Society in Language, Language in Society

Society in Language, Language in Society Ruqaiya Hasan (17 February 2015) Photo by Ernest Akerejola Society in Language, Language in Society Essays in Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan

Edited by

Wendy L. Bowcher Sun Yat-sen University, China Jennifer Yameng Liang University of Science and Technology Beijing, China Selection and editorial content © Wendy L. Bowcher and Jennifer Yameng Liang 2016 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-40285-1

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57286-1 ISBN 978-1-137-40286-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137402868 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Society in language, language in society : essays in honour of Ruqaiya Hasan / Wendy L. Bowcher, Sun Yat-sen University, China ; Jennifer Yameng Liang, University of Science and Technology Beijing, China) pages cm Summary: “This is the first collection dedicated to research directly influenced by the innovative and groundbreaking ideas of the eminent linguist Ruqaiya Hasan. The collection offers an insight into the breadth and depth of Hasan’s distinctive linguistic approaches and theoretical concerns. The chapters cover areas such as verbal art, context of situation, semantic networks, cohesive harmony, text structure and literacy education. The volume contains an interview with Ruqaiya Hasan, and a section in which the contributors describe their connection with Ruqaiya Hasan and her work. This book is of particular value to scholars and students working in sociolinguistics, literary criticism, stylistics, functional linguistic theories, literacy pedagogy, social semiotics, multimodality and applied linguistics” — Provided by publisher. 1. Semiotics—Social aspects. 2. Communication—Social aspects. 3. Language and languages—Variation. 4. Language and culture. 5. Language and education. 6. Sociolinguistcs. I. Bowcher, Wendy L., editor. II. Liang, Jennifer Yameng, 1987– editor. III. Hasan, Ruqaiya, honoree. P325.5.S63S63 2015 401.4—dc23 2015012349 Contents

List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Preface x Acknowledgements xii Notes on the Contributors xiii

Part I Hasan’s Linguistics

1 The Ontogenesis of Rationality: Nigel Revisited 3 M. A. K. Halliday

2 ‘Construe My Meaning’: Performance, Poetry and Semiotic Distance 24 David G. Butt

Part II Verbal Art

3 Jakobson’s Place in Hasan’s Social Semiotic Stylistics: ‘Pervasive Parallelism’ as Symbolic Articulation of Theme 59 Donna R. Miller

Part III Semantic Networks

4 Can Semantic Networks Capture Intra- and Inter-Registerial Variation? Palliative Care Discourse Interrogates Hasan’s Message Semantics 83 Alison Rotha Moore

5 Hasan’s Semantic Networks Revisited: a Cantonese Systemic Functional Approach 115 Andy Fung

Part IV Context of Situation

6 Language and Society, Context and Text: the Contributions of Ruqaiya Hasan 143 Annabelle Lukin

v vi Contents

7 Multiscalar Modelling of Context: Some Questions Raised by the Category of Mode 166 Tom Bartlett 8 On Describing Contexts of Situation 184 Margaret Berry 9 Interfacing Field with Tenor: Hasan’s Notion of Personal Distance 206 Marvin Lam 10 Studying Language in Society and Society through Language: Context and Multimodal Communication 227 Rebekah Wegener

Part V Structure and Texture: Two Kinds of Unity 11 GSP and Multimodal Texts 251 Wendy L. Bowcher and Jennifer Yameng Liang 12 Construing Instructional Contexts 275 Carmel Cloran 13 ‘Threads of Continuity’ and Interaction: Coherence, Texture and Cohesive Harmony 300 Kristin M. Khoo

Part VI Literacy and Education 14 Reﬂection Literacy in the First Years of Schooling: Questions of Theory and Practice 333 Geoff Williams 15 Reﬂection Literacy and the Teaching of History 357 Mariana Achugar and Mary Schleppegrell

Part VII In Her Own Words 16 In Her Own Words: an Interview with Ruqaiya Hasan 381 David G. Butt and Jennifer Yameng Liang

Part VIII In Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan 17 In Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan: Notes from the Contributors 415

A Bibliography of Work by Ruqaiya Hasan 433 Author Index 439 Subject Index 444 List of Figures

2.1 Verbal art and language (Hasan, 1985, based on Hasan, 1979) 27 2.2 A schematic view of the logogenetic accumulation of tokens in Act 2 Scene 2 of Troilus and Cressida 33 3.1 The overlapping semiotic systems (based on Hasan, 1985, p. 99) 64 4.1 Hasan’s ‘Demand Information’ network (based on Hasan, 2013, p. 289) 95 5.1 Primary options of message semantics in Cantonese 126 5.2 Systemic options of RELATION ENACTMENT in Cantonese 127 5.3 A tentative semantic network of asking questions in Cantonese 134 6.1 Culture, meaning and situation (Hasan, 1985b) 148 6.2 A ‘rudimentary’ network for field (Hasan, 1999a) 150 6.3 Realization and Instantiation in Halliday’s linguistic model (Hasan, 2009c, p. 12, based on Halliday, 1999) 153 6.4 Class, codes and communication: an interpretation (Hasan, 2005c) 155 6.5 Hasan’s typology of sign types (Hasan, 2014, Figure 6.1, p.112) 158 8.1 Language event: Mode systems 191 8.2 Language event: Tenor systems 193 8.3 Language event: Field systems MK1 201 8.4 Language event: Field systems MK2 202 9.1 Sophie Neveu and Robert Langdon’s biography of interactions in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (Lam, 2010) 220 9.2 Accumulative frequencies of [ancillary] and [practical] vs [constitutive] (top) and [relation based] vs [reflection based] (bottom) (Lam, 2010) 223 10.1 Stratification: reproduced from Halliday and Matthiessen (2004, p. 25) 237 10.2 Stratification and the contextual plane representing the union of the social and biological 238 11.1 The GSP of the nursery tale (Hasan, 1996, p. 54) 253 11.2 GSP of multimodal print advertisements (Cheong, 2004, p. 164) 263 11.3 A tourist site entry ticket to Hua Shan (with ‘Enhancer’ circled) 265 11.4 A tourist site entry ticket with the Attributor circled 267

vii viii List of Figures

11.5 A tentative GSP of the register of tourist site entry tickets (TSET) 270 12.1 Relation of RU classes to a material base 276 12.2 GSP of the official instructional context 277 12.3 Function structure and RU structure of Extract 1 278 12.4 Function structure and RU structure of Extract 2 280 12.5 RU structure of Clarification element exemplified in Extract 3 282 12.6 Function and RU structure of Extract 5 284 12.7 RU analysis of Extract 6 285 12.8 GSP of local instructional context 289 12.9 RU structure of Extract 9 290 12.10 RU structure of Extract 10 291 12.11 RU analysis of Extract 11 292 12.12 RU analysis of messages 1–14 of Extract 12(a) 295 12.13 RU structure of Extract 12(b) 297 12.14 The structural element Practicum 297 12.15 Extract 12(a) amended 298 13.1 Place of cohesion and the textual metafunction rank matrix of SFL (reproduced from Halliday, 2009, p. 85) 303 13.2 Summary of cohesive devices (reproduced from Hasan, 1985, p. 82) 305 14.1 A child’s initial recording of some examples of language in use 344 14.2 Collaborative recording of oral language in use at school in a kindergarten class 345 14.3 The children’s example of dysfunctional wording in a command 347 14.4 Screenshot of ‘Mr Very Confused’s Recipe for Fairy Bread’ 349 14.5 An example of a child’s playful text to display his ability to identify Events 351 15.1 Support for deconstructing the Declaration of Independence passage 366 List of Tables

2.1 Logical analysis of Sonnet 30 44 2.2 Logical analysis of Sonnet 64 45 2.3 Logical analysis of Sonnet 60 46 2.4 Logical analysis of Sonnet 29 47 2.5 Logical analysis of Sonnet 65 48 3.1 Process types ascribed to Archie (from handout, Hasan, 2010) 75 3.2 Process types ascribed to death/dying (from handout, Hasan, 2010) 75 3.3 The close associations of time and death (from handout, Hasan, 2010) 76 6.1 Material and textual relations within one interaction: complex vs parallel simple texts (Hasan, 1999a, p. 267) 152 6.2 Properties of the sign types in Figure 6.2 (Hasan, 2014) 159 8.1 Categories of activities in the language events 199 9.1 Notions on distance with reference to the ordered typology of systems (adapted from Lam, 2010, p. 59) 214 10.1 The dimensions (forms of order) in language and their ordering principle from Halliday and Matthiessen (2004, p. 20) 235 10.2 Types of realization statements from Hasan (1996, p. 111) 240 13.1 Illustrative survey of work applying CHA 307 14.1 Transcription of written language in the child’s notes in Figure 14.1 344 14.2 Example of differences in wordings of commands in a recipe (transcribed from a smartboard screen) 349

ix Preface

It has been a pleasure and an honour to prepare this manuscript in recog- nition of one of the world’s leading linguists, Ruqaiya Hasan. From its inception, the aim of this book has been to offer a selection of work by close associates, previous students, and other scholars who have been taught or inspired by Ruqaiya, and who have actively engaged with her work and her ideas. Many years ago, just after finishing my BA (Hons) at Macquarie Univer- sity under Ruqaiya’s supervision, I (Wendy) was talking with a lecturer at Sydney University. When I mentioned that Ruqaiya had been my supervi- sor, that lecturer raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Really. That’s a scholar with a fertile mind.’ Indeed, Ruqaiya is such a scholar. Her incisive mind and deep thinking, along with her insistence on analytical integrity, consistency and academic rigour, have produced some of the most thought-provoking and ground-breaking insights into the relationship between language and society. Due to the complex subjects she deals with and her insistence on probing beyond the surface of an issue, much of her work still awaits development. However, the rich array of issues that she has raised, questions that she has asked, and analytical methods that she has proposed, are such that scholars seeking a satisfying and rewarding research path would do well to consider her work. The volume includes some of the key areas of research to which Ruqaiya Hasan has contributed. These include semantic networks, cohesive harmony, verbal art, literacy, and the concept of context. We are aware, however, that there are significant areas that are virtually untouched or only par- tially dealt with in the volume, including her engagement with the fields of pragmatics, sociolinguistics and sociology, and with issues to do with child language development. Some of these are mentioned in Chapter 16, which is an interview with Ruqaiya Hasan conducted by David Butt and Jennifer Yameng Liang. This chapter represents a personal and rather lively account of Ruqaiya’s views on a number of concerns within the field of linguistics. Nevertheless, although the collection can only provide a glimpse into some of Ruqaiya’s ideas, overall the book does give readers an indication of the scope of her insights and, we are sure, offers inspiration to many scholars and researchers, and will do for many years to come. We are grateful to all the scholars who have contributed to this collection. We have included in the volume a chapter entitled ‘In Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan: Notes from the Contributors’ in which each author has written a short description of their background or association with, and/or inspiration from, Ruqaiya.

x Preface xi

In particular, we wish to thank Ruqaiya for being dedicated, tenacious and ever willing to take the time to discuss her ideas, work through difﬁcult concepts, and foster academic integrity and rigour in those with whom she engages.

Wendy L. Bowcher Jennifer Yameng Liang December 2014

Addendum:

During the time we were proofing this book we heard the sad news that Ruqaiya Hasan had passed away. We know that we speak on behalf of all the contributors to this volume in expressing our deep sorrow that Ruqaiya was not able to see this book in print – a book that was to be presented to her to honour her intellectual generosity and mentorship. In announcing the sad news to the scholarly community, Geoff Williams made the following comment: ‘A wonderful life, an immense scholarly contribution, an extraordinary friend to so many people around the world.’ Ruqaiya’s contribution to the scientific field of linguistics is yet to be fully realized. While her written works attest to her extraordinary depth of insight, her incisive mind and critical thinking, the innumerable times that she spent critiquing, encouraging and otherwise lending her academic insights to individual researchers around the world have left an indelible mark that has enriched the academic community and which will continue to bear fruit. We will miss her dearly.

Wendy L. Bowcher Jennifer Yameng Liang June 2015 Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Zhang Zhenzhen, Chen Yuping and Chen Xia for their assistance during the preparation of the typescript. We would also like to thank Philip Tye for his careful copy-editing. Figures 11.3 and 11.4 have been reproduced by kind permission of Huashan Scenic Management Committee and the ofﬁce of the Ming Tombs Special Administrative District respectively. Thanks to John Whitworth for permission to use the poem ‘Little’.

xii Notes on the Contributors

Mariana Achugar is a Guggenheim Fellow and an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and SLA at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. Her research explores the role of discourse in processes of cultural reproduction and change, and also disciplinary literacy development in multilingual contexts. Her most recent work has appeared in Linguistics and Education, Discourse & Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and Text and Talk among other venues.

Tom Bartlett is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communi- cation Research, Cardiff University, UK. His research interests are systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language and context, and discourse and par- ticipatory democracy. His recent publications include Systemic Functional Linguistics: Exploring Choice (co-edited), Choice in Language: Applications in Text Analysis (co-edited) and Hybrid Voices and Collaborative Change: Contex- tualising Positive Discourse Analysis.

Margaret Berry, now retired, was Reader in English Language at the Univer- sity of Nottingham, UK. She has published widely within the ﬁeld of SFL and wrote the classic ﬁrst introductory books to SFL: An Introduction to Systemic Linguistics (Vol. 1): Structures and Systems (1975) and An Introduction to Sys- temic Linguistics (Vol. 2): Levels and Links (1977). She has published articles on theoretical issues in SFL, exchange structure, theme and rheme, register variation, and the application of SFL to the teaching of English. She has lectured in China, Australia and Canada, as well as in Europe.

Wendy L. Bowcher is a Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-sen University, China. Her research interests include multimodal discourse analysis of Japanese and English texts, context in SFL theory, language education, forensic linguistics, and English intonation. She is the editor of Multimodal Texts from around the World: Cultural and Linguistic Insights (2012), co-editor (with Terry D. Royce) of New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse (2007) and co-editor (with Brad Smith) of Systemic Phonology: Recent Studies in English (2014). Wendy was instrumental in the formation of the Japan Association of Systemic Functional Linguistics (JASFL) in 1993 and served for several years as the Vice President of the Association. From 2011 to 2014 she was the Vice-Chair of the International Systemic Functional Lin- guistics Association (ISFLA) and served as Programme Chair of the ISFC held at Sun Yat-sen University in 2013.

xiii xiv Notes on the Contributors

David G. Butt is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie Uni- versity in Sydney, and was recently Director of the University Research Centre for Language in Social Life. Over the last decade and more, this Centre has conducted projects across communities and institutions for which functional linguistics provided signiﬁcant evidence about the management of change. Through the Centre he has been actively engaged with professionals in medicine (surgery and psychiatry), counselling, care for people with disabilities, intelligent systems design and brain sciences, cultural analysis (literature, theatre, world Englishes), complexity theory and ‘smart spaces’, Vygotskian approaches to education and training, ﬁnancial reporting, courtroom explanations and forensic evidence, media and jour- nalism, and child language development (in the traditions of Halliday). The Centre has also investigated the interrelations between linguistics, verbal art (especially poetry), philosophy and the arguments of natural sciences (especially biology, genetics and physics). The Centre has participated in educational projects in various cultures beyond Australia – Singapore, India, and especially with Australia’s close neighbours in Timor and in Indonesia.

Carmel Cloran (now retired) worked in educational settings before com- pleting a BA and a PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney, under the watchful eye of Professor Ruqaiya Hasan. With Hasan, she explored (a) the parame- ters of context, and (b) the meaning-making practices of mothers interacting with their preschool children. She enjoyed a career teaching and researching linguistics at Macquarie, the National University of Singapore, the Regional Language Centre, Singapore, and the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published a number of papers, the most recent being a comparison of the concept of rhetorical unit (proposed in her doctoral dissertation) with Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope (Functions of Language (2010) 17 (1): 29–70). She co-edited with David Butt and Geoff Williams, a collection of papers by Ruqaiya Hasan entitled Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning (1996).

Andy Fung is a PhD candidate and a member of the health-care communication research team in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. As inspired by Geoff Williams, he is interested in extending Ruqaiya Hasan’s semantic networks from the perspective of systemic functional Cantonese grammar, and examines the semantic and lexicogrammatical features of questions and answers in emergency communication. He also has an ongoing interest in multimodal discourse analysis and mobile apps communication as a tool in educational and tourism settings.

Michael A. K. Halliday was born in Leeds, England, in 1925. He studied classics (reluctantly) in secondary school, then trained in Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies for service with the British army in Notes on the Contributors xv the Second World War. He studied for three years in China (Peking Univer- sity, then Lingnan in Guangzhou), returning to England to teach Chinese at Cambridge University. Most of his working life was devoted to teaching and research in linguistics; he saw himself as a generalist, with special interest in grammar and phonology, and was committed to developing an ‘appliable’ linguistics which would be useful both to linguists and to others whose pro- fessional work required engagement with language. His major interests have been in language in education, the language of infancy and early childhood, the language of science, quantitative studies of language and the semantic functions of intonation and rhythm. He retired as Emeritus Professor of Lin- guistics, University of Sydney, at the end of 1987. His collected works, edited by Jonathan J. Webster, were published in ten volumes from 2002 to 2007, and an eleventh volume, Halliday in the 21st Century, was published in 2013.

Kristin M. Khoo is a PhD candidate in Linguistics with an Australian Post- graduate Award scholarship at Macquarie University, Sydney. She began her studies in linguistics at Macquarie in 2001, in combination with studies in psychology. Her doctoral research is focused on cohesion and cohesive harmony from an SFL linguistic perspective in the discourse of psychotherapy. Kristin’s research explores the role of linguistic evidence in clinical concepts of cohesion and coherence associated with self – concepts prominent in the Conversational Model of psychotherapy, as well as more broadly in discus- sions of brain, mind, consciousness, memory and relationship in mental health, neuroscience and related ﬁelds. Kristin has experience teaching in undergraduate linguistics and psychology courses since 2005, at Macquarie University, Sydney Institute of Business and Technology (Macquarie Univer- sity campus) and Open Universities Australia (Macquarie University). She also has experience in linguistic research through previous research assistance at the Centre for Language in Social Life at Macquarie University and participates in research collaboration through the Language in Social Life Psychotherapy Research network.

Marvin Lam is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also an active member of the PolySystemic Research Group, an SFL working group with both an international and a regional focus in the Pearl River Delta, China, and Southeast Asia. His research focuses on SFL and applied linguistics in gen- eral, the modelling of interpersonal distance, interpersonal communication, text linguistics and discourse studies, language typology, language teaching and language across the curriculum. His work on the modelling of interpersonal distance and its objective measurement with the concept of ‘socio-semiotic distance’ has proved its signiﬁcance in yielding interpersonal information from linguistic analysis, and has been applied in various institutional contexts, such as the interpersonal relationship between patients xvi Notes on the Contributors and health-care practitioners in hospital emergency departments, thera- pists and clients in psychotherapy treatments, customers and customer service representatives in telephone call centre exchanges and between char- acters construed in novels and motion pictures. Together with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen and Kazuhiro Teruya, Lam co-authored Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics (2010).

Jennifer Yameng Liang is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Studies at the University of Science and Technology Beijing. She received her PhD degree from the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University. Her research interests centre on both theoretical explorations and practical applications of SFL, in particular the concepts of context and ecosocial environment and multimodal/multisemiotic studies. In her doctoral research, she conducted research on the dynamic meaning-making practices and processes of Chinese tourist site entry tickets. She has co-authored with Wendy Bowcher and published in Visual Communication, Semiotica and Social Semiotics.

Annabelle Lukin is a linguist in the Centre for Language in Social Life, at Macquarie University, Australia. She has drawn on many aspects of Ruqaiya Hasan’s work in SFL in her studies of literature, education, ideology in media discourse, translation, and discourse analysis. She curates the SFL linguists’ site on VIMEO, and is a contributor to Wikipedia entries on linguistics, and in particular, on topics and people relating to SFL.

Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Depart- ment of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she coordinates its English Language Studies Programme and heads the Department’s Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has largely focused, in an SFL perspective, on register analysis, particularly in institutional text types, her corpus-assisted investigations having speciﬁcally explored the grammar of evaluation in terms of appraisal systems. Currently her interests also extend to issues of World Englishes. No stranger to Ruqaiya Hasan’s framework for the study of verbal art, of late Miller has energetically taken up its defence, but has also been reﬂecting intensely on Jakobson’s potential place within it. See for example her 2010 essay, ‘The Hasanian framework for the study of “verbal art” revisited ...and reproposed’(Textus XXIII (1)), the 2012 ‘Slotting Jakobson into the social semiotic approach to “verbal art”: a modest proposal’ (in F. Dalziel et al. (eds) A Lifetime of English Studies: Essays in Honour of Carol Taylor Torsello, and 2013 ‘Another look at social semiotic stylistics: coupling Hasan’s “verbal art” framework with “the Mukaˇrovský–Jakobson theory” ’ (in C. Gouveia and M. Alexandre (eds), Languages, Metalanguages, Modalities, Cultures: Functional and Socio-Discursive Perspectives). Notes on the Contributors xvii

Alison Rotha Moore is a linguist with interests in functional linguistics, pro- fessional and institutional discourses, agency, identity and embodied action. Alison’s research mostly involves health discourse, but she has recently also begun working on discourses around animal welfare and her latest paper is ‘That could be me: identity and identiﬁcation in discourses about food, meat, and animal welfare’ (2014) in Linguistics and the Human Sci- ences. Alison has a PhD in Linguistics from Macquarie University and a Research Masters in Public Health from the University of Sydney. She con- venes the English Language and Linguistics Programme at the University of Wollongong.

Mary Schleppegrell is Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research studies the role of language in learning with particular attention to the needs of English language learners. She draws on SFL to identify the demands of teaching and learning in different subject areas. She is the author of The Language of Schooling: a Functional Linguistics Perspec- tive, and co-author (with Zhihui Fang) of Reading in Secondary Content Areas: a Language-Based Approach. Her research has recently appeared in Language Learning, Linguistics and Education, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy and Australian Journal of Language and Literacy.

Rebekah Wegener is a linguistics and semiotics researcher at the Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Romanistik at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. She received her PhD from Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests include theoretical and applied linguistics and communication in complex systems. She works on aspects of medical communication, modelling context for multimodal environments and behavioural interfaces for artiﬁcial intelligence. She is co-founder of Audaxi Pty Ltd, a company specializing in human and technical systems for higher education.

Geoff Williams completed his PhD in linguistics under Ruqaiya Hasan’s supervision at Macquarie University in 1995, studying the nature of semantic variation associated with speakers’ social positioning during joint book- reading in early childhood. He regards his research experience under Hasan’s supervision as changing the nature of his academic work. Geoff’s research also includes the ﬁrst systematic studies of children’s learning of SFL-derived grammatics, in collaboration with Joan Rothery and Ruth French. Geoff researched and taught at the University of Sydney for 30 years, initially in the Faculty of Education and later in the Department of English, Fac- ulty of Arts, where he introduced a range of new courses concerned with children’s language and literacy development. In 2005 he became Head of xviii Notes on the Contributors the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, from which he retired as Emeritus Professor in 2010. He has held the position of Chair of both the International and the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistic Associations. He has contributed numerous chapters to SFL volumes and, with Ruqaiya Hasan, edited Literacy in Society (1996), and with Annabelle Lukin, The Development of Language: Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals (2004).