Introduction

[alex don]

At 8:51 pm -0400 5/7/06, Ian Roderick wrote:
>Dear list members,
>
>My name is Ian Roderick and I am an assistant professor in the
>Communication Studies department at Wilfrid Laurier University in
>Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
>
>I became quite interested in CDA and social semiotics during my MA
>studies but slipped away from it while writing my doctoral
>dissertation. I have  recently come to find myself interested in
>returning to a more systemic form of discourse analysis in my own
>research. Presently I am interested in representations of autonomous
>technologies (robotics, UAVs, intelligent agents, etc.) particularly
>in a military context but I also have a strong interest in public
>space and exhibitionary spaces, in particular. I also hang out on
>the Language of New Capitalism list.
>
>As well as an introductory course on mass communication and another
>in print communication, I teach a course entitled The Cultural
>Political Economy of the Theme Park and another I call The Operating
>System of War.
>
>I expect that this is a quiet time for the list but I hope to
>contribute when and where I can.

   hello ian, tracy, christopher, and others,

i've noticed some of your posts ian, on the LNC list. nice to see your
name here as well. i think i have been lurking on this list
(discourse studies) for a few years now.

have you come across maree stenglin's work btw? i think she did her thesis
on the 'textuality' of museum space.. she's presenting on a related
topic at this year's ASFLA conference (in armidale, australia) where
the theme is multi-modality (see:
http://www.une.edu.au/campus/confco/asfla2006/ ) .

as for me, i'm at present trying to finish up my doctoral *thesis* (since
it's with the university of birmingham, UK) in applied
linguistics, using SFL as the main tools of my analysis. i've always
been interested in CDA, and as you probably know, CDA looks to SFL as
its natural set of tools. my own work is not specifically in the area
of CDA however, but rather directed towards exploring the appraisal
framework. i think it represents another set of tools which could be
usefully applied to CDA-inspired goals. generally-speaking, the main
use that CDA enquiries seem to put to SFL is in the area of
transitivity analyses, in which the main actors of clauses are
compared with the main goals. in this way, patterns of weightings one
way or another can be mapped. appraisal is concerned with the mood of
clauses rather than the transitivity, and with attendant patterns of
evaluation (rather than with actions/ processes, and participants
etc). this means that it offers another framework that can be used to
explore patterning in texts..... and depending on the goal and method
of the analysis, may be able to offer a way of systematically
accounting for certain ideological positionings.

because evaluation is such a slippery customer, and because SFL is
not a prescriptive framework, it seems likely that concurrent corpus
studies would be necessary for making some claims using appraisal.

anyway, anyone interested in the appraisal framework can check out the website:
http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/index.html
for a taste.

for now,
best wishes to all and a wish for more posts and discussion here,
alex
-- 


------
alexanne don
phd research student
applied linguistics
university of birmingham, UK.
email:
<eldon at panix.com>
<eldon at gol.com>
<acd089 at bham.ac.uk>