This pioneering volume lays out a set of methodological principles to guide the description of interpersonal grammar in different languages. It compares interpersonal systems and structures across a range of world languages, showing how discourse, interpersonal relationships between the speakers, and the purpose of their communication, all play a role in shaping the grammatical structures used in interaction. Following an introduction setting out these principles, each chapter focuses on a particular language - Khorchin Mongolian, Mandarin, Tagalog, Pitjantjatjara, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, British Sign Language and Scottish Gaelic – and explores mood, polarity, tagging, vocation, assessment and comment systems. The book provides a model for functional grammatical description that can be used to inform work on system and structure across languages as a foundation for functional language typology.

This volume presents fifteen original papers dealing with various aspects of causative constructions ranging from morphology to semantics with emphasis on language data from Central and South America. Informed by a better understanding of how different constructions are positioned both synchronically (e.g., on a semantic map) and diachronically (e.g., through grammaticalization processes), the volume affords a comprehensive up-to-date perspective on the perennial issues in the grammar of causation such as the distribution of competing causative morphemes, the meaning distinctions among them, and the overall form-meaning correlation. Morphosyntactic interactions of causatives with other phenomena such as incorporation and applicativization receive focused attention as such basic issues as the semantic distinction between direct and indirect causation and the typology of causative constructions.

Grammar and Context: considers how grammatical choices influence and are influenced by the context in which communication takes place examines the interaction of a wide variety of contexts - including socio-cultural, situational and global influences includes a range of different types of grammar - functional, pedagogic, descriptive and prescriptive explores grammatical features in a lively variety of communicative contexts, such as advertising, dinner-table talk, email and political speeches gathers together influential readings from key names in the discipline, including: David Crystal, M.A.K. Halliday, Joanna Thornborrow, Ken Hyland and Stephen Levey. The accompanying website to this book can be found at http: //www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415310814/

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a usage-based theory of language, founded on the assumption that language is shaped entirely by its various functions in the contexts in which it used. The first of its kind, this book advances SFL by applying it comparatively to English, Spanish and Chinese. By analysing English alongside two other, typologically very different major world languages, it shows how SFL can effectively address two central issues in linguistics – namely typology and universals. It concentrates in particular on argumentation, carefully explaining how descriptions of nominal group, verbal group and clause systems and structures are motivated, and draws on examples from key texts which display a full range of ideational, interpersonal and textual grammar resources. By working across three world languages from a text-based perspective, and demonstrating how grammar descriptions can be developed and improved, the book establishes the foundations for a groundbreaking functional approach to language typology.

This textbook explores functional discourse grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at the pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonological level. The book focuses principally on English and provides extensive exercises for students to use and evaluate the theory.

This book engages with current issues in developing materials for language teaching.

This volume showcases previously unpublished research on theoretical, descriptive, and methodological innovations for understanding language patterns grounded in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective. Featuring contributions from an international range of scholars, the book demonstrates how advances in SFL have developed to reflect the breadth of variation in language and how descriptive methodologies for language have evolved in turn. Taken together, the volume offers a comprehensive account of Systemic Functional Language description, providing a foundation for practice and further research for students and scholars in descriptive linguistics, SFL, and theoretical linguistics.

Corpus linguistics has had a revolutionary impact on grammar and discourse research. Not only has it opened up entirely new theoretical perspectives and methodological possibilities for both fields, but it has also to a considerable extent erased the boundaries that have traditionally been drawn between them. This book showcases a variety of current corpus-based approaches to the study of grammar and discourse, and makes a case for seeing grammar and discourse as fundamentally inter-related phenomena. The book features contributions from leading experts in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, critical discourse studies, genre and register analysis, phraseology, language learning and teaching, languages for specific purposes, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, systemic functional linguistics and text linguistics. An essential reference point for future research, Corpora, Grammar and Discourse has been edited in honour of Susan Hunston, whose own work has consistently pushed at the boundaries of corpus-based research on grammar and discourse for over three decades.

Currently there is a movement in linguistics towards careful use of corpora in linguistic and text analysis, which has involved both written and spoken corpora and those which combine spoken and written text. Most text analyses address written texts - often literary works - but detailed discussion of the language of a single oral text from multiple perspectives has rarely been published. This book is among the first to integrate the analysis of the language of spoken and written texts. It describes language as a network of functional relations involving a context which is also a network of functional relations. The essays in Part One present several perspectives on the theory of language as functional relations; those in Part Two discuss a single oral text using a variety of functional perspectives. All of the essays are by linguists interested in oral and written texts, who have achieved international recognition in their fields. Illustrated in this book are cognitive, social construction, social praxis and anthropological approaches to the description of text.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.