Historical Perspectives
Strata in Systemic Functional Linguistics - Levels, Layers, Planes, Domains - Elissa D. Asp
Elissa D. Asp [+]
Saint Mary's University
Elissa D. Asp is Professor of English and Linguistics, and Coordinator of Linguistics at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS. She was educated at Glendon College and York University in Toronto, where she specialized in linguistic description of discourse and linguistic theory. She is interested in functional and formal theories of language and developing models that elucidate language processing in context. Ongoing research addresses three main areas: (1) language and discourse correlates of dementias, especially neurodegenerative diseases associated with ageing; (2) MEG studies of neurocognitive networks supporting language and discourse processing; (3) theoretical implications of these studies for models of language.
Description
Chapter two outlines the development of the idea of strata beginning with 19th century aphasiological models which introduced the idea of a language faculty with distinct components contributing different functions and following with the work of de Saussure on the distinction between signifier and signified and the relational character of the sign, Hjelmslev’s elaboration of the relational character of language into distinct ‘planes’, Lamb’s adaptation of Helmslev’s model in stratificational linguistics, and Halliday’s adaptation of strata to his systemic model.