Hello all!
This week’s Sydney Friday seminar is from Xiaoqin Wu, 4pm Sydney time Friday
15th October.
Although lockdown has just wrapped up for most of Sydney, it hasn’t yet for the
universities, so we’ll still be online, but hopefully we will be able to come
together face to face again in not too long.
The link is: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84093744071
All welcome. Below is the abstract and the schedule for the semester.
Yaegan
Modeling rhythm as a multifaceted construct: A social semiotic understanding of
rhythm in space
Xiaoqin Wu, UNSW, Sydney
Rhythm has been assigned a great significance both in everyday life and in
academic research, especially in studies of temporal structures and processes.
It has been claimed as a basic mode of being (You 1994), and people even go as
far as to say, “I rhythmize, therefore I am” (Jousse 1974: 175). However, in
the current modelings of rhythm, there is an over-emphasis of the temporal and
an under-emphasis of the spatial in rhythm analysis. In light of this, the
presentation provides a multifaceted theorization of rhythm that synthesizes
two complementary accounts (e.g. Lefebvre 1996, 2004; Van Leeuwen 1985, 1992,
2005). This model presents the ways rhythm functions to make semiotic meaning
that symbolically articulates social meaning (Hasan 1989), which accounts for
the body on the near side and power on the far side. Under this theorization,
space and time are considered together in the exploration of rhythm configured
as spatial-temporal experiences.
By contextualizing space and time to the design and the use of a so-called
‘Active Learning Classroom’ in film lessons in the tertiary settings, this
presentation conducts a nuanced multimodal rhythm analysis of co-instantiated
speech (Halliday 1970; Martin & Rose 2007) and movement (Han 2022; He 2020;
McMurtrie 2016; Ngo, Hood et al 2021) patterns in teacher-student embodied
interactions. Through the analysis, this presentation exposes how the
institutional hegemonic class attempts to reinforce its power and control via
inscribing regular rhythms in the designed space, thus appropriating the space
and disciplining the body to perform confirmatively, and how teachers and
students adapt or even resist this appropriation and regularization via
imprinting their own beats in the performed space. In doing so, this
presentation develops systemic ways of analyzing, describing and interpreting
the multifaceted nature of rhythm by attending to its material, semiotic and
social sides. By coupling space and time, this presentation also contributes to
a temporal understanding of space and a spatial understanding of time, which is
particularly useful in investigating the patterns of multiscalar temporality.
In doing so, it ultimately contributes to an understanding of the ways space
participates in the production and reproduction of social relations (Ravelli &
McMurtrie 2016).
References
Halliday, M.A.K. (1970). A course in spoken English: Intonation. London: Oxford
University Press.
Han, J. (2022). A social semiotic framework for music-dance correspondence. PhD
thesis, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Hasan, R. (1985/1989). Linguistics, language and verbal Art. New York: Oxford
University Press.
He, Y. F. (2020). Animation as a semiotic mode: Construing knowledge in science
animated videos. PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
Jousse, M. (1974). L'anthropologie du geste. Paris: Gallimard.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on Cities (ed. by E. Koffman & E. Lebas). Oxford:
Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythm analysis: space, time and everyday life. London:
Continuum.
Martin, J. R. & Rose, D. (2007). Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the
clause. London: Continuum.
McMurtrie, R. (2016). The semiotics of movement in space. London & New York:
Routledge.
Ngo, T., Hood, S., Martin J.R., Painter, C. Smith, B. & M. Zappavigna. (2021).
Modeling paralanguage from the perspective of Systemic Functional Semiotics:
Theory and Application. London: Bloomsbury.
Ravelli, L., & McMurtrie, R. (2016). Multimodality in the built environment:
Spatial discourse analysis. New York: Routledge.
Van Leeuwen, T. (1985). Rhythmic structure of the film text. In T.A. van Dijk
(ed). Discourse and communication – New approaches to the analysis of mass
media discourse and communication. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Van Leeuwen, T. (1992). Rhythm and social context. In P. Tench (ed). Studies in
systemic phonology. London: Frances Pinter.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing social semiotics: An introductory textbook.
London: Routledge.
You, H. L. (1994). Defining rhythm: Aspects of an anthropology of rhythm.
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,18, 361-384.
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
Factoring out structure: Nuclearity, linearity and iteration
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