Linguistics and the Human Sciences
Dados do Periódico
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editora | Equinox Publishing (GB) |
| ISSN | 1742-2906 / 1743-1662 |
| Wikidata | Q15757435 |
| OpenAlex | S127224575 |
| MAG | 127224575 |
| Site | http://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/showissue.asp?jref=54&issref=1288 |
| Total de publicações | 51 |
| Período coberto | 2007 - 2026 |
| País | GB |
| Idioma | EN |
| Citada por | 1 |
| Fator de impacto | 0.212 |
| Índice h | 1 |
Linguistics and the Human Sciences directly addresses linguistics, which includes linguistic anthropology as a core subfield. Its broader focus on "Human Sciences" further indicates its relevance to disciplines closely cognate with social anthropology
Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Digital Communication and Language · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Language and cultural evolution · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic research and analysis
Reshaping the Semiotic Landscape in Tunisian Cities during the Covid-19 Pandemic
A semiotic landscape (SL) refers to all meaning-making resources in public spaces ( Adami, 2020 ). This study examines an unexplored aspect of SL by focusing on the layout of public spaces—the display and arrangement of people and things. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the layout of public spaces in Tunisia has witnessed a significant reshaping. This article argues that even though the reshaping of SL was initially motivated by …
Introduction to the Special Issue
Acceptable Risks
Environmental impact statements assess the environmental, social, and economic impacts of a proposed project and outline measures to minimize any adverse impacts. These documents form a core component of development approval processes for major infrastructure and resource projects, and are generally written by consultants hired by the project proponent. Environmental activists and researchers have raised questions as to the reliability of these d…
Using Pedagogic Register Analysis to Identify How Dialogic Discourse Creates Collective Disciplinary Capability in Secondary History
Using pedagogic register analysis, this article describes how one teacher's dialogic practice evolves over time to create a community of learners and collective disciplinary knowledge. In current research, there is substantial rigorous evidence of the importance of talk in learning. However, despite this evidence, there remains a need to articulate for teachers the linguistic choices in dialogic pedagogy that can make a difference in student lear…
The “TeXture” and “ArchiteXture” of Online Philanthropic Fundraising Discourse
In the digital era, online fundraising has become crucial for charitable organizations' sustainability. This study applies Systemic Functional Linguistics and Rhetorical Structure Theory to analyze fundraising discourse from 36 Hong Kong religious charity websites. Our integrated analysis of “teXture” (metafunctional linguistic choices) and “architeXture” (rhetorical organization) reveals how charities navigate competing demands of information pr…
A New Century, a New Periodical, a New Competitor
The first issue of the Trévoux journal appeared in 1701. Produced by the Jesuits, it provided a competitor for the Journal des Sçavans. Both journals relied heavily on book notices, and Religion was the most common subject dealt with. Analysis of the process types of finite verbs and of nominalized processes, and of the types of theme, shows that the Journal des Sçavans uses more material processes and less mental processes than the Trévoux journ…
Theme Resources Realizing Textual Meanings in a Literary Text
This article explores how theme resources are employed to construct textual meanings in the famous British novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The data for analysis are confined to the novel's chapter 1, “The Period.” The theoretical framework adopted for analysis is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Findings of the study exhibit a number of interesting textual features of which four stand out. First, the text is organized mainly …
Generic Macrostructure Potential of Academic Oral Presentations
The aim of this article is to present some of the main results of the research projects called “Literature from a linguistic perspective: modelling and teaching of literary narrative genres and response genres” ( Salmaso, 2019–2021 ; Salmaso, 2022 ), and “Macrogenres short story and academic oral presentation: insights into their generic macrostructure potential and lexico-grammatical realizations of their constituents” ( Salmaso, 2022–2024 ). Th…
Jane Austen and the Fall and Rise of the Epistolary Novel
The epistolary novel, popular for just a few decades of the mid-18th century and out of favor by the early nineteenth, is making a counter-intuitive comeback in young adult fiction. In a recent study by the Smithsonian National Postal Museum of 138 epistolary novels from ancient Greece until the present day, 52 (37%) were published in the 21st century. Yet the actual writing of letters is not exactly undergoing a revival—even a romantic or person…
Contrasting the Reader Positioning Strategies in the Environmental Discourse of Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace France
This paper investigates the potential differences in the strategies of persuasion employed in activist campaign emails written in English and French. Developing recent work by Don (2019) and Peter White (2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b), it seeks to highlight how the imagined reader is positioned as being at various levels of alignment and affiliation with the author. The analysis is based on a corpus comprising 50 campaign emails received from Greenp…
Systemic Functional Linguistics Tools in Translation Training With Examples From French-Greek Translations
Using as a springboard the principle that there is necessarily an ongoing linguistic process during the translation process, it is necessary to determine which tools of language science could better serve translation training. From these tools, we selected some key notions of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to analyze the source text (ST) and evaluate its transfer to target text (TT). More specifically, we investigated the influe…
Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation
International audience
To Translate or Not to Translate
The Philosophical Transactions was founded in 1665, two months after the Journal des Sçavans. It was edited by Henry Oldenburg from that date until his death in 1677. During that time he regularly printed translations of items from the Journal des Sçavans, 17 in total over that period. Grew, who took over the editorship after Oldenburg's death, continued the tradition printing four translations in the two years that he edited the journal. The Phi…
The SFL Glass Ceiling in French Linguistic Circles
While systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has made considerable headway in numerous linguistic circles around the world and across multiple languages, it has not encountered the same enthusiasm in French academic linguistic circles. The current study addresses this issue by examining the potential barriers and challenges facing SFL in France, particularly the question of knowledge circulation and translating SFL research into French. The study …
Introduction to the Special Issue
This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences includes four peer-reviewed articles which have been selected from those presented at the 1st International Systemic Functional Linguistics Interest Group Conference (SFLIG 2021) and successfully contributed to the Open Access Proceedings published by the University of Tasmania
The strategic use of engagement resources in engineering written reports
Written engineering discourse is embedded in its social context and is sensitive to the relationship between an engineer and their client. In order for engineering writers to be able to frame their evidence as part of a convincing argument, they require a strong understanding of the client’s needs and the regulatory context. To present this understanding and framing in writing, the grammatical resources covered by the ENGAGEMENT framework (Martin…
Evaluative patterns in the concluding components of expounding essays
Essays that have an expounding or explaining nature are a common type of text in many academic disciplines such as business. While their primary function is to explain the causes or consequences of a phenomenon, they also serve to illustrate the writer’s perspective. In other words, these essays persuade readers to recognise the writer’s arguments, often when they are summarised in the concluding sentence of a paragraph with a final commentary. T…
‘Describing language
Describing language: Form and functionRuqaiya Hasan. Edited by Jonathan J. Webster and Carmel CloranSheffield: Equinox, 2019. 371pp
Developing a conceptual framework for exploring cultural representations in Vietnamese children’s picturebooks
In a time of globalisation, the teaching of intercultural understanding has become one of the essential components of teaching curriculum in classrooms around the world. Among various materials for teaching intercultural understanding, multicultural children’s picturebooks have been applied widely in classrooms to raise students’ awareness of cultural representations of diverse countries, especially the teaching of Asian cultures in the context o…
Dreamers and caminantes
Migration remains a recurring yet controversial subject in today’s society. Previous research on press discourse has predominantly focused on migration metaphors from their verbal construction (Santa Ana, 1999; O’Brien, 2003) and the interplay with the visual mode in articles (Catalano & Waugh, 2013; Catalano & Mitchell-McCollough, 2019) or political cartoons (El Refaie, 2003). This genre frequently reflects an unfavorable and discriminatory repr…
Condensing Meaning
In this chapter we address the challenge of interpreting and teaching complex infographics of the kind read and viewed in secondary school science in Australia. Inspired by the work of Bateman and his colleagues we adopt a complementary bottom-up and top-down perspective – analysing infographics bottom-up in terms of general gestalt grouping principles (for both micro- and macro-groups) and interpreting images top-down with respect to abductions …
The Language of Vietnamese School Science Textbooks
This paper explores textual meanings realised in the theme resources of a Vietnamese lower secondary school science textbook – Sinh h?c 8 (Biology 8). The theoretical framework employed for analysis is Systemic Functional Linguistics. The data for analysis is ten texts selected randomly from the textbook. The units of analysis are major independent clause simplexes and hypotactic clause complexes which have a subordinate clause in initial positio…
Revisiting Halliday (1990) ‘New Ways of Meaning
Three decades ago, M. A. K. Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), presented a paper to AILA in Greece entitled ‘New Ways of Meaning: A Challenge to Applied Linguistics’ (Halliday, 1990), which introduced the notion of an ecological study of language (Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001). In this seminal paper, Halliday emphasizes that ‘language does not passively reflect reality; language actively creates reality’ (cf. Halliday a…
Viewing to Learn
This study investigates the interplay between language, image, and gesture in science teaching in the school. It applies the theoretical framework of systemic functional semiotics, and the investigative method of pedagogic register analysis, to construct a detailed description of intermodal pedagogic practice. The approach is illustrated with a secondary science lesson that can be viewed online. The lesson is analysed from three perspectives: the…
The Man (of) Who(m) Laughs
This paper analyzes the dialogized heterodiscourse and the ideological-evaluative positions sustained by the social voices moving around the movie Joker (2019). Our theoretical framework is based on the proposals of dialogic discourse analysis (DDA), more specifically, the Bakhtinian notion of (dialogized) heterodiscourse and the Volochinovian concept of ideological sign. The relations and effects of meaning constructed by the film narrative emer…
Phylogenesis of the Dreamtime
The aim of this paper is to sketch some possible correlations between phases in the development of languages in Australia, and phases in the archaeological record of people in the continent. The technique is to compare Australian language groupings, at the scales of phylum, family, group, language and dialect, with events in the climatic and archaeological history of the continent. The emerging historical account is also correlated with other evi…
On matter and meaning
“As hard as it gets”
The turn of the century marked an escalation of the violence of the Colombian conflict by both Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. However, popular perception of each group contrasts sharply with the statistics on responsibility for criminal acts. Since the press is one of the main sources of information on the conflict for the general population, analyzing the way in which it reconstructs these events may provide some insights into…
Phylogenesis of the Dreamtime
The aim of this paper is to sketch some possible correlations between phases in the development of languages in Australia, and phases in the archaeological record of people in the continent. The technique is to compare Australian language groupings, at the scales of phylum, family, group, language and dialect, with events in the climatic and archaeological history of the continent. The emerging historical account is also correlated with other evi…
Interview with Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen On Translation Studies (Part III)
As the final part of the interview on translation, this transcript further explores the relationship between the two areas, namely Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and translation studies. Christian Matthiessen and Bo Wang first discuss works by various scholars, including Bell (1991), Baker (1992) as well as Hatim and Mason (1990). Then, Christian Matthiessen suggests some theoretical developments needed, comments on the developments in dif…
The Language of Vietnamese School Science Textbooks
In this article, an attempt is made to explore in some depth the transitivity features of seven lessons (texts) of a Vietnamese science textbook – Sinh h?c 8 (Biology 8). The findings show that in constructing biological knowledge in their texts, the Vietnamese biologists as textbook writers have employed very high frequency of material and relational processes, virtually no behavioural process, very low percentage of mental, verbal and existenti…
Popularity of Latin and Law French in Legal English
This paper is a pilot study of the Language of the Law (or Legal English), a subsidiary of a broader research project on the Disciplinary English (DE), from the perspective of SFL. It starts with reviewing Halliday’s seven features or difficulties of scientific English that are presumably shared by Legal English. Then, the features of legal English identified by Forensic linguists, Mellinkoff and Tiersma among others are also perused. Subsequentl…
Creativity and Multimodality
Creativity studies have been expanding into multimodality in recent years, particularly in the field of computational creativity (Elgammal and Saleh, 2015) and cognitive science (Gardner, 2008). Comparatively, linguistics is far behind in productivity in this area. A key linguistic contribution by Carter (2004) theorizes creativity in everyday common talk into two main categories: pattern-reforming and patternforming. This paper extends Carter’s …
Linguistic Politeness in Online Discussion Boards
The move away from relying on location and physical interaction to define community has brought about a recognition of non-geographic communities particularly those that meet only through the Internet. This paper explores one such online community, a group of animé lovers which have grown in recent years due to the global spread of Japanese pop culture. The data mined from this fan forum are used to determine how its members behave linguistically…
A Contextual Investigation of Chinese Translations of Detective Stories – Mismatched Holmes
This study is carried out within the scope of the academic discipline of Translation Studies interfacing with Systemic Functional Linguistics. Different from comparative studies among different translations synchronically, this article adopts a diachronic perspective to compare two Chinese translations in the late nineteenth century and late twentieth century of Conan Doyle’s nine detective stories, with a view to identifying mismatches of verbal…
Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics
Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics: The State of the Art in China Today by Jonathan Webster and Peng Xunwei (Eds) (2017)
Linguistic Rhythm and its Meaning
Linguistic rhythm has generally not been considered to realize semantic units.Exceptions are van Leeuwen (1992) and Martinec (1996, 2000, 2002). This articledevelops further Martinec’s hierarchical model of rhythm by relating it to semanticfields. The semantic units realized by rhythmic units in his model are wavesof import, which belong to the textual metafunction (see e.g. Halliday and Matthiessen,2014). They are shown to be mapped onto semanti…
Bridging boundaries between systemic functional linguistics and translation studies
Erich Steiner, as a leading scholar in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), has been involved in various important strands of research on SFL and translation. This transcript is based on the second part of the interview during his visit to Hong Kong. We continue to discuss the application of SFL to translation, covering topics like SFL and other functionalist theories of translation, the tools for translation contributed by functionally-oriente…
Disambiguating ambiguity
This paper addresses inconsistencies in findings for children’s humour development by examining the ways in which five different ambiguity types (lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic and idiomatic) have been interpreted and applied in earlier studies on humour comprehension. It identifies discrepancies in linguistic phenomena perceived to constitute each ambiguity type and highlights how differences have contributed to contrasting clai…
The space between forgetting and remembering
This article examines the reoccurring dialogic structure ‘negation+forget’ in stories written by adolescent orphans living in the shadow of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. The employment of Appraisal, a detailed systematic framework of evaluative language has provided insights into their memories. The analysis identifies two major targets the narrators cannot, or will not forget: (a) distant memories of their parents, and (b) specific memories of gr…
Bridging boundaries between systemic functional linguistics and translation studies
Erich Steiner, as a leading scholar in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), has been involved in various important strands of research on SFL and translation. In this interview, he discusses his motivation of studying linguistics, and introduces his works in different areas, including machine translation in the 1980s, corpora, register, explicitation, grammatical metaphor, integration of product- and process-based researches, as well as languag…
Ecolinguistics and ecosophy
This article presents a philosophical framework for studies of ecolinguistics, combining the Eastern wisdom of ecological harmony and the Western human geographical concept of sense of place. To establish the basic criteria for ecolinguistic analysis, the article traces the three most influential Chinese schools of philosophy and extracts three of their shared disciplines: benevolence, frugality and intimacy with nature. To reveal the dynamic rel…
The Concept of ‘Translation Equivalence’
This paper focuses on how Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) conceptualizes translation equivalence (TE) – a concept which seems to resist any satisfactory treatment. To provide background for the study, the paper first examines some widely known formal and non-systemic functional (non-SF) perspectives on TE. Then it presents the SFL perspective on TE, focusing in particular on the current SFL perspective on TE as expounded by Halliday (2001, …
The Language and Identity of the German Minority in Poland According to a Language Biographical Study Conducted in Pomerania and Warmia-Masuria Regions
This paper provides an insight to the language use and identity construction of the German minority inhabiting northern parts of Poland, studied through their language biographies. The border shift after World War II changed the lives of millions of people. For the Germans who decided or were forced to stay in Poland, it meant learning a new language and culture. This study examines the influence of language management on the language biographies…
Investigating Stancetaking in Russian and Chinese
The proposition that stancetaking is pervasive in communication is widely argued (e.g., Halliday, 1978; Ochs, 1990; Englebretson, 2007; Jaffe, 2009). However, as a subject of critical analysis, stance is not typically studied in foreign language courses at UK universities. UK civil servants therefore developed and piloted a course on interpreting stance in Russian and Mandarin Chinese, incorporating Poynton’s (1989 [1985]) extended tenor network …
Creativity and Register
The discussion on how creativity can be described in terms of register, field, tenor, and mode has been established in Law’s (2019b) creativity-in-register cube framework (CIRCF). This article is a sequel to that discussion by demonstrating how the CIRCF can be used in the quantitative analysis of Carter’s (2004) pattern-forming creativity, using the dialogues of TV drama House, M.D. (Shore, 2005) as examples. This article begins with an introduc…
Systemic Functional Linguistics in Translation
This article is concerned with my personal account of the process of translating into Vietnamese a world famous grammar book: An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Second Edition, written by world renowned scholar M. A. K. Halliday. The account of the translation process is placed within the compass of systemic functional linguistics. It is clear from my account that in translating An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Second Edition, the trans…
Don’t Speak Local Languages
This study demonstrates how various stakeholders’ orientations about languagein- education policy and linguistic/cultural diversity are shaped by a monolingual habitus in Pakistan. The notion of habitus originates from Bourdieu’s (1991) social theories that refers to ‘a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions, and attitudes which are regular without being consciou…
Hatim, Basil (2020) Communication Across Cultures
Hatim, Basil (2020) Communication Across Cultures: The Linguistics of Texts in Translation. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. ISBN: 978-1-905816-30-9
Quantifying Systemic Coupling and Syndrome Using Multivariate Statistical Methods
One of the fundamental underpinnings of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is that the relationship between language-as-system and language-as-text is modelled probabilistically in relation to the cline of instantiation. This offers a spectrum of new ways to approach several SFL concepts quantitatively. This paper falls within that spectrum as it proposes that the relatively recent concepts of coupling and syndrome can be redefined quantitativ…
Zhihui Fang on SFL-Informed Literacy Education
As appliable linguistics, systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has been widely applied in various areas of education – in studies of classroom discourse, in teacher training, curriculum development, etc. Zhihui Fang is a leading scholar who has applied systemic functional linguistics in the development of pedagogical models for secondary literacy education. In this interview, Yanmei Gao, Chengzhu Yin and Hanbing Li ask Zhihui Fang about the appl…