Analyzing the Media provides original studies from established scholars in the field of SFL and/or multimodality as well as from young scholars who have already delivered remarkable contributions to the discipline. The volume starts with an introduction to media studies from an SFL perspective. The first chapters explore different functional approaches to analyzing journalistic genres (e.g., reports, editorials, letters to the editor, popular science features) with a clear emphasis on the examination of linguistic/semiotic textures, which are studied in terms of a range of aspects such as generic, thematic and rhetorical structures, the distribution and function of pronouns and of and-parentheticals, engagement, projection and the packaging of voices, modality and authorial voice, etc. Two chapters focus on the lexico-grammatical and functional changes that affect journalistic texts when they are translated for re-publication in a different news culture or adapted for use in the second language classroom. Other papers discuss how the new social media have led to new emerging linguistic practices as in internet forums, how specific multimodal textures, such as smell, can be co-deployed with other meaning making resources (verbal, visual, spatial) to create specific effects for particular situations, e.g., in open-house viewing events, and how Cultural Historical Activity Theory, an action oriented theory that does not integrate a model of social semiosis, can be fruitfully combined with SFL theory to explore hitherto unbeaten paths in human-computer interaction.

Analyzing the Media provides original studies from established scholars in the field of SFL and/or multimodality as well as from young scholars who have already delivered remarkable contributions to the discipline. The volume starts with an introduction to media studies from an SFL perspective. The first chapters explore different functional approaches to analyzing journalistic genres (e.g., reports, editorials, letters to the editor, popular science features) with a clear emphasis on the examination of linguistic/semiotic textures, which are studied in terms of a range of aspects such as generic, thematic and rhetorical structures, the distribution and function of pronouns and of and-parentheticals, engagement, projection and the packaging of voices, modality and authorial voice, etc. Two chapters focus on the lexico-grammatical and functional changes that affect journalistic texts when they are translated for re-publication in a different news culture or adapted for use in the second language classroom. Other papers discuss how the new social media have led to new emerging linguistic practices as in internet forums, how specific multimodal textures, such as smell, can be co-deployed with other meaning making resources (verbal, visual, spatial) to create specific effects for particular situations, e.g., in open-house viewing events, and how Cultural Historical Activity Theory, an action oriented theory that does not integrate a model of social semiosis, can be fruitfully combined with SFL theory to explore hitherto unbeaten paths in human-computer interaction.

Analyzing the Media provides original studies from established scholars in the field of SFL and/or multimodality as well as from young scholars who have already delivered remarkable contributions to the discipline. The volume starts with an introduction to media studies from an SFL perspective. The first chapters explore different functional approaches to analyzing journalistic genres (e.g., reports, editorials, letters to the editor, popular science features) with a clear emphasis on the examination of linguistic/semiotic textures, which are studied in terms of a range of aspects such as generic, thematic and rhetorical structures, the distribution and function of pronouns and of and-parentheticals, engagement, projection and the packaging of voices, modality and authorial voice, etc. Two chapters focus on the lexico-grammatical and functional changes that affect journalistic texts when they are translated for re-publication in a different news culture or adapted for use in the second language classroom. Other papers discuss how the new social media have led to new emerging linguistic practices as in internet forums, how specific multimodal textures, such as smell, can be co-deployed with other meaning making resources (verbal, visual, spatial) to create specific effects for particular situations, e.g., in open-house viewing events, and how Cultural Historical Activity Theory, an action oriented theory that does not integrate a model of social semiosis, can be fruitfully combined with SFL theory to explore hitherto unbeaten paths in human-computer interaction.

Beyond their current social hype, the media have long since been of major concern to linguists. Rooted in rhetorical notions of effectiveness and appropriateness, featuring in early models of communication (e.g. Jakobson 1960), surfacing in the principled division of speech and writing and a key idea in text theory (cf. register/mode, Halliday & Hasan 1976) and language variation, the concept of medium has recently been gaining ground in discourse/text linguistics and general linguistic theory. Some would go as far as to claim independent disciplinary status to an ever-growing field of media linguistics. Despite the wealth of notions of medium, there would seem to be linguistic consensus on at least three relevant key elements of the concept. 1. Technological: Media are primarily seen as the technological means and infrastructure enabling and shaping the use of language. Technical frameworks like radio, TV, printing, new and social media leave traces in the linguistic styles and the texture of the discourse constructed. Each medium comes equipped with its own material-situational constraints and affordances. 2. Semiotic: Viewing media as sign systems or semiotic modes opens up a multimodal approach to text and discourse, which seeks to describe the patterns of mode co-operation, combination and integration. In this view, we ask for medium-specific multimodal patterns of texture. But fundamental mode differences, like the question of the autonomy or interdependence of speech and writing, also come to the fore. 3. Socio-cultural/pragmatic: Finally, from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic point of view, media can be recast as socially constituted forms of textual practice. In this view, what is highlighted is the pragmatic routines and design patterns within media institutions, which affect genres and their linguistic/multimodal styles. Here we must also ask how relations between communicators are shaped by the medium used. Based on these clear and versatile ideas of medium, the present volume seeks to look at a whole number of diverse and currently popular media genres from a systemic-functional linguistics perspective. The book brings together new methodological and corpus-based approaches that have the power to inform future media genre analysis and its methodologies as well as systemic-functional linguistic theory.

This paper presents the results of a study conducted within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics that analyses the lexico-grammatical criteria used for simplifying news articles to adapt them to levels of linguistic proficiency found in second language classrooms. The analysis focuses on different versions of news articles corresponding to Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced levels. The original versions come from The Guardian, and the simplified versions were adapted by a major publisher for an English as a Second Language (ESL) website (http://www.onestopenglish.com). The results of our analyses show that the changes focus mainly on the ideational metafunction with a decrease in the logical complexity of subordination in the simplified texts for the ESL classroom. They also involve a decrease in experiential grammatical metaphors. In this latter case abstract nominal post-modification structures, including present and past participle as well as prepositional phrases, are expressed as finite clauses in the simplified ESL texts (Martin 1989, Christie & Derewianka 2008, Rose & Martin 2012). Changes in the textual metafunction involve going from more “contentful” to “more contentlight” Themes (Berry 2013), and changes in the interpersonal metafunction involve going from more abstract to more concrete grammatical subjects (Halliday & Mathiessen 2013). Nevertheless, all these metafunctional changes at the discourse-semantic level of the simplified versions consistently respect the typical news article generic structure. Some of the more salient news article linguistic features are also maintained, such as for instance news writer invisibility by means of processes of saying attributed to external participants who are construed as the “voices of authority”. From a teaching perspective, results illustrate a fundamental concept in Systemic Functional Linguistics, that of language as choice, which can be productively exploited in the classroom. In particular, text rewriting activities based on the different versions of the news articles enable advanced level students to select alternative linguistic expressions of different levels of complexity to express a range of related meanings, while respecting genre realization.

“Today, the social construction of news is widely accepted among news scholars” (Johnson-Cartee 2005: 186). News is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a product crafted by news assemblers and news agencies, designed to appeal to the news consumer. News events are selected and news stories constructed with the reader in mind (cf. Murphy 2005). The present research project attempts to give insights into the different interpersonal meanings in British, German and Italian editorial discourse by proposing a framework that depicts the relationship between the discourse participants involved in the production and the reception of such a news text: the journalist(s), the reader(s) and the news actors. The aim is to explore “patterns of interpersonal meaning-making” (Halliday/Matthiessen 2014:42) (cf. Coffin/Donohue/North 2009, Halliday/Webster 2009). Apart from the author’s attitudes, evaluations and judgements of the news actors, the news events and the reader, the author may also try to solidarize with the reader to gain a shared perspective on the news event addressed. The empirical study follows the approach by Landert (2014) who classifies the effect of personalization according to three levels on which it can be realized and the discourse participant(s) it refers to: • the communicative setting (e.g. an opinion-based journalistic genre like the editorial) • the content (e.g. Does the news event that is being addressed involve the reader in any sense?) • the linguistic realization (through the direct address of the reader, personal pronouns and subjective stance) The paper will focus on the latter, that is the effect of personalization through the linguistic realization, more precisely through the use of personal, possessive and reflexive pronouns. This linguistic tool to create “a collective identity that includes the news site as well as the audience” (Landert 2014: 199) will be scrutinized from a cross-lingual and cross-cultural perspective of three different news cultures (i.e. the British, the German and the Italian). Whereas personalization per se has already been subject to quite a number of empirical studies, the presentation will try to highlight the role of news culture in the personalization of news events and to illuminate differences in the degrees of personalization, its function and the role of the reader, an enterprise which has not been undertaken so far. In doing so, the following questions shall be addressed: • To what extent do the use of personal pronouns and their effect in editorials differ between the three news cultures? • Which pronoun dominates editorial discourse: the self-reference to the author to express opinion and describe personal experiences, the inclusive we to solidarize with the readership, the exclusive we to stress the line of the editorial board and to explain their decision making, or the direct address of the audience to relate to the reader? • Which news culture exploits personal pronouns as a means to bridge the discursive gap the most and what effect does it have on the general style of editorial writing?

This paper provides a corpus-based comparative study of the relationship between global discourse structure, rhetorical relations and thematic patterns in a bilingual corpus of written journalistic texts belonging to three different genres (letters to the editor, editorials and reports) in English and Spanish. Previous corpus-based analyses of news reports and editorials/commentaries in these two languages have shed light on the role of clausal thematic choices as signals of their global or generic characterisation (see Lavid et al. 2010a; Moratón et al. 2012). In this study we extend this comparative analysis to the genre of “letters to the editor”, which has received less attention in the literature and examine the correlations between global discourse structures, rhetorical relations and the thematic patterns selected by writers of these journalistic texts. The data for analysis consists of a bilingual comparable corpus of a total of sixty-two texts, consisting of sixteen news reports, sixteen editorials and twenty letters to the editor, evenly divided into English and Spanish. All the texts were collected from British and Spanish high-circulation newspapers between 2009 and 2013. English texts were extracted from three online newspapers: Times online, The Independent and The Telegraph. Spanish texts were gathered from the online versions of three high-circulation newspapers such as El País, El Mundo, and La Vanguardia. The analytical tools used for the study are Halliday and Hasan’s concept of Generic Structure Potential (Halliday and Hasan 1989) and the further extension presented in Eggins & Martin (1997), Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson 1988), Lavid et al.’s model of thematisation for Spanish and English (Lavid et al. 2010), and the notion of thematic progression patterns (Danes 1974; Dubois 1987; Eggins 2004, inter alia). The results of the corpus analysis revealed interesting correlations between the global discourse structures, on the one hand, and the rhetorical relations and thematic patterns selected to realise those discourse structures, on the other. News reports, characterised by a three-staged generic structure (headline, presentation of the issue, and facts about the issue), typically select the Constant TP pattern which repeats and elaborates the topic stated in the headline in both languages (English 75% and Spanish 45%.). Editorials present a more elaborate generic structure consisting of a headline, addressing the issue, outlining the arguments and articulating a position, and prefer the Derived TP pattern in both English and Spanish probably due to the explanatory nature of the metaphorical headline. Letters to the editor are mostly of the argumentative type thus sharing the macro structure of the editorials which is realised by a combination of Themic and Rhemic patterns. The language-specific differences between the English and the Spanish texts were mainly related to the length of the global discourse structures, generally longer and more explanatory in Spanish than in English. The analysis suggests that thematic and rhetorical structuring are not random choices in discourse, but can be interpreted functionally as indicative of the genre under study, providing linguistic evidence of the global discourse structures which characterise each of these newspaper genres.

Given the central role played by science in our daily life and the variety of science-related issues that are currently translated into other languages, popular science in and for mass media is an area of significant importance for research on linguistic aspects and translation. Yet, it is still largely underexplored in both Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Translation Studies (TS), with few exceptions (e.g., Minelli de Oliveira & Pagano 2006; Liao 2011, 2013; Kranich et al. 2012; Olohan 2016). This paper sets out to offer a contribution to the analysis of translation of popular science writing in the media from the perspective of SFL, working with the language pair English-Italian. Although firmly rooted in SFL, and TS, it also draws on journalism, media studies and science communication. Specific focus is on the popular science feature article translated from broadsheet newspapers, consumer magazines and specialized science magazines. In feature articles, the journalist/writer has some freedom to experiment with style and introduce his/her own voice. Hardly from being a purely objective kind of register, the feature article often embodies subjectivity intruding into the text. Moreover, as rhetoric of science scholar Tinker Perrault points out, not only do popular science articles present facts, ‘the truth’, but they also give readers information in such a way that lets them take a critical stance, inviting them “to engage with science-related issues not as spectators but as members of civil society” (Tinker Perrault 2013: 138). In other words, this seems in line with the cultural process of “democratization of knowledge” which has been taking place in the UK and the US (Kranich et al. 2012: 332). What happens when such issues cross cultural and linguistic borders through a process of interlingual transfer? The paper aims at exploring the issue of subjectivity in popular science texts in the written media as conveyed through evaluative language choices and resources which “position the speaker/writer with respect to the value position being advanced and with respect to potential responses to that value position” (Martin & White 2005: 36). Special focus is thus on the translation of interpersonal meanings (Halliday 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen 2014) realized through the APPRAISAL SYSTEMS, and especially through the attendant resource of Engagement (Martin & White 2005), which, as Munday (2015: 409) contends, has so far been relatively overlooked in TS, apart from a small number of studies (Vandepitte et al. 2011; Munday 2012, 2015; Quian 2012). The paper discusses the results of a product-oriented analysis of a corpus of articles included in the ‘Science’/‘Technology’ sections of the Italian consumer magazine, Internazionale, translated from a wide range of English sources, i.e., broadsheet newspapers, consumer magazines and specialized magazines, in print and online, from both the UK and US. Analysis is centred on ‘evaluation shifts’ occurring when an English Source Text (ST) is rendered into an Italian Target Text (TT). The findings show that, in general, English STs tend to be more addressee-oriented, by leaving more room for alternative views, whereas Italian TTs tend to reduce some explicit indicators of Engagement (either through shifts towards a higher degree of certainty or omissions). The goal of the paper is to seek (1) to establish whether translation choices at the level of Engagement in a TT seem to be linked to the different degree of popularization in different STs and (2) to see to what degree shifts (that in same cases might even be linked to the technical constraints of the medium) seem to reflect the ideological positioning of the translator/editor and may influence the final perception of the reader.

In the last decade, parenthetical constructions – that is, detached structures (often clauses) which may be inserted in the middle of another structure, and which are not fully integrated in the sense that they could be omitted without affecting the rest of the structure – have been the subject of extensive research from a functional perspective (see Blakemore 2005, 2006, 2007; or Dehé 2014; Dehé and Kavalova, 2007, among others). This study is a further contribution to this line of research and provides a corpus-based analysis of one type of parenthetical construction namely, and-parenthetical, as shown in (1), in texts taken from press reportages, press editorials and press reviews. (1) What I’m saying – and I’m really agreeing with Bill here – is that anti-social behaviour orders are the end of the line. The analysis of and-parentheticals has been utterly neglected in the literature from a corpus-based perspective, and it has been mainly restricted to the spoken mode, as and-parentheticals have been traditionally considered a speech-bound phenomenon (cf. Kavalova 2007). In order to bridge the gap, this study analyses the functional behaviour of and-parentheticals in written texts. The data are taken from six computerised corpora of British and American Present-day English newspapers taken from the ICAME family of corpora: namely the LOB, the Brown, the FLOB, the FROWN, BrE06 and AmE06 (cf. Hofland et al 1999 and Baker 2009). It has been usually argued that and-parenthetical clauses are not only mainly restricted to speech, but are also the result of a stylistic choice or the result of a sort of on-line reformulation and revision (cf. Blakemore, 2005). However, the statistical analysis of more than 600 instances of and-parentheticals retrieved from the corpora shows that these types of constructions feel also at home in writing and that —in press reportages, editorials, and reviews— they can also be considered interpersonal discourse markers of persuasion and addressor involvement in discourse. In other words, the analysis will show that and-parentheticals also serve an interpersonal metafunction in British and American English newspapers, and are used as linguistic devices that provide the addressee with (background) information expressing the addressor’s degrees of commitment, judgments, or opinions in the context of the main utterance. Beyond that, the detailed statistical comparison —based on tested criteria of linguistic variation (cf. Biber 1988)— of the functional behaviour of and-parentheticals in press reportages, editorials, and reviews will also show that there is a tendency for those texts with a higher degree of interpersonal or addressor involvement to favour the use of these constructions.

This paper delves into the question of how the system of projection works and is realized in the dissemination of science in the British press from a systemic functional perspective. Previous studies on projection, this being described as the phenomenon by which the speaker/writer (re)construct a previous (linguistic) representation, have focused on the syntactic structures used for projecting (Semino and Short 2004; Elorza and Pérez-Veneros 2014); on the types of reporting verbs framing and introducing those structures (e.g. Thompson and Ye 1991; Thompson 1994a) or also on the participants who/which are given voice (Hawes and Thomas 2012; Hawes 2014). Thompson (1994b) has carried out an alternative study of projection by suggesting that we can study it in two different ways: by tracking a meaning along a text to see whether it appears as Proposition, Fact, or nominalization (Thing); or by having a look at the distribution and function of a single meaning and how it is projected along the text. He posits that typically those meanings develop along a cline of projection from first appearance in text as Propositions (direct speech), until they can be presented as fully packaged nominalizations which, in turn, can function as a participant of a new projection (cf. Halliday 1994: 115, 266; Klein and Unsworth 2014; Moyano 2015). With the purpose of analysing the dynamics of projection in science popularization discourse in the British press, my study addresses the question of how scientific knowledge is constructed logogenetically in texts as projected meaning, either as Proposition, Fact or Thing, in line with Thompson’s taxonomy. This is done by analysing the type of projection used in science popularization articles, to see the degree of ‘packaging’ of scientific knowledge. Besides, I also look at the type of participant related to those projections, as well as their cohesive development along the text, with special attention to cases of material participants (e.g. the study, the findings), to see which of these material participants are the result of the ‘packaging’ of a previous projected meaning and still can act as participants of a new projection (cf. Klein and Unsworth 2014). To this aim, a corpus consisting of 100 cases of projection has been compiled and manually analysed. The results show that projection is mainly realized through Propositions and Facts in popularizations, although there are also cases in which the words of others are projected as Things, thus taking the role of participants of a new projection. Besides, in this corpus these fully-packaged projections tend to appear at the beginning of the text (cataphoric position) to evolve later into either Propositions or Facts, which contrasts greatly with previous results (cf. Thompson 1994b).

Newspapers host a range of different text types that contribute to a paper’s coverage of a particular piece of news. These include, e.g., reports, analyses, comments, editorials, columns and letters/emails to the editor. As the landscape in the printed press has undergone considerable changes over the past decades, it has been argued that the boundaries between different newspaper text types have been shifted, blurred or even abolished. This chapter shows, however, that the boundaries between informative and commenting newspaper genres remain solid and intact. The study is grounded on an analytic method based on grammatical structure rather than on semantic or pragmatic criteria. The grammatical system used for analysis here is Modality (Halliday 1994), and the primary focus has been laid on the choice of modal expressions in terms of their authorial orientation and manifestation in the four categories explicit-subjective, implicit-subjective, implicit-objective and explicit-objective. The results indicate that newspaper genres – at least in the quality press – can be clearly delineated in terms of the subjective/objective modal orientation patterns chosen by the authors.

In 2015, the author wrote a paper entitled “Notes on interpersonal aspects of an Internet travel forum”. This was an analysis of a small sample of postings from a French site (Routard) relating to a close destination, Brittany, and a distant destination, Namibia. The analysis showed that the Namibia sample had a smaller more closely-knit community than the Brittany sample. The Brittany sample used more epistemic modality, and more mental than material processes, showing that the participants were more concerned with what they feel and think. The Namibia sample displayed more dynamic modality, and had more material than mental processes, showing that the participants are more concerned with practicalities. This paper is a parallel study for an English language site. The site chosen is Tripadvisor; the close destination is Northumberland, and the distant destination, again, Namibia. The sample is made up of ten exchanges for each destination. Where an exchange is longer than ten turns, the first ten turns are taken, though this is only the case in the Namiba sample. The size of the Namibia sample is 8616 words (including names, dates and headings), while the size of the Northumberland sample is only 2896 words showing that the Namibia exchanges tend to be roughly three times longer than the Northumberland exchanges. The differences between the two samples are fairly slight, but among those that appear are the following. Questions have a greater tendency to be indirect in the Namibia sample. Modal expressions are more likely to be epistemic in the Namibia sample, and dynamic in the Northumberland sample. Deontic modality is rare in both, but more common in the Nambia sample. Also rare are affective mental processes, but nevertheless they are more frequent in the Northumberland sample. Overall the participants in the Namibia sample seem more involved and closer to forming a virtual community than the participants in the Northumberland sample.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Computer Science have a long history together. This ranges from Winograd’s blocks world (Winograd, 1971), inspired by Halliday’s work on grammar, over applications in Natural Language Generation (Bateman, 1998), through to our own work. For example, we have used concepts from SFL to help model contextualized, ambient intelligent systems ranging from the use of abstract concepts (Cassens and Wegener, 2008) and of parameters of context (Wegener et al., 2008) for requirements engineering to a stratified view on context modeling with a special focus on the semantic stratum (Butt et al., 2013) and its practical application in intention-aware automatic doors (Kofod-Petersen et al., 2009). Based on these experiences and our own work on the use of Activity Theory (Leont’ev, 1978, Nardi, 1996) within the same application domain, we propose an approach to requirements elicitation and modeling of contextualized, ambient systems that combines the tool-centric perspective from the cultural-historic approach to activity theory with the communications and meaning-centric perspective of SFL. For applications in ambient systems, SFL is an attractive model of language because it foregrounds language as a social semiotic and thus frames spoken and written communication as just one avenue for meaning making. However, it also raises some problems. Firstly, SFL focuses on human communication and requires cognition for most of the categories that it posits; for the others, it presupposes language. Secondly, SFL is language centric. Despite the assumption that language is a social semiotic, the inclusion of other modalities is in many cases quite a challenge. SFL assumes spoken or written language as the baseline and other modalities are often treated as the context. This has interesting implications for context and how it is modeled as well. Lastly, SFL has an under-developed model of culture and consciousness. Despite being well positioned to capture both aspects, neither have been adequately integrated into the theory, meaning that while we have a model of language as a social semiotic, we have no model of the semiotic agent or the environment of the semiotic agent. By comparison, Cultural Historical Activity theory (CHAT) is action centric and focuses on action rather than meaning. Because of this, it has no model of semiosis or meaning making and thus no way to analyse action beyond the representation of the action itself. It also lacks an elaborated model of context and a stratified view of interaction. CHAT does however have a strong model of culture that can accept a layered view of context. By focusing on action, it has developed a modelling of the activity sequence that can take GSP and other SFL analyses and provides a clear unit of analysis. Perhaps the greatest strength, particularly from a human-computer interaction perspective, beyond a model of activity, is the explicit inclusion of non-human agents as potential actors. Interestingly, for an approach focused on activity, Cultural Historical Activity theory has a well developed model of cognition that is social in focus and this means that we have an opportunity to integrate a powerful model of language with a similarly focused model of interaction and the mind. Because they share underlying assumptions, it is possible to integrate the two theories at abstract and applied levels. SFL has a history of building on and integrating other theories if the core assumptions are compatible (e.g. Halliday’s integration of Berstein’s theory of social organisation). Most importantly, they are non-competitive models. That is, they do not seek to explain or model the same sphere of human behaviour, rather they complement each other, meaning that by combining them they together explain and model more than each alone. Here, we set out our integration of the two theories at the abstract and practical level, citing examples from our previous and current projects in human-computer interaction.

Our sense of smell is mediated by physicochemical and biological interactions. This sense is part of the material basis for what we might call a mode of smell, a socially mediated semiotic system (van Leeuwen 2005, Norris 2013). The resources of such systems or modes, to the extent that they are recognized as such, are rarely if ever deployed alone, but as part of a multisemiotic arrangement (van Leeuwen 2005, Kress 2010, Norris 2013). Here, I discuss the meaning potential of smell by considering how social actors produce, manipulate, combine, and organize certain smells to create sophisticated ‘messages’ that can be interpreted and evaluated by others. As an example, I examine real-estate agents’ use of specific smells, created among other things by preparing coffee and cinnamon buns, as part of open-house viewings. I consider the potential meanings encoded by those and other smells in the ‘smellscape’ (Margolies 2006, Porteous 2006, Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) in that particular context of situation (Malinowski 1923). I also discuss the use of those resources as part of a multisemiotic event or activity that includes the co-deployment of verbal, visual, and spatial resources. By considering some of the types and relative amounts or degrees of meaning instantiated through those different semiotic systems, I demonstrate how smell can be deployed to make meanings that are potentially complementary to as well as incongruent or inharmonious with those committed verbally, visually, and spatially (see Hood 2008, Martin 2011, and Painter, Martin, and Unsworth 2013, inter alia, on ‘commitment’).

Analyzing the Media provides original studies from established scholars in the field of SFL and/or multimodality as well as from young scholars who have already delivered remarkable contributions to the discipline. The volume starts with an introduction to media studies from an SFL perspective. The first chapters explore different functional approaches to analyzing journalistic genres (e.g., reports, editorials, letters to the editor, popular science features) with a clear emphasis on the examination of linguistic/semiotic textures, which are studied in terms of a range of aspects such as generic, thematic and rhetorical structures, the distribution and function of pronouns and of and-parentheticals, engagement, projection and the packaging of voices, modality and authorial voice, etc. Two chapters focus on the lexico-grammatical and functional changes that affect journalistic texts when they are translated for re-publication in a different news culture or adapted for use in the second language classroom. Other papers discuss how the new social media have led to new emerging linguistic practices as in internet forums, how specific multimodal textures, such as smell, can be co-deployed with other meaning making resources (verbal, visual, spatial) to create specific effects for particular situations, e.g., in open-house viewing events, and how Cultural Historical Activity Theory, an action oriented theory that does not integrate a model of social semiosis, can be fruitfully combined with SFL theory to explore hitherto unbeaten paths in human-computer interaction.

Analyzing the Media provides original studies from established scholars in the field of SFL and/or multimodality as well as from young scholars who have already delivered remarkable contributions to the discipline. The volume starts with an introduction to media studies from an SFL perspective. The first chapters explore different functional approaches to analyzing journalistic genres (e.g., reports, editorials, letters to the editor, popular science features) with a clear emphasis on the examination of linguistic/semiotic textures, which are studied in terms of a range of aspects such as generic, thematic and rhetorical structures, the distribution and function of pronouns and of and-parentheticals, engagement, projection and the packaging of voices, modality and authorial voice, etc. Two chapters focus on the lexico-grammatical and functional changes that affect journalistic texts when they are translated for re-publication in a different news culture or adapted for use in the second language classroom. Other papers discuss how the new social media have led to new emerging linguistic practices as in internet forums, how specific multimodal textures, such as smell, can be co-deployed with other meaning making resources (verbal, visual, spatial) to create specific effects for particular situations, e.g., in open-house viewing events, and how Cultural Historical Activity Theory, an action oriented theory that does not integrate a model of social semiosis, can be fruitfully combined with SFL theory to explore hitherto unbeaten paths in human-computer interaction.