Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics; Grammar, Text and Discursive Context; Donna R. Miller; Paul Bayley

Edited by

Donna R. Miller [+–]

University of Bologna

Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she heads the Research Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has focused on register analysis in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations exploring the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. Recently she has been investigating the Hasanian model of ‘verbal art’. She is co-author of Language and Verbal Art Revisited (with Monica Turci, Equinox Publishing, 2007).

Paul Bayley [+–]

University of Bologna

Paul Bayley is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna. He is head of teaching and learning activities at the Bologna University Language Centre. He is co-editor of European Identity: What the Media Say (with Geoffrey Williams, OUP, 2012) and Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict (with John Morley, Routledge, 2009).

This volume addresses the increasingly typical hybrid nature of text and discourse. In an SFL perspective, this also means that cultural and situational contexts must be seen as being always potentially hybrid or, as Hasan has fittingly put it, ‘permeable’, such permeability being based on the powerful activation/construal dialectic between discursive situation and language, system and instance. The authors of the papers in this collection variously focus on hybridity within sociocultural contexts in which discourse occurs, investigate hybridity of discourse types (in a wide range of genres, registers, text-types, etc.), but also examine hybridity within the stratum of lexicogrammar itself. Moreover, the implications of hybridity for education and the professions are explored. The volume makes plain the multifaceted complexity of the phenomenon, as well as its rich potential as a theoretical construct in SFL.

Prelims

Acknowledgements [+–] vi

Donna R. Miller,Paul Bayley FREE

University of Bologna

The term ‘hybridity’ has been around for a long time and, for most of its history of use, has been pressed into the most disparate – and often dubious – services. In recent times it has become a sort of transdisciplinary ‘buzz word’ and it was about time that Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) also raised its voice on the subject. This volume addresses the increasingly typical hybrid nature of text and discourse. In an SFL perspective, this also means that cultural and situational contexts must be seen as being always potentially hybrid or, as Hasan has fittingly put it, ‘permeable’, such permeability being based on the powerful activation/construal dialectic between discursive situation and language, system and instance. The authors of the papers in this collection variously focus on hybridity within sociocultural contexts in which discourse occurs, investigate hybridity of discourse types (in a wide range of genres, registers, text-types, etc.), but also examine hybridity within the stratum of lexicogrammar itself. Moreover, the implications of hybridity for education and the professions are explored. The volume makes plain the multifaceted complexity of the phenomenon, as well as its rich potential as a theoretical construct in SFL.

List of figures [+–] ix-xi

Donna R. Miller,Paul Bayley FREE

University of Bologna

List of tables [+–] xi-xii

Donna R. Miller,Paul Bayley FREE

University of Bologna

Preliminaries

1. Hybridity & systemic functional linguistics [+–] 1-17

Donna R. Miller,Paul Bayley £17.50

University of Bologna

This volume addresses the increasingly typical nature of text and discourse: ‘hybridity’. In an SFL perspective, this means that the cultural and situational contexts that tend to activate meanings and wordings must also be seen as being ‘hybrid’, or as Hasan (2000) has more fittingly put it, ‘permeable’: “It is not simply that predetermined qualities of genres are being mixed, combined, hybridized: the fact of the matter is that by these devices people extend, elaborate and reclassify their discursive contexts. Derrida’s celebrated claim that one cannot not mix genres should really be rephrased as contexts of life cannot but be permeable; the rest follows by the dialectic of language and discursive situation”. This is indeed the main message, and mission, of the book, which focusses on hybridity/permeability within the social and cultural contexts in which discourse occurs and of discourse types (covering a wide range of genres, registers, text-types, etc.), but also hybridity within the stratum of lexicogrammar itself. The volume also addresses the implications of hybridity for education and the professions.

Part I Grammatical hybridity

2. On the (non)necessity of the hybrid category behavioural process [+–] 21-40

David Banks £17.50

Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France

David Banks is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France. He is a past Director of ERLA (Equipe de Recherche en Linguistique Appliquée) and a past Chairman of AFLSF (Association Française de la Linguistique Systémique Fonctionnelle). His research interests include the synchronic and diachronic analysis of scientific text, and the application of systemic functional linguistics to French. He has published over 80 academic articles and authored or edited over 20 books. His book The Development of Scientific Writing (2008) won the ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) Language and Linguistics Book Award in 2010.

In his provocative paper, David Banks takes issue with the neatness of the classification of process types as illustrated by the cover to IFG2 (Halliday 1994), maintaining that such neatness is illusory, whereas ‘…natural languages have the habit of being frustratingly untidy. They very rarely, if ever, fall into neat preprepared boxes’. Neatness is also not tantamount to correctness, or with the requisite clarity of status and definition that categories should have and the behavioural category does not. So he challenges the need for this too-‘hybrid’ ready-made ‘box’, admitting however that the phenomena it is meant to accommodate are indeed real and need to be dealt with. This he proposes can be done more satisfactorily at a greater level of delicacy, which would include networks providing the further choice between voluntary and involuntary perception and between projecting and nonprojecting verbal processes. Cases falling outside of these networks ‘can be analysed either as material or as mental, depending on the particular clause in which they appear; or indeed as both’ (emphasis added), meaning that process types can be seen as primary or secondary and that it is the context that will determine which, highlighting, for example, whether action in the physical world or a given mental state is of greater importance – which one might call a theory of permeable contexts and hybrid process types.

3. Hybridity in TRANSITIVITY: Phraseological and metaphorically derived processes in the system network for TRANSITIVITY [+–] 41-63

Gordon Tucker £17.50

Cardiff University (retired)

View Website

Dr Gordon Tucker was formerly Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University, and is now, in retirement, Honorary Research Fellow in the same Centre. His research is located within the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics, and in particular in the area of lexical and phraseological organisation within a Systemic Functional Grammar. He is the author of The Lexicogrammar of Adjectives (1998, Cassell Academic), and has published more than 40 journal articles and book chapters. He has taught courses as an invited scholar and has been a plenary speaker in Canada, India, South Korea, Brazil, Venezuela, France, Madagascar, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Much of his research and subsequent publications have involved modelling lexicogrammatical organisation in the light of corpus linguistic findings, and it has been especially the challenge of corpus linguistic research that has led to his seminal work on phraseology within a Systemic Functional model of language.

Gordon Tucker’s paper represents the alternative Cardiff Grammar (CaG) developed by Robin Fawcett and Gordon Tucker himself. Premising that lexicogrammatical hybridity is a problem for the design and organisation of the system network, Tucker’s chapter investigates hybridity in the transitivity system, scrupulously probing the potential interaction of different transitivity types in clausal patterns featuring phraseological and metaphorically derived processes. This he does by putting forward for testing a twofold hypothesis concerning a verb’s lexicogrammatical behaviour vis-à-vis its prototypical and metaphorical senses, after which he proceeds systematically to: a) define the extent to which the process in a given expression is hybrid or not on the basis of its use of metaphor/metonymy; b) apply various criteria tests for determining process type membership in any given expression; c) try out a range of alternatives for modelling these in the system network representation of the meaning potential available to speakers of a language and d) contemplate the lexicogrammatical consequences of each alternative. As the SFL separation of the semantic and lexicogrammatical strata is not shared by CaG, the task of modelling metaphoricity is an even thornier one, which, however, Tucker negotiates admirably. In conclusion he notes, among other qualms, that ‘It does appear that descriptions and procedures set up for prototypical cases strain under the weight of hybridity’. Nonetheless he would shun any solution that involved ‘[b]rushing the problem under the carpet’.

4. Hybridity and process types [+–] 64-81

Jorge Arús Hita £17.50

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

View Website

Jorge Arús Hita is senior lecturer in English language and linguistics at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

Jorge Arus Hita practices his grammatics at clause level as well, also aiming to account for what happens when a typically non-metaphorical lexical verb is used metaphorically. Hybrid processes, he suggests, undergo a transformation in meaning: the literal meaning – which he calls A – is transposed to a different area of the lexicogrammar – B – whereby the resulting hybrid meaning – C – is brought about. Accordingly, hybrid processes are seen as the intended product of literal plus metaphorical senses. Depending on the degree to which the metaphorical load is felt, three levels of hybridity are theorised. With processes whose metaphoricity is perceived as formidable, the A meaning is seen as more prominent than the B meaning in the interpretation of the resulting C meaning. Then there are those cases in which the metaphorical use is well-established and the weight of the A and B meanings fairly balanced. The third level occurs when the A and B meanings have so blended that they can no longer be felt as two distinct senses at all: ‘In this case, we are in front of a new lexicalised meaning, no longer a hybrid but rather … a highbred (as in ‘highbred cattle’) resulting from the previous process of hybridity’. Arùs Hita bolsters his argument by offering multiple analyses for each of these degrees of hybridity and exemplifying the distinctive semantic interplay taking place within each type of construction.

Part II Hybridity: Implications for pedagogy and professional practices

5. Re-orienting semantic dispositions: The role of hybrid forms of language use in university learning [+–] 85-108

Caroline Coffin £17.50

Open University

Caroline Coffin is Professor in English Language and Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK.

In her chapter, Caroline Coffin considers how one’s ‘semantic disposition’ (after Hasan 2009a) may be re-oriented (or not) through the process of institutionalized learning. As students appropriate and internalize concepts and perspectives from within and across different disciplines and apply these to personal and/or professional lived experience, they are learning to reconfigure the world. In so doing, their existing semantic dispositions are inevitably unsettled and re-formed – to a greater or lesser extent. So how does this occur? What role does language play? Coffin examines contexts of learning that activate meanings and wordings which can be seen as ‘hybrid’ from a number of perspectives. She argues that such contexts and discourses potentially enable students inhabiting a largely practical world constituted by specific lived experiences to enter into a predominantly theorized world constituted by abstract and generalized models of human behaviour, illustrating how, by expanding their semiotic resources, students become active agents in discursively extending, reclassifying and navigating between personal, professional and academic worlds.

6. Teaching through English: Maximal Input in meaning making [+–] 109-132

John Polias,Gail Forey £17.50

Lexis Education, Fitzroy, Australia

John Polias is Director of Lexis Education based in Fitzroy, Australia, an international consultancy in teaching and learning, which has written a series of professional development courses.

Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Gail Forey is Associate Professor and Associate Director for The Research Centre for Profesional Communication in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has co-edited Globalisation, Communication and the Workplace (Continuum, 2010).

John Polias and Gail Forey focus on language education and pedagogy in which the teacher uses various hybrid modes and resources. They discuss the value of SFL in teaching through English in different key learning areas (KLA’s) in Hong Kong, where the teacher maximizes access points for the learner by using multisemiotic resources related to a wide range of subject areas. The data, collected from the KLAs of Science, Information Technology, Art, Music and Physical Education, unambiguously show that different KLA’s demand different approaches to the construction of knowledge. These are amply illustrated, as are the hybrid resources used to construct, across the curriculum, knowledge through language. The chapter argues the value of a ‘teaching learning cycle’ (e.g. Christie and Martin 1997) and a pedagogic model in which the teacher and students take on varying degrees of responsibility in co-constructing meaning in multiple cycles. The ultimate aim of the cycles is to bring the student to the point of independently constructing both matter and meaning through activities whose final goal is knowledge development.

7. The multilayeredness of hybridity in the written stylistic analysis argument [+–] 133-153

Anne Isaac £17.50

Independent Scholar

Anne Isaac was formerly a lecturer in English for Academic Purposes at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Anne Isaac discusses hybridity as a multidimensional phenomenon (Sarangi this volume), applying the concept to the written stylistic analysis genre – seen as ‘a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of [a] culture’ (Martin 1984:25) – and considering its pedagogical implications for teaching academic writing to undergraduates for whom English is an L2. Data analysis probes multi-layered hybridity in the discursive organisation of the genre to determine which dimensions of hybridity are most likely to enable students to write more effectively. It reveals four dimensions of hybridity in the stylistic analysis genre which are amply discussed, along with the pedagogical implications of the findings which, among other things, show how innovation may actually enhance the effectiveness of an argument providing three crucial steps are fulfilled.

8. Activity types, discourse types and role types: Interactional hybridity in professional-client encounters [+–] 154-177

Srikant Sarangi £17.50

Aalborg University

Srikant Sarangi is Professor in Humanities and Medicine and Director of the Danish Institute of Humanities and Medicine/Health at Aalborg University, Denmark. Between 1993 and 2013, he was Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University. Currently he is also Professor in Language and Communication at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim (Norway); Visiting Research Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, The University of Hong Kong; and Visiting Professor at University of Malay. In 2012, he was awarded the title of ‘Academician’ by the Academy of Social Sciences, UK.

His research interests include: institutional and professional discourse; quality of life and risk communication in genetic counselling, HIV/AIDS, telemedicine, general practice and palliative care; intercultural pragmatics; language and identity in public life; ethnicity, race and discrimination in multicultural societies.

He is author and editor of twelve books, guest-editor of five journal special issues and has published nearly two hundred book chapters and journal articles in leading journals in discourse and communication. He is the editor of Text & Talk as well as the founding editor of Communication & Medicine and with (C. N. Candlin) of Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice.

Srikant Sarangi is the only non-practitioner of SFL to appear in this volume; his is a different, but not discordant, voice. His chapter offers his current thinking on the interplay of discoursal hybridity, role analysis and professional practice, emphasising how ‘hybridity and hybridisation are not simply linguistic … processes which are signalled through intertextuality and interdiscursivity; they also constitute communicative acts which are mediated by role-relationships in context-sensitive ways’. His playful metaphorical representation of the phenomenon’s internal and external dimensions – ‘KitKat hybridity’ – leads him to argue for the unpacking of the notion to distinguish its simple and complex forms at the interactional level. He contends that the concept of role, and in particular of role-set, can be mapped on to hybrid discourse types by re-examining key discourse analytic studies of professional practice in a range of institutional settings, and focusses especially on the hybrid activity type, genetic counselling. Sarangi ends by urging close attention to this interplay of discourse types and role types, seen as indispensable to analysis – if one would hope to be able to “account for different forms of hybridity, socio-historically and contingently, as well as ecologically and manifestly”.

Part III Registerial — and/or generic — hybridity

9. Hybridization: How language users graft new discourses on old root stock [+–] 181-204

Geoff Thompson† £17.50

University of Liverpool

Geoff Thompson, who died in 2015, was an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, UK, and received an honorary doctorate from Linnacus University, Sweden.

Geoff Thompson’s chapter aims at providing a ‘snap-shot’ of one stage in the development of particular internet registers: football and newspaper blogs. Thompson explores the hypothesis that informal speech is ‘the familiar root stock’ onto which features of new discourse types is ‘grafted’, thus producing hybrid texts that are created by the non-expert writer as s/he comes to grips with the unfamiliar discourse types produced by experts. Using corpus-based methods, he specifically attempts to identify patterns of lexicogrammatical features in such texts. On might say that Thompson’s findings are ‘hybrid’ in themselves. If on one hand variation across the sets of blogs clearly emerges from his analysis of the data, in the sense that ‘each set of blogs has generated its own conventions which differ from those of the other sets examined’, then, on the other, he also observes ‘fundamental similarities in their characteristics; and hybridity is one of the major characteristics which they have in common’. The initial hypothesis that informal speech would be the root stock onto which other types of discourse are grafted is substantiated, but Thompson also finds significant evidence that the process takes place in various ways and to varying degrees, depending on numerous factors influencing how bloggers, through their separate contributions to these ongoing texts, manage, to a greater or lesser extent, to negotiate their computer-mediated participation.

10. Registerial hybridity: Indeterminacy among fields of activity [+–] 205-239

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen,Kazuhiro Teruya £17.50

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Christian Matthiessen is Chair Professor and Head of Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. He is the editor and author of a number of books, most recently Introduction to Functional Grammar (co-authored with Michael Halliday, Hodder Arnold 2004), Construing Experience Through Meaning (co-authored with Michael Halliday, et. al., Continuum 2006), Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics (co-authored with Kazuhiro Teruya & Marvin Lam, 2010).

Kazuhiro Teruya is the author of several systemic functional books: two volumes of description of Japanese, co-authored books on key terms in SFL and a complete guide to systemic functional linguistics, an introduction to SFL in Japanese (edited and co-authored) and an edited series of Matthiessen’s collected works. Previously he taught at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, PRC and at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was also involved in the Language-based Intelligent Systems project at the Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, in Japan.

Christian Matthiessen and Kazuhiro Teruya clarify their theoretical and analytical position with their very title – Registerial hybridity: indeterminacy among fields of activity – and continue to do so throughout their chapter. They focus on the mixture of functional varieties of language working in diverse institutional domains, making use of a typology of registers that has been created by Matthiessen and other members of The PolySystemic Research Group at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and which are, as they put it, ‘seen “from above”, from the vantage point of context’. Their interpretation of ‘hybridity’ stems from the idea of indeterminacy that was proposed in Halliday and Matthiessen (1999:547–562) as a way of getting at and teasing out ‘fuzziness’, ‘vagueness’, ‘ambivalence’ etc.. Indeed the authors distinguish, discuss and exemplify a wide range of indeterminacy types: ambiguities, overlaps, blends and neutralizations. In closing, they return to the context-based register typology for the purpose of locating the cases of indeterminacy that have been examined within it, and consider still other kinds of register mixing, including satire as employing ‘effective registerial strategies for bringing features of commonly accepted views into critical relief’.

11. Woolf’s Lecture/Novel/Essay A Room of One’s Own [+–] 240-267

Carol Taylor Torsello £17.50

University of Padua (retired)

Carol Taylor Torsello retired in 2009 from her position as full professor at the University of Padua, Italy, where she taught English language and linguistics.

Carol Taylor Torsello asks how one can classify Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in terms of genre. Her analysis begins with a careful reading of the text to extract all the explicit textual indications of the genre, which, however, point to three different ones – lecture, novel and essay. Her next step is to consider the structure of Woolf’s text and compare this structure with ones proposed for the three genres. She finds that it is not impossible to fit the elements of Woolf’s text into the structure of each of the three genres, but that important specificities keep the match with each from being completely satisfactory. As a final step she posits a contextual configuration (CC) for Woolf’s text and for each of the three genres, and makes comparisons. The best match is with the CC of the essay. Nonetheless, important specificities distance Woolf’s text from the typical essay. Taylor Torsello suggests that the metaphor of hybridity fits the generic complexity of this text, because she sees Woolf as making deliberate, selective use of three of the generic ‘templates’ available to her in her attempt to free herself of the male dominated literary code and create a feminine style and a feminine genre.

12. Genre and register hybridization in an historical text [+–] 268-285

Michael Cummings £17.50

York University, Toronto.

Michael Cummings is Professor emeritus and Senior Scholar in the English Department of York University, Toronto. His research interests include Systemic Functional linguistic approaches to discourse and lexico-grammar in Old English and modern English.

Michael Cummings deals with a literary text as well, but a historical text which is a classic reading in introductory anthologies of Old English literature, called the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos quando Dani maxime persecuti sunt eos, that is ‘the sermon of the Wolf to the English at a time when the Danes were oppressing them severely’. His overall purpose is ‘the mutual illumination of this text and SFL register and genre theory’, especially aiming to show that SFL approaches and categories can also be highly appropriate to examining such a remote historical dialect/text; and then to demonstrate the extent to which Hasan’s thoughts on the ‘permeability’ of register/ genre categories (in (Halliday and Hasan 1989:107) are invaluable for the task as well. This he effectively does by dissecting this complex persuasive sermon into sequentially distinct sub-texts realising the structural elements and also subgenres which vary and even blend into one another, thus enabling some subtext to carry out multiple functions. Cummings notes how ‘the Sermo Lupi is often found to have a difficult and elusive structure’; although his analysis demonstrates the legitimacy of the opinion, it also reveals the intricacy of the text so that it can no longer be said to elude us.

13. Hybrid contexts and lexicogrammatical choices: Interpersonal uses of language in peer review reports in linguistics and mathematics [+–] 286-305

Akila Sellami-Baklouti £17.50

University of Sfax, Tunisia

Akila Sellami-Baklouti is Associate Professor of English language and linguistics at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Sfax, Tunisia.

Akila Sellami Baklouti’s chapter addresses the functional significance of hybridity for text analysis, showing that text can be the product of hybrid discursive contexts: genre and discipline, which constitute two interacting cultures. Harnessing the ‘activation-construal dialectic’ (Hasan 2009b:170) between context, meaning and wording, Baklouti investigates semantic and lexicogrammatical choices realizing the interpersonal uses of language in a corpus of 30 Peer Review Reports relevant to two disciplines: Mathematics and Linguistics. A comparative approach shows that the two sub-corpora display some common lexicogrammatical choices, which are explained as being the traces left in the text by the Peer Review Report genre. In addition to these similarities, however, analysis also reveals some substantial differences, which are posited as being motivated by dissimilar disciplinary cultures (Mathematics vs. Linguistics), especially in terms of their research paradigms and community member relationships. Her findings support Baklouti’s hypothesis that each sub-corpus is to some degree a hybrid outcome of the interaction of different genres belonging to different cultures. Moreover, she is led to conclude that the dialectical relationship between text and context proves to be essential to showing this kind of hybridity at work.

14. The permeable context of institutional and newspaper discourse: A corpus-based functional case study of the European sovereign debt crisis [+–] 306-333

Sabrina Fusari £17.50

University of Bologna

Sabrina Fusari is Researcher of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research in Systemic Functional Linguistics focuses on the use of electronic language corpora for the analysis of institutional and news registers, with particular focus on patterns of Transitivity.

Like Thompson, Sabrina Fusari investigates register hybridity by combining SFL with Corpus Linguistics. After a brief theoretical overview, her case study of the European sovereign debt crisis as represented in newspaper and institutional discourse is presented. Analysis revolves around two specially prepared corpora comprising: 1) articles from The Financial Times, and 2) official documents released by the Council of Europe, all on the debt crisis, published between 9 and 15 December 2011. The keywords investigated (‘eurozone’, ‘debt’, ‘banks’, ‘growth’) prove to be used differently in the two corpora, both in phraseological and in grammatical terms, and this impacts on how the same crisis and, by extension, the role of European institutions, are represented in the two registers. Findings show that, despite the mutual influence between institutional and newspaper discourse, different views on the debt crisis, and potential ways out of it, are upheld by the City of London (which The Financial Times may be considered to represent) and by EU institutions. Finally, the synergy between SFL and Corpus Linguistics proves a valuable instrument for analysing register hybridity (and ‘idiosyncrasy’, Miller and Johnson 2009), potentially increasing its effectiveness as more sophisticated SFL-aware corpus annotation tools become available.

Part IV A closing statement: Hybridity – or permeability?

15. In the nature of language: Reflections on permeability and hybridity [+–] 335-383

Ruqaiya Hasan† £17.50

Macquarie University

Ruqaiya Hasan – who sadly passed away in the final stages of this
book’s preparation – was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie
University, Australia. The life-long research of this extraordinary scholar
and generous mentor can be succinctly summarised with the titles of
her seven volume Collected Works, edited by J.J. Webster for Equinox:
Language, Society and Consciousness; Semantic Variation: Meaning in
Society and in Sociolinguistics; Language in Education: Social Aspects of
Learning and Teaching; Context in the System and Process of Language;
Describing Language: Form and Function; Unity in Discourse: Texture and
Structure, and Verbal Art: A Social Semiotic Perspective. The SFL community
grieves her loss and honours the legacy she leaves behind.

Ruqaiya Hasan’s chapter stands apart, as is fitting. It’s been dubbed a ‘Closing Statement’ as an intertextual bow to the weight of its Jakobsonian predecessor, and thus in tribute to Hasan, an SFL scholar whose work has been inspirational to many of the other contributors’ own. Hasan would show how permeability ‘…is a characteristic of certain categories recognized in language on the basis of principled descriptions’. The examples she presents are from both the grammatical and the lexical end of the spectrum but the concept is applicable not only to the stratum of lexicogrammar but also to those of semantics and of context. She firmly holds that ‘… permeability cannot be taken as a licence for crossing boundaries anywhere, anyhow’. Indeed she suggests that it is perhaps in the nature of language that to function as a communal meaning potential the sign relations will be subject to certain regularities, meaning that permeability has a systematic basis and also that it is grounded in the probabilistic nature of language itself, and perhaps is even, as Zadeh (1997) proposes, a quality of human thought as well. In concluding the chapter, she takes on the myriad issues raised by a juxtaposition of the terms ‘permeability’ and ‘hybridity’; here, as throughout her chapter and indeed as is her wont, posing essential questions and eschewing facile answers.

End Matter

Index [+–] 384-395

Donna R. Miller,Paul Bayley FREE

University of Bologna

Reviews

This volume unites a diversity of reflections on the nature and effects of hybridity, a theoretical concept covering a range of discourse phenomena from the merging of functions within the clause to the re-articulation of social signifiers within public and institutional discourse. Taken together, the contributions demonstrate the essential permeability and coevolution of language and social life at all levels, with hybridity as the dynamic driving force. This volume persuasively demonstrates how the extravagant architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics provides a theoretical perspective well-suited to the analysis of this complex concept and, in doing so, significantly enriches the theory itself.
Tom Bartlett, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, author of Hybrid Voices and Collaborative Change: Contextualising Positive Discourse Analysis

Overall, this book provides a comprehensive and insightful framework for the analysis of hybridity within SFL and will be an excellent reference for researchers working on SFL, hybridity, discourse analysis, stylistics or language teaching.
Australian Journal of Linguistics

Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics is of great value for the following four reasons. Firstly, it covers various categories of hybridity-grammar, text and context, and provides a comparatively systematic study of hybridity from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, thus refuting Norman Fairclough’s statement that SFL cannot have anything valid to say about hybridity since it lacks a system corresponding to the ‘order of discourse’. Secondly, the volume is characterized by interdisciplinary study, which is not only testified by the interface between SFL and cognitive linguistics, and the synergy between SFL and CL, but is also proved by the selection of corpora from different areas, like linguistics, mathematics, and literature. Moreover, since many contributors have exemplified the status of SFL as an appliable linguistics (e.g. Caroline on the applicability of SFL in dealing with university learning, Cummings on a historical text, and Sabrina on institutional and newspaper discourse), it is believed that the appliability of SFL should be one of its future directions. Last but not least, each chapter is well organized with clear logic and structure, which makes the book easy to follow and accessible to readers. The book is much to be recommended to any student, lecturer, or researcher interested in hybridity.
LinguistList

Overall, the volume adds to readers’ vectors for appreciating and investigating those linguistic phenomena that may be labeled as exhibiting fuzziness, indeterminacy, intersection, agnation or features subject to double coding, no matter whether the issue of hybridity or permeability emerges at the stratum of lexicogrammar, semantic discourse or context. This suffices to guarantee, in my view, that the volume will be welcomed by scholars and researchers interested in functional grammar, discourse analysis, genre analysis and the semogenesis of social semiotic resources.
Discourse Studies

The volume offers much to language teachers, discourse analysts and language theorists, with the main strength of the volume being the inclusion of a rich array of highly instructive and engaging exemplar texts, situations and analytical approaches and a clear demonstration that SFL indeed has much to say about hybridity in discourse.
Discourse & Society

A very valuable monograph on systemic functional linguistics. It is just like a beautiful chorus, meeting the needs of the development of the era. Not only does it prove the systematic nature of hybridity research in systemic functional linguistics, but it also refutes the idea that systemic functional linguistics lacks an adequate cognitive element (Miller & Bayley 2016: 4). All in all, it deserves to be carefully read by scholars who are committed to the study of systemic functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics, pedagogy, second language acquisition, professional practice, discourse analysis and stylistic analysis.
The Journal of Foreign Languages

This volume from some of the most significant writers in Systemic Functional Linguistics.... is a very timely addition to the literature and one that may well act as a catalyst in moving SFL further along the trajectory from its current emphasis on the description of norms to a consideration of the ragged edges of language as a social semiotic and what these tell us about language as a dynamic system and the relevance of this for social change.
Functions of Language

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics

Grammar, Text and Discursive Context

Donna R. Miller [+–]

University of Bologna

Paul Bayley [+–]

University of Bologna

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