Construing Meaning

This collection highlights studies applying systemic functional (SFL) approaches to diverse datasets, collectively offering insights into the construal of meaning through textual and multimodal communication.

Across the thirteen chapters of this volume, contributors explore how meaning is construed through language, text and multimodal communication in a wide range of contexts, including education, scientific writing, political discourse, social media, audiovisual communication, coding, online lectures and film reviews. The book combines studies grounded in the Hallidayan tradition with chapters that extend systemic functional perspectives through dialogue with multimodality, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and other complementary frameworks. Its distinctive contribution lies in showing the versatility of SFL as a social-semiotic approach capable of illuminating both traditional textual practices and emerging forms of digital and multimodal interaction. Readers will benefit from the book’s broad methodological range, international scope and rich empirical coverage, gaining insight into how language and other semiotic resources shape, and are shaped by, social, cultural, educational and technological contexts.

The volume will be of interest to researchers, advanced students and educators working in systemic functional grammar, multimodality, discourse analysis, applied linguistics and language teaching and learning.

Ana Elina Martínez-Insua is Senior Lecturer at the Universidade de Vigo, Spain, where she forms part of the research team of the LVTC (Language Variation and Textual Categorisation) group.

Javier Pérez-Guerra is Professor of English Linguistics at the Universidade de Vigo, Spain, where he coordinates the LVTC (Language Variation and Textual Categorisation) group.

Yolanda Fernández-Pena is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, French and German Studies at the Universidade de Vigo, Spain.