28.3587, Review: Applied Ling; General Ling; Ling Theories; Text/Corpus Ling: Gardner, Alsop (2016)

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Subject: 28.3587, Review: Applied Ling; General Ling; Ling Theories; Text/Corpus Ling: Gardner, Alsop (2016)

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Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 15:09:58
From: Sara Vilar-Lluch [S.Vilar-Lluch at uea.ac.uk]
Subject: Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-4637.html

EDITOR: Sheena  Gardner
EDITOR: Sian  Alsop
TITLE: Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age
SERIES TITLE: Functional Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Equinox Publishing Ltd
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Sara Vilar-Lluch, University of East Anglia

REVIEWS EDITOR: Robert A. Coté

SUMMARY

“Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age” edited by Sheena Gardner
and Siân Alsop, explores how the new technological affordances (i.e. digital
communication and computational software) are changing the way we use language
in our everyday life and how we understand language in doing linguistics
research. The book is structured in three parts. Part I considers genres that
have appeared as a result of the new digital era, it explores their capability
to generate new meaning and social stances, and highlights the importance of
adopting a multimodal approach in linguistic analysis. Part II is concerned
with the digital recontextualization of texts (institutional discourses in
particular) and the implications such recontextualization entails for both
language understanding and the generation of texts adapted to the new digital
demands. Part III highlights the potentials of computational analysis and
state the fruitfulness of studies that integrate corpus to the traditional SFL
qualitative method. 

Part I: Texts that are born digital: new digital genres

In Chapter 1, “«There is power in stories»: A Multimodal Corpus-Based and
Functional Analysis on Fandom Blogs”, Maria Grazia Sindoni studies the genre
variation of fandom blogs. The chapter addresses two relatively unexplored
subjects in the literature: the genre variation that blogs have given rise to
and the frequently dismissed fandom blog type. The study is primarily based on
a corpus analysis, complemented by a functional interpretation of the data,
and an analysis of other semiotic elements characteristic of the blog type
that are difficult to be studied only with computational methods, i.e. images
with integrated text, good examples of the alteration of semiotic resources or
“resource switching”, especially common in the social networks.  

The corpus comprises fandom related content of the social network platform
Live Journal, and it was studied by keywords and key-keywords (i.e. co-keys or
key-words that share keyness) (p. 14). Fandom blogs are described as composed
with a high density of positive lexis and expressions which refer to the
virtual world of the Internet, characterized by a high use of pronouns (male
pronouns predominate), by a preference for quotations to projections, and an
inclination to questions and polarization. The fandom genre is thus presented
as accessible and amateurish and is attributed a male-oriented perspective.

Chapter 2, “Digitality and Persuasives Technologies: Towards an SFL Model of
New Social Actions and Practices in Digital Settings, also advocates for
multimodality in the study of meaning generation in the digital context.
Concerned with the meaning making affordances of the new digital technologies
(i.e. emojis), Sandra Petroni articulates her research around two major axis:
the persuasion involved in digital technologies (i.e. the prioritization of
some resources over others to construct meaning and change people’s behaviours
or attitudes) and the possibility of classifying the non-linguistic resources
of the “persuasive technologies” following Martin and White’s appraisal system
(cf. Martin & White, 2005).

The study combines Fogg’s behavioural model with the Appraisal Theory and
presents the non-verbal semiotic resources of the digital technologies as
important contributors to the generation of a system of communal values.
Digital technologies are confirmed as persuasive, mainly employed to build
positive stances; the depiction of participants and processes referred to is
transformed by the addition of the new semiotic resources (i.e. emojis) and
thus decoded as positive.

Chapter 3, “Digital Citizenship: Social Actors in Blog Posts to Chilean Online
News Portals”, takes up again the integration of corpus analysis with SFL
framework, complemented with van Leeuwen’s sociosemantic approach to social
actors (cf. van Leeuwen, 2008) and Martin and Rose’s genre theory (cf. Martin
& Rose, 2007). Lésmer Montecino and María Cristina Arancibia analyse the
construction of social actors’ identity (i.e. Harold Beyer, the Chilean
Education Minister) in the debates that took place in the news portals EMOL
and El Mostrador after the Congress approved the charges against his misuse of
funds.  

The analysis of 160 blog comments depicts political actors’ identities as
being communally constructed, pictures a divided Chilean social reality, and
establishes the government and the citizens in a vertical relation of
opposition.

In Chapter 4, “Imagined Community and Affective Alignment in Memorial Tributes
to Steve Jobs on YouTube”, Anu Harju examines the construction of alignment in
online celebrity memorials (i.e. Steve Jobs). Grief, traditionally enclosed in
the private sphere, is depicted in the digital environment as an anonymous
public expression. The research studies a YouTube video and its users’
comments posted from 2012 to 2014 by performing a transitivity analysis
complemented by a second analysis based on the appraisal theory. Public
mourning constructs imaginary communities that divide the users in
in/out-groups according to the users’ evaluations of the deceased. Mainly
constituted by emotional discourse, the mourning focuses on the achievements
in life and adopts a positive tone despite reporting a loss. 

In Chapter 5, “Commenting, Interacting, Reposting: A Systemic-Functional
Analysis of Online Newspaper Comments”, Mariavita Cambria argues that the
change from printed to online newspapers has resulted in a hybridization of
genres that has changed both the representation of news and the way news are
experienced by the readers. The study aims to describe how users are
represented in the comments they write about news articles, and it stresses
the dialogic nature of such comments. To do so, Cambria builds a corpus
composed by the users’ comments of a total of 303 articles about immigration.
The corpus analysis is complemented with a qualitative analysis of the
pictures and videos referred to in the comments.

Part II: Texts that achieve digitality: professional genres recontextualized

In Chapter 6, “«We’re hearing from Reuters that...»: The Role of
Around-the-Clock News Media in the Increased Use of the Present Progressive
with Mental Process Type Verbs”, Ben Clarke gives evidence of one of the major
assumptions of SFL: the contextual dependence of grammar variation and the
interrelation of grammatical and semantic changes. Clarke exposes the existing
explanations of the use of the progressive form in cognitive verbs (i.e. as
construction of incompleteness and temporariness, as index of a particular
meaning beyond the primary semantic value, and as a mitigation of potential
face threatening acts) (p. 108), and he offers a new and complementary
account.

The study is based on a diachronic corpus analysis of the cognitive verbs
“hope” and “hear”, traditionally associated with the present simple but with
an increasing use of the progressive form. CoHAE (Corpus of Historical
American English), the corpus employed, comprises data from the 1810s to the
first decade of 2000s. The analysis shows a marked jump in the usage of the
progressive form of cognitive verbs in the 1970s, which corresponds to the
apparition of the first 24h news media. The around-the-clock news establish
“recency” as a fundamental value of newsworthiness. Thus, the progressive form
of cognitive verbs is associated with the depiction of temporal and spatial
presence to stress the here and now of the events being reported. 

In Chapter 7, “The Construal of Terminal Illness in Online Medical Texts:
Social Distance and Semantic Space”, Mariel Bloor analyses the lexicogrammar
of death in online medical information on the prognosis of illnesses addressed
to the broad community of non-experts. The data is reported to be empty of the
personal touch expected in face-to-face communication and is saturated with
technical collocations worded as long nominal groups that increase the
indeterminacy of the clauses, thus opening the door to misunderstanding. The
texts avoid any reference to the sufferers, and all allusions to the death
entailed in the symptoms reported are bypassed, i.e. the illnesses are fatal
but the patients “do not” die (p. 123). Descriptions of fatal illnesses tend
to focus “on the living” and make a constant use of grammatical and lexical
metaphors. Thus, Bloor concludes that the current English medical discourse
displays an “euphemistic representation of death” (p. 131). 

In Chapter 8, “Moving Online to Teach Academic Writing in Science and
Engineering: Theory and Practice”, Helen Drury provides an evaluation of a 10
year period redesign of teaching materials to meet the needs of online
learning. The study is ultimately based on the social semiotic framework of
the SFL tradition and focuses on the case of three samples of pedagogic
resources for the academic writing of laboratory reports. The analysis shows
how the online design has shifted from a mimesis of the linear written mode to
the adoption of multimodality, where the arrangement of visual resources is
what brings coherence and cohesion to the text and determines the pathways of
learning that students will adopt.

The recontextualization of semiotic resources in the digital environment is
further explored by Lees Fryer in Chapter 9, “Cut and Paste: Recontextualizing
Meaning-Material in a Digital Environment”. A figure originally published in a
medical article is taken as case study to analyse how, in the transmission of
information to new contexts, the original semiotic elements are modified by a
selective process of appropriation and rearranged to generate a new meaning.
The author also seeks to understand the social relations enacted through the
new texts and the reader’s role in making sense of them.

In Chapter 10, “Analysis of an Online University Lecture: Multimodal
Perspectives”, Marsini Karagevrekis is concerned with the integration of
verbal and non-verbal semiotic resources in meaning generation and takes an
online economics video-lecture as case study. Karagevrekis argues that the new
electronic form of data allows a more comprehensive analysis by providing
evidence of how paralinguistic features (i.e. pitch, tone) and body language
(i.e. gestures, gaze) can modify the purely linguistic meaning and generate
affiliation (i.e. with laughter). The study of the video-lecture is
complemented with an analysis of a diagram as an illustration of transduction,
i.e. the change of information in changing the mode of communication (p. 178).
The diagram is attributed the potential to trace a specific reading path,
perceived as the bearer of an undisputed objectivity, thus excluding all
possible refutation of the audience. 

Continuing with the examination of objectivity generation in text, in Chapter
11, “Transitivity in Language Event Reports in an Online Corpus of Science
Journalism”, Blanca García Riaza studies how science popularization articles
of digital newspapers (i.e. The Guardian) employ reporting verbs as a vehicle
to construct a legitimizing authority. Assuming that reporting verbs are
essential to interpret the author’s intention in the report (p. 186), García
Riaza considers how the reporting verbs employed enable the identification of
the author, and how they depict the production of the linguistic event
reproduced. A corpus of 567 articles is examined following a three-staged
analysis: first paying attention to the opening paragraphs, then to the rest
of the text, and finally a comparison is realized. Because digital texts do
not present the linear reading of the printed versions, first paragraphs are
assumed to be comparatively more informative than the text that follows them.
The analysis is developed around four research questions: (i) presence and
frequency of reporting verbs in the corpus, (ii) position of the reporting
verbs in relation to the participant, with an especial focus on the adjunct
“according to”, (iii) most common reporting verbs and degree of evaluation,
and (iv) degree of informativity. The analysis shows that whereas “according
to” is more frequent in the opening sections, a higher frequency of reporting
verbs is presented in the subsequent paragraphs. Their most frequent structure
is “participant + verb”, which is read as echoing the reader’s preference to
know the informative source. 

The rupture of the reading linearity in digital texts, usually associated with
the attribution of freedom to the readers, is further explored in Chapter 12,
“Is this the End of Hypertext? Hotel Websites’ Return to Linearity”. Martin
Kaltenbacher argues that the non-linear reading path frequently entails
interlinks outside the website which, in business websites, may jeopardize the
commercial goals of the company announced. An analysis of three hotel websites
(i.e. Hotel Sacher, Hotel Salt Lake and Booking.com) reveals a return to the
linear reading of the written brochures in the hotel industry; these texts
present a clear beginning and end to ensure prospective customers are guided
according to the requirements of the company. 

Part III: Texts that have digitality thrust upon them: super powers in text
analysis

Chapter 13, “On Negotiating the Hurdles of Corpus-Assisted Appraisal Analysis
in Verbal Act”, opens Part III by examining the complex relation between SFL
and corpus linguistics, often depicted as a trade-off between richness of
analysis and quantity of data analysed. Donna R. Miller presents a corpus
assisted study on evaluation to illustrate how corpus linguistics can work
together with the traditional qualitative approach. Evaluation is often
regarded as the linguistic aspect, which presents more difficulties to be
automatized for the high possibility of attributing different categorizations
to the same piece of writing in function of the context. The analysis examines
the different meaning attributions to the word “noble” in Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus and assesses how these meanings are reflected in the appraisal
system, thus coupling ideational and interpersonal dimensions of language. The
study is divided into a first automatic stage, which is complemented by a
qualitative analysis based on Martin and White’s appraisal framework
(especially focused on judgement and appreciation). Miller concludes affirming
the fruitfulness of corpus analysis when employed as a complementary tool for
the qualitative linguistic analysis (p. 225).

In Chapter 14, “Diachronic Change from Washington to Obama: The Challenges and
Constraints of Corpus-Assisted Meaning Analysis”, Paul Bayley and Cinzia
Bevitori examine further the pairing of SFL with corpus analysis by offering a
diachronic study of the State of the Union speech (SoUs) delivered by US
Presidents in the period between 1790 and 2014, composing a corpus of 228
texts. SoUs is understood as the canonical representation of the Presidential
power (p. 230) and is analysed in terms of its increasing employment of
persuasive and negotiating devices achieved through changes in clause
structures, lexis, construction of both speaker’s and audience identities, and
engagement evoked through modality. The authors start by identifying the
constraints and affordances of corpus linguistics and affirm the necessity of
a constant back and forth between the automatic and the manual analysis (p.
229). While stating the usefulness of keyword searches as a first approach to
texts and stressing the suitability of corpus to provide quantitative data and
semantic information about lexical terms (i.e. negative connotation of “cause”
vs. the positive of “provide”), the authors stress that corpus should be
regarded as a complement, not substitute, of a reading of the texts. Discourse
change (i.e. SoUs shift to informal style) is mentioned as example of a
linguistic characteristic whose identification cannot be completely achieved
with the single use of automatic resources. Still, the analysis constitute a
good illustration of how corpus is a valuable complement to diachronic studies
on meaning.

Chapter 15, “The Role of Corpus Annotation in the SFL-CL Marriage: A Test Case
on the EU Debt Crises”, considers the difficulties of SFL annotation in
performing studies which integrate SFL and corpus linguistics. Sabrina Fusari
argues that despite the traditional theoretical dispute between SFL and corpus
(i.e. corpus linguists tend to regard SFL as too subjective; SFL claims the
atheoretical stance of corpus linguistics constitutes itself the adoption of a
theory), both approaches have an important point of contact, the attention to
lexis and grammar as object of analysis, and thus, they should be considered
as complementary. The author proceeds to examine the difficulties in
generating an annotation software for SFL, i.e. a complex categorization
system that sometimes can carry certain overlap, and a lack of reliance on
automatic annotation. UAM Corpus Tool and Halliday Centre Tagger, two software
tools used in SFL analysis are examined. Fusari concludes that, in order to be
properly automatized, SFL needs simplifications; therefore, we need to
consider up to which point SFL complexity can be sacrificed (p. 250).

In Chapter 16, “Grammatical Metaphor through the Lens of Software? Examining
«Crisis» in a Corpus of Articles from The Financial Times”, Antonella Luporini
examines the SFL distinction between lexical and grammatical metaphors and the
role of the later in meaning generation. Despite the alleged traditional
reluctance to use corpus linguistics to perform a study on metaphors, Luporini
adopts an integrative approach to analyse the grammatical metaphors employed
in The Financial Times to represent the financial crises. The corpus is
constituted of articles collected from all the issues of the newspaper and
published along 2008. The analysis displays the predominance of ideational
metaphors, partly attributed to their capacity to encode the logical relations
attributed to the events (p. 267), and the modest employment of grammatical
metaphors of modality to distance the authorial voice from the opinion
expressed (p. 271). 

In Chapter 17, “A Corpus Approach to Method of Development: Discourse Markers
and Presuming Reference in 32 ICE-GB Text Types”, Michael Cummings analyses
the distribution of continuity and variation markers in different text types
in a corpus composed by the British Component of the International Corpus of
English. Ultimately, the analysis examines the method of development
hypothesis of Fries, i.e. the themes of the different sentences of a text
constitute textual structural patterns. A continuity is assumed between theme
and rheme, and such a continuity is to be displayed through the identification
of chains of references. The analysis establishes broadcast interviews as the
genre with the highest density of thematic discourse markers and the
administrative and regulatory prose as the lowest. Legal cross-examinations
present the highest density of thematic presuming reference, and academic
writing in natural sciences the lowest. The results confirm the importance of
grammatical items in theme position to mark topic continuity and variation.

In Chapter 18, “Journey of Three Digitized Texts: Entextualization and
Recontextualization in a Corpus Study”, Tom Morton and Anne McCabe study the
processes of recontextualization that take place when spoken and written
linguistic texts are transcribed and arranged to be analysed in corpus
software. The data analysed was produced in bilingual schools of English and
Spanish in Spain and were aimed to be examined to gauge students’ mastery of
English appraisal resources. The process of entextualization entailed in
linguistic research, i.e. the removal of a piece of text from its original
context so it can be treated as object of study in itself, involves the
decontextualization of the data and empties the texts of all linguistic
features except the lexicogrammatical elements. The application of the
theoretical categories of the linguistic framework adopted for the analysis
(i.e. the appraisal theory) entails a new meaning attribution to the text.
Still, the authors state the necessity of integrating corpus analysis with a
broader theory of language (i.e. SFL) to obtain fruitful results. 

In Chapter 19, “Annotating Cohesive Ellipses in an English-German Corpus”,
Katrin Menzel studies the cohesion in English and German by analysing the
ellipsis production in both languages in oral and written texts through an
integrative approach of SFL and corpus linguistics. The computational tools
were used for an initial annotation of the ellipsis that after was checked
manually. The analysis describes ellipsis as a cohesion resource, displays its
oral and written manifestations, states its frequency distribution in the
languages studied and shows how different languages exploit ellipsis resources
differently. Although Menzel recognizes the importance of pragmatic elements
in ellipsis generation, the analysis is focused on the lexicogrammatical
aspects and the categorization employed is based on Halliday and Hasan’s
distinction between nominal, verbal and clausal ellipsis. Spoken registers of
both languages are these with a higher presence of ellipsis, and translations
are the ones which present less. While SFL is said to be able to provide a
useful set of analytical categories, the author claims the necessity of corpus
analysis for a comprehensive approach which accounts for the natural
distribution of ellipsis in a language. 

The importance of cohesion in speech organization is recovered in Chapter 20,
“Linguistic Characteristics of Schizophrenia and Mania Computationally
Revealed”, the last one of the collection. With the aim to determine the
linguistic features that enable the identification of a linguistic production
as belonging to a patient with schizophrenia or mania, Ekaterina Shagalov and
Jonathan Fine perform a corpus based analysis of 10 interviews: 6 correspond
to individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, 4 to mania diagnosis. The
interviews were realised as open questions to allow the spontaneous use of
language. To perform the analysis, the authors identified a total of 46
linguistic variables that were grouped in 4 broader sets: (i) disfluency and
cohesion, (ii) lexical and richness of description, (iii) amount of talk, and
(iv) syntactic complexity. The chapter offers a comprehensive account of each
one of the four major features for both schizophrenia and mania diagnosis. The
results establish the variables in text formation as the most relevant for the
prediction of the disorder. Because text formation features are essentially
relational, the authors conclude the main difference between the linguistic
productions of subjects with schizophrenia and mania is the way relations to
verbal and nonverbal contexts are constructed.

EVALUATION

The studies comprised in this collection depict Systemic Functional
Linguistics as a powerful theory of language for current linguistics research.
SFL has been established as an invaluable framework to give account of
linguistic phenomena (i.e. projection, cohesion, ellipsis) (cf. Chapters 11,
17, 19), with a high applicability in other disciplines (i.e. as a support to
mental disorders differentiation) (cf. Chapter 20). Also, the validity of SFL
linguistic assumptions (i.e. the correlation between the different linguistic
strata --grammar, semantics and context) has been evidenced (cf. Chapter 6).

The collection shows the fruitful integration of SFL with corpus linguistics.
Computational support has proved to be particularly valuable for diachronic
analysis (cf. Chapters 6, 14) and an invaluable tool for possible practical
applications of linguistic features identification, as assistance to medical
settings (cf. Chapter 20). Still, the integration of SFL with corpus
linguistics is described as a complementary or integrative approach, where
corpus is understood as an essential component to make possible more ambitious
projects but in no case regarded as a substitute of the qualitative
linguistics analysis (cf. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 13, 14).
The articles display SFL as a theory in constant development, with the
possibility to encompass the new sources of meaning generation of the digital
sphere (i.e. the adaptation of the appraisal framework to give account of the
non-verbal meaning generated with the emojis) (cf. Chapter 2). The
interpersonal metafunction of language is frequently established as a central
axis for the study of language in the digital environment (cf. Chapters 2, 4),
of crucial importance to account for the enactment of a stance of shared
values among the users of the social networks. 

SFL is also depicted as an appropriate theory of language for multimodal
analysis. Multimodal approaches are regarded as necessary to achieve a
comprehensive study of the new processes of meaning generation in the digital
environment, i.e. employment of different semiotic modes of data (e.g. images,
sound, texts embedded in images) and recontextualization of texts (cf.
Chapters 1, 2, 9, 10, 18). The digital sphere makes necessary to consider
non-verbal resources and digital communication on their own, not as ancillary
to the verbal resources and face-to-face communication (cf. Chapter 2).

Still, a general evaluation of the complete collection does not make complete
justice to the studies comprised. It needs to be said that not all the
articles are equally relevant for the objectives of the collection; also, the
articles present different levels of analytical development and rigour, and
originality of research. Whereas some chapters offer a research guided by
clear research questions or seek to develop the SFL framework so it can be
applied to the digital texts, other chapters mainly present linguistic
observations concerning the new digital environment. 

Overall, “Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age” offers a
selection of state-of-the-art SFL studies. Complementary approaches, which
integrate qualitative analysis with corpus linguistics, are presented as the
driving force for change in SFL research. In general, the chapters are well
organized, with a clear introduction to provide a contextual and theoretical
backgrounds, a description of the method and data to be analysed, an account
of the analysis and detailed discussion of the results. 

The studies show how digital resources are mainly employed to construct shared
stances among the users and foster positive attitudes towards the subject
under discussion. While this positive attitude could have been anticipated of
fandom blogs (cf. chapter 1), it needs to be regarded as a significant social
phenomenon in relation to mourning practices (cf. Chapter 4) and terminal
illnesses representation (cf. Chapter 7). The correspondence of the
evaluations constructed in the digital sphere on the non-virtual world and the
study of the genuineness of such evaluations are left for further research.

REFERENCES

Martin, J. R. & Rose, D. (2007). Working with Discourse. Meaning beyond the
clause. London/New
York: Continuum

Martin, J. R. & White, P. R. R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal
in English. New York:
Palgrave.

van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical
Discourse Analysis. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sara Vilar-Lluch is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her
main research areas are Systemic Functional Linguistics and Discourse
Analysis; she is also interested in metaphor and face theory. In her PhD
project she studies the representations of ADHD and the diagnosed individuals
in the psychiatric, educational, political and family institutional
discourses.





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