Meaning Making in Text: Multimodal and Multilingual Functional Perspectives

Meaning Making in Text extends the notion of text as a vehicle for ever-changing and complex forms of communication. Based on recent developments in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), it proposes a range of analytical tools for accessing a variety of discourses in different contexts. The book presents studies of linguistic and multimodal phenomena concerning English and minority European languages that, until now, have received very limited attention, and offers proposals for analysing text in terms of their application to pedagogy. The contributors demonstrate the increasingly rich potential of SFL to provide a refreshingly powerful account of human nature and the ways it can be applied that go well beyond those to do with language itself.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Sonja Starc, Carys Jones and Arianna Maiorani PART I: PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE IN TEXT 1. Thematic Structure and Progression in some Late Seventeenth Century Texts; David Banks 2. Multifunctional Roles of the First Person in Academic Texts; Toini Rahtu 3. The Position of Connectors in Slovene and Croatian Linguistic Discourse: a Corpus Based Approach; Tatjana Balazic Bulc and Vijko Gorjanc 4. Nominalization as a Discursive Phenomenon from the Perspective of Text Cognition; Katja Plemenitas 5. Exploring Language in Verbal Art: a Case Study in K. Mansfield's 'Bliss'; Adriana Pagano and Annabelle Lukin PART II: DEVELOPMENTS IN MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 6. Positioning the Reader in a Polyfunctional Text: Attitude and Reading Path In a Modern Swedish Handbook on Gardening; Andreas Nord 7. Revisiting Hitchcock: An Alternative Multimodal Reading of Interactive Patterns in 'Psycho'; Arianna Maiorani 8. Meaning in Images: Complexity and Variation across Cultures; Claudia Stoian 9. Language as Access: Transposition and Translation of Audiovisual Text as a Vehicle of Meaning and a Gateway to Understanding; Christopher Taylor PART III: APPLICATIONS TO PEDAGOGY 10 . Multimodal Analysis of Genres of Economic Representation in EAP/ESP; Mersini Karagevrekis 11. Decoding Multimodal Text by Untrained Readers: A Message for Mother Tongue Pedagogy; Sonja Starc 12. Information Flow in Written Text and the Writer-reader Relationship; Carys Jones 13. Scaffolding Semogenesis: Designing Teacher/Student Interaction for Face-to-Face and On-line Learning; James R. Martin and S.Dreyfus

About the Author :
Sonja Starc is Associate Professor for the Slovene Language at the University of Primorska, Slovenia. Previously she has worked as a teacher in a Slovene in high school, an adviser on the National Institute of Education and National Examination centre, and an editor of the journal Slovene in Schools. She has organized international conferences, and publishes articles in Slovene and English. Carys Jones has taught and researched on how language helps learning at King's College London, UK, in Education and the allied health disciplines over many years. Her publications are about her interests in systemic functional linguistics and complementing approaches. She initiated and, until recently, ran the Language in Higher Education Research Group. Arianna Maiorani is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the English and Drama Department of Loughborough University, UK, where she teaches linguistics and dance theatre. She has extensively published in the fields of SFL and Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis with a particular focus on filmic discourse, online environments and the semiotics of space. A former dancer and still a professional choreographer, she is currently working on a SFL approach to the semiotics of dance movement.