Interpersonal Grammar: Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory and Description

Description

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.

J. R. Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic functional theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre and multimodality, focusing on English, Tagalog, Spanish and Korean. He was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998, and was Head of its Linguistics Section from 2010-2012; he was awarded a Centenary Medal for his services to Linguistics and Philology in 2003. In April 2014 Shanghai Jiao Tong University opened its Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics, appointing Professor Martin as Director. From 2017-2019 he was visiting professor in the Department of Language Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Beatriz Quiroz is Associate Professor in Language Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Her current research, informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), focuses on an integrated description of clause systems in Chilean Spanish, with a special emphasis on system-structure relations. Her broader interests include language description, language typology and the various interactions between grammar and discourse. Giacomo Figueredo is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, where he is an investigator in the Laboratory of Language Experimentation, carrying out empirical experimental research on language description, modelling and generation. His interests include language description, multilingual studies, language typology and translation.