modes of meaning and modes of expression: types of
grammatical structure, and their determination by different semantic functions.
D J Allerton, E Carney, D Holcroft [Eds] Function and Context in Linguistics
Analysis: essays offers to William Haas. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 57-79
Rose, D 2001 The Western Desert code: an Australian cryptogrammar. Canberra:
Pacific Linguistics.
Date
Presenter
Topic
13th August
Jim Martin
Construing entities: types of structure
20th August
Ed McDonald
Back to the future: Descriptive adequacy in Halliday’s The Language of the
Chinese "Secret History of the Mongols"
27th August
Dragana Stosic
An axial perspective on Serbian nominal groups
3rd September
Yaegan Doran
Types of structure revisited
10th September
Geoff Williams
Semantic variation theory as appliable linguistics: Exploring contexts for
melanoma treatment.
17th September
Helen Caple & Ping Tian
Analysing the representation of diversity in early childhood picture books:
Challenges for multimodal discourse analysis
24th September
Mary Macken-Horarik
'Building a knowledge structure in school English: Troubles and (potential)
triumphs
Mid-semester break
(ASFLA)
8th October
Sally Humphrey & Dragana Stosic
Towards a social semiotic perspective on Health Literacy
15th October
Xiaoqin Wu
Articulating social discourse and enacting spatial pedagogy: A multifaceted
understanding of rhythm and space
22nd October
Anna Crane
Interpersonal meaning in Gija: contributing understandings to revitalisation
programs
29th October
Bev Derewianka
Recontextualising a pedagogical grammar from theory to classroom practice
5th November
Alison Moore
#Recover South Coast: social media in bushfire recovery
12th November
Thu Ngo
Functions of film sounds from the systemic functional semiotics perspective
Y. J. DORAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
