Hello all,
This week’s Sydney SFL Friday seminars will be by Alex Garcia (USYD) with a
talk entitled:
“Guerra, conflicto y violencia”: understanding the construal of organised
violence in Spanish.
As usually, it will be held this Friday at 4-5:30pm Sydney time, in The
University of Sydney Quad Seminar Room S204 (The Oriental Room), followed by a
drink together at the Gardener’s Grill in Victoria Park.
For those that cannot make it to Sydney, the seminars will be livestreamed
through zoom at:
https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84805546745
The abstract and full schedule for Semester 1 is below!
Yaegan
Abstract:
Dr Alex Garcia
The University of Sydney
“Guerra, conflicto y violencia”: understanding the construal of organised
violence in Spanish.
Official discourse on the importance of human rights, freedom and peace starkly
contrasts with the prevalence of organised violence throughout the last century
and until today. Whether in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine or Colombia, the mass
murder of civilians is ignored, tolerated, or even supported by ordinary
citizens of the perpetrating nation-states. In the justification of this type
of violence, Malesevic, (2017) argues, ideology plays a crucial role, which is
largely achieved through its interplay with language.
Lukin (2018) argues that violence is legitimised by categorising it as ‘war’.
Using a wide range of English Language corpora, she shows how, despite its
inherently violent nature, ‘war’ appears to be a neutral category rarely
collocating with ‘violence’. A study of this kind in Spanish has not been
conducted to date.
The purpose of this study is to understand the ideologies surrounding organized
violence by analyzing and contrasting the semantic and grammatical patterning
of the lemmas guerra (war), conflicto (conflict), and violencia (violence) in
three corpora: Es1010 (a 10B corpus of Spanish texts from the web), a corpus of
the final report of the Truth Commission in Colombia, and a corpus of news
reports on the internal conflict in the Colombian press. The analysis shows
that the concept of war in Spanish, although not as sanitised as in English, is
construed in a way that naturalises and legitimises organised violence.
Date
Presenter
Topic
23rd Feb
Lorenzo Logi &
Michele Zappavigna
The University of New South Wales
GIFS as social media paralanguage
1st March
Alex Garcia
The University of Sydney
“Guerra, conflicto y violencia”: understanding the construal of organised
violence in Spanish.
8th March
Mohamed Ali Bardi
Macquarie University
Towards a Systemic Functional Description of the nominal group in Arabic
15th March
Chunhui Zhang
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China & The University of Sydney
Fact construction in China's civil court trials: from the perspective of field
22nd March
Georgia Carr
The Australian National University & The University of Sydney
‘Who went upstairs for some private FUN?’ Unpacking, repacking and assessing
consent in sex education
29th March
No Seminar – Good Friday
5th April
No Seminar – Mid semester Break
12th April
Jennifer Blunden
University of Technology Sydney & University College London
‘You have to go off instinct’: writing in secondary school Visual Arts
19th April
Erika Matruglio
The University of Wollongong
The complicated case of cultural identity.
26th April
Lucy Macnaught
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Visible semiotic mediation as an ‘on ramp’ for investigating co-writing with
GPTs.
3rd May
Olivia Inwood
Western Sydney University
& Mohammad Makki
The University of Wollongong
Discourse of mis-disinformation on social media during a pandemic: A
comparative analysis of Persian and Australian Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram
data
10th May
Marie Quinn
University of Technology, Sydney
Using functional basis for a community reading program in rural Timor-Leste
17th May
Anni Hellwig
The University of Wollongong
"Digital, multimodal composition in English for architects and civil engineers
programs: Implications for theory and practice"
24th May
Thu Ngo
The University of New South Wales
Multimodal construction of literary concepts in children's film
Y. J. DORAN
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
Adjunct Professor, Linguistics, Indonesian University of Education
Honorary Associate, Linguistics, The University of Sydney
