Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2 - Ruqaiya Hasan†

Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2 - Ruqaiya Hasan†

24. Semantic networks: the description of linguistic meaning in SFL

Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2 - Ruqaiya Hasan†

Ruqaiya Hasan† [+-]
Macquarie University
Ruqaiya Hasan, who died in 2015, was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. Read her obituary here
Carmel Cloran [+-]
University of Wollongong
Carmel Cloran, now retired, was formerly Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Wollongong.
Geoff Williams [+-]
University of Sydney
Additional to his honorary appointment at this University, Geoff is an Emeritus Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he was Head of the Department of Language and Literacy Education from 2005 to 2010. Earlier, he held senior lecturer appointments at the University of Sydney in the Faculty of Education (1979-1993) in the fields of Primary Education and English Language, and the Faculty of Arts, Department of English, in the English Language and Early English Literature section (1993-2005).
Annabelle Lukin [+-]
Macquarie University
Annabelle Lukin is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Centre for Language in Social Life, Macquarie University. She is interested in understanding more fully what it means to analyse text and linguistically construed social context in the terms established and developed in the work of linguists such as Halliday and Hasan. She works in particular in the areas of media and political discourse, and in literature, including literature and translation, and she has published in all these areas. She is co-editor (with Geoff Williams) of Language Development: Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals (Continuum). She curates the ‘SFL Linguists’ site on VIMEO, and contributes to Wikipedia on topics in linguistics, especially on people and ideas from the systemic functional linguistics tradition.

Description

In SFL, the semantics of a language calls for as much attention as its lexicogrammar: in fact, meaning and wording are two sides of the same coin; the description of both is equally central to understanding ‘how language works’ (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens, 1964) – which has been Halliday’s agenda since the beginning of his engagement with linguistics. But what actually led SFL into the exploration of semantics as a legitimate domain for description was not these theoretical considerations, per se; rather, like other aspects of the evolution of SFL, interest in semantics too arose in attempts to resolve certain problems in the course of research during the 1960s. This chapter presents one perspective on the course of this development, specifically with respect to semantic networks as a resource for the analysis of meaning.

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Citation

Hasan, Ruqaiya ; Cloran, Carmel; Williams, Geoff; Lukin, Annabelle. 24. Semantic networks: the description of linguistic meaning in SFL. Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 697-738 Nov 2005. ISBN 9781845531140. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=25350. Date accessed: 18 Apr 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.25350. Nov 2005

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