Abstract
According to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), language users have to make choices from different semantic networks within language to create specific meanings across various contexts. The chapters collected in this volume investigate how the notion of choice functions as an important perspective to underpin SFL as an appliable linguistic theory in terms of different contexts. By contrast, another volume by the same editors (Fontaine et al., 2013; see p. 487) adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to discuss the notion of choice, drawing, for example, on evolutionary theory, psychology, sociology and neuroscience.
Choice in Language: Applications in Text Analysis consists of an introduction and 12 chapters, which are divided into four parts. The introductory section offers a brief review of SFL and the organization of the volume. Part I, encompassing three chapters, explores how interpersonal choices are realized and how author identities are constructed through discourse. Adendorff and Pienaar are concerned with how sex workers in a South African city employ newspaper entries to construct their identities and services they offer from the perspective of a transitivity system and appraisal theory. Based on a corpus of 40 Italian journalistic texts, Swain examines how different voices in the Italian press are construed under the appraisal framework within the sociocultural context. Barletta, Mizuno and Moss concentrate on how a group of Colombian postgraduates construct their new identities as teacher-researchers through the attitudinal and engagement resources used in their monographs.
Part II moves the focus to recounting choice in political speeches. Banks looks into the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor, especially the process of nominalization, in French political tracts. Based on Tony Blair’s talk responding to London underground explosions in 2005, O’Grady discusses how speakers use intonation choices to structure spoken texts with their aim to give guidance to listeners along certain ‘interpretative’ pathways over others.
Part III analyzes the effects of choice across different text types in five chapters, most of which are grounded in computational approaches to corpora. Mahfouz interrogates the impact of domain of text on transitivity analysis and the extent to which the domain plays a role in disambiguating polysemy based on the BNC (British National Corpus) Baby corpus. Lavid, Arús and Moratón adopt an empirical approach to discussing the thematic choices in their corpus of newspaper commentary and news reports, to shed light on the creation, exploration and sharing of linguistic resources in different languages. Sellami-Baklouti’s study focuses on how context affects the probabilities of choice of clause structure in academic discourse. Berry, based on a long-term study, looks at the distinction between the themes of clauses in informal spoken English and formal written English in children’s learning processes. Clarke highlights the category and frequency of occurrence of ellipsis through the study of a corpus of TV football commentary, radio football commentary, the Guardian ‘joy of six’ editorials and football newspaper reports, in order to verify the context-metafunction hook-up hypothesis.
The closing two chapters constitute Part IV, which illustrates the interplay of choice across different modalities. Jesús Moya Guijarro elucidates how verbal and visual resources are combined to construct textual and compositional meanings in hotel brochures from the viewpoint of Halliday’s functional grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual social semiotics. Montemayor-Borsinger, Ventola and Magalhães explicate how choices are represented on the front covers in three editions of Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar and they find each cover is aimed at realizing its ideational function.
This book is a valuable contribution to SFL, and it is also a good model that demonstrates the application of how semantic choices are made in various discourse types, such as journalistic or media discourse (Chapters 1, 2, 7 and 10), academic discourse (Chapters 3 and 8), political discourse (Chapters 4 and 5), educational discourse (Chapter 9), multimodal discourse (Chapters 11 and 12) and discourse sets, including academic prose, written fiction, written newspaper and spoken conversation (Chapter 6). Each study in this volume not only is a self-contained component with its own framework and data, but also provides readers with original and heuristic thinking on the issue. In addition, the analytical frameworks employed in the present collection prevail within SFL, such as appraisal theory, transitivity system, grammatical metaphor, thematic structure, intonation system and multimodal framework. Some chapters have constructed their own corpora for investigation, which reflects that corpus study is gradually being recommended in discourse analysis because findings based on a corpus analysis are more credible and reliable.
As we know, modern linguistic research seeks ways in which studies can be conducted more scientifically. These ways, including computational, mathematical and statistical methods, are highly recommended in linguistic studies at present. However, only four chapters in this collection are reported to use computational approaches. Second, while contributors in this book come from different nations in the world, including South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, Columbia, Argentina, Italy, France, the United Kingdom and Spain, most of their studies (10 out of 12) focus on English language as their data. We might think that the notion of choice within SFL is only suitable for the interrogation of English, but that would seem to be inconsistent with the title of the book, Choice in Language: Applications in Text Analysis.
As Halliday and Matthiessen (2004: 23) argue, a language is a resource for making meaning, and meaning resides in systemic patterns of choice; thus, a text is the product of ongoing selection in a very large network of systems. This book well displays the significance of choice and how choice works in meaning-making across various genres in English. Readers who are interested in SFL and discourse analysis will benefit from this collection.