Hello all!
Just a reminder about our final Friday seminar for the year this arvo from Thu
Ngo. Details below.
See you all there!
Yaegan
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Date: Monday, 8 November 2021 at 12:27 pm
To: "asflanet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <asflanet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
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Subject: [asflanet] Re: Friday Seminar
Hello all!
This week is our last Sydney Friday seminar for the year, by Thu Ngo, 4pm
Sydney time Friday 12th November.
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 next year.
The link is: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84093744071
All welcome. Below is the abstract and the schedule for the semester. Thank you
to everyone who has presented and attended the seminars through this year! It
has been really wonderful to see you all and see the community’s work thriving!
Yaegan
Conceptualising film sounds from an SFL perspective to inform teaching of
multimodal literature: The ideational metafunction.
Thu Ngo
Abstract:
The teaching of multimodal literature in digital formats such as Film,
Augmented Reality and iPad applications, necessitates all contributing semiotic
resources in the digital multimodal literary text being taken into account to
fully appreciate the art of digital multimodal storytelling. Although sound
contributes significantly to meaning making, it is hardly noticed unless it is
completely absent, particularly in films.
Driven by multimodal digital literature teaching and in response to the call
for comprehensive MULTIMODAL research (rather than bi-modal research), the
current study aims to address the following questions:
1. What kinds of sounds can we observe in the film?
2. What kinds of meanings can be made with sounds in films?
3. How do sounds interact with other meaning making resources to contribute to
the overall message of the story and the literary and aesthetic values of the
film?
The study draws on film studies, musicology, psycho-musicology, literature
studies (Altman, 1992; Audissino, 2017; Chion & Gorbman, 2009; Gorbman, 1987;
Manvell & Huntley, 1957; Weis & Belton, 1985; Wilcox, 2014; Balkwill &
Thompson, 1999; Chau, Wu, & Horner, 2015; Huron, 2008; Wu, Horner, & Lee, 2014)
in combination with Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic view on sounds to
conceptualise the categorisation and metafunctional meaning of film sound as
well as its roles in realising literary elements such as plot,
characterisation, setting and imagery. The study found that film sound can be
modelled from the systemic functional semiotic (SFS) perspective in terms of
ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. However, similar to the
modelling of paralanguage in which certain semiotic potential of paralanguage
is dependent on its co-occurrence with language, the semiotic potential of
certain types of film sound also depends on their co-occurrence with visual
images.
Within the scope of this presentation, firstly I’m going to propose the
categorisation of film sound according to its source (i.e. speech, music and
noise) and diegesis (i.e. diegetic and non-diegetic sound) and the ideational
metafunction of music and noise in films. Arguably, music and noise do not have
the affordances to represent Figures, Entities or Location but properties of
actions, from which interpretation can be made about the Figures and Entities
the sound represents. Secondly in the presentation I will discuss how knowledge
about the semiotics of film sounds can inform the teaching of critical
interpretation of film as a literary text in the school curriculum. The
interpersonal and textual metafunctions of film sound will be presented on
another occasion.
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
Claire Simpson-Smith
A question of worthiness: Use of evaluative language for persuasive purposes in
engineering
12th November
Thu Ngo
Conceptualising film sounds from an SFL perspective to inform teaching of
multimodal literature: The ideational metafunction.
Y. J. DORAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
