Hello all!
This week’s Sydney SFL Friday seminar is from Georgia Carr – abstract below.
We are to face at Sydney Uni, from 4-5:30pm Fridays in the Oriental Room of the
Quad at Sydney Uni, followed by our regular catch up at the pub.
We will also be livestreaming the seminar at:
https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84002530042
(If you cannot make face to face or the live stream and you wish to see the
talk, please contact the speaker who will have access to a recording).
Below is the abstract for this week’s talk, and the schedule for the semester.
If you can, it’d be wonderful to see you all in person!
Yaegan
Doing the heavy lifting: Technicalising and iconising attitude in sex education
Georgia Carr
The University of Sydney
In this talk, I begin with SFL’s notion of ‘mass’, that is the degree to which
meaning is condensed (Martin 2017). In particular, I am concerned with items
with strong mass i.e. highly condensed meanings, such as technicality from the
sciences (e.g. nucleus, photosynthesis) and the law (e.g. consent), as well as
iconised meanings which we might associate more with the humanities (e.g. the
Olympic flame, the white dove symbolising peace). We might think of these as
items which do the ‘heavy lifting’ when it comes to building fields
(ideationally) and building bond networks/affiliating (interpersonally). Using
examples from sex education, I will show why existing descriptions of
technicality and icon/isation need renovating. I propose new theoretical terms,
as well as a typology of highly condensed meanings.
References
Martin, J.R. (2017). Revisiting field: Specialized knowledge in secondary
school science and humanities discourse. Onomázein, special issue on SFL,
111-148. DOI: 10.7764/onomazein.sfl.05
Date
Presenter
Topic
11th March
Yaegan Doran
Sundanese nominal groups: Text and textual meaning
18th March
Annabelle Lukin
Masculine power in international war law: a (preliminary) linguistic inquiry
25th March
Joshua Han
Examining social media 'content creation' from a social semiotic perspective
through a multimodal rhythmic analysis of a TikTok video
1st April
Mary Macken-Horarik
Building a knowledge structure in school English: Troubles and (potential)
triumphs
8th April
Rosemary Huisman
Temporal meanings and SFL worlds of experience
Usyd Mid-semester break
29th April
David Rose
Four ways to tell a story
6th May
Alison Moore & Aurélie Mallet
#RecoverSouthCoast: how can SFL/SFS inform the study of social media use for
rebuilding community after bushfire and other disasters
13th May
Dragana Stosic &
Sally Humphrey
Negotiating the validity of health information on social media
20th May
Georgia Carr
Doing the heavy lifting: Technicalising and iconising attitude in sex education
27th May
Len Unsworth
Analysing Affiliation in Infographics for High School Science
