This contribution explores the challenges and opportunities of making Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) more accessible to a diverse audience and enhancing its appliability in various linguistic contexts. In particular, SFL will be used to explore how Generative AI encodes its language instantiations. The author will discuss how programming constructs and computational processes can be analogous to linguistic structures and functions from an SFL perspective, illuminating the interconnectedness between language structures and programming syntax. As technological advancements continue to reshape the landscape of linguistic research and computational applications, the fusion of SFL and Generative AI opens up avenues for innovative solutions in natural language understanding, human-computer interaction, and educational technology.

Fake news is a phenomenon as old as news itself. Likewise, the effects of news bias have been exploited for centuries to push hidden agendas and spread ideologies. These commonplaces were not only ignored by those in power but willingly abused in the pursuit of their own interests. With the rapid advent of the social media, which have by and large escaped public regulation and can now be (ab)used by anyone, things have started to change. There are now urgent calls from governments and educational authorities to better equip citizens with critical media literacy skills. This paper explores how established methods of SFL can be used to unveil editorial bias in newspapers: the systemic analysis of modal expressions in news texts helps to unveil Authorial Orientation and the pretence of objectivity; the thorough analysis of Judgement and Engagement — two categories from Appraisal Theory — allows students to explore evaluative stance and editorial bias.

This book chapter explores the underutilized yet promising application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in analysing oral academic discourse, focusing on applied linguistics doctoral defence sessions in Iran. Despite the prevalence of SFL in examining written academic texts, its application to high-stakes oral interactions has been sparse. This study bridges the gap by utilizing Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Framework to investigate the attitudinal resources — Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation — employed by doctoral defence examiners. Drawing from transcripts of Iranian doctoral defences, this study examines how linguistic choices reflect evaluative attitudes, foster professional engagement, and create collegial atmospheres during critical interactions. The findings of this study highlight discursive positivity of the examiners as an evaluation inclination which underscores the relevance of SFL in understanding complex academic interactions and has pedagogical implications for academics, particularly novice examiners.

This chapter enhances understanding of interpersonal negotiation and appraisal in spoken dialogic academic discourse, aiming to help EAP economics students develop discipline-specific multimodal literacy and engage more effectively in the specialist field of their studies. The chapter provides a multimodal analysis of selected still frames of an excerpt from an online academic conversation on economic issues, using a social semiotic metafunctional framework. This framework combines Halliday’s metafunctional theory (extended to other semiotic resources), Bakhtin’s views on genre and intertextuality, and Gregory’s concept of textual phase and transition. The combined analytical approach examines how paralinguistic resources (i.e., gesture, facial expression, posture, intonation) intertwine with spoken language to create overall meaning. It also highlights the discipline-specific devices economists use to express opinions, make evaluations, and guide audience alignment.

This chapter applies systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis to refugee-themed picture books to examine how parenthood is constructed intersectionally across verbal and visual modes. The findings reveal strongly gendered patterns that mirror those identified in migration studies: mothers appear as primary caregivers, while fathers are linked to provision and protection. These representations reflect broader cultural narratives of migrant family life and emotional resilience. By linking literary portrayals to real-world experiences, the chapter demonstrates the value of SFL in bridging discourse analysis, multimodal literature, and interdisciplinary research on forced displacement.

This study investigates the multimodal strategies through which writers and illustrators foster interaction between child readers and the characters in three picture books portraying same-sex male parent families. The theoretical approaches applied in this study are Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Social Semiotics (2006), later developed by Painter, Martin and Unsworth (2013) for the analysis of visual narratives. The results reveal that eye-level angles, middle shots, a notable presence of frontal images, together with a generic drawing style and vibrant, warm and familiar colours, in combination with verbal language, are the main semiotic resources through which illustrators foster a sense of connection and engagement between the story’s characters and the child reader. Some demand images and close-ups, although smaller in number, also contribute to aligning the visual readers with the characters at important points of the stories. Visual Social Semiotics, therefore, seems to be an appropriate approach to examine the interactive potential inherent in the interplay between visual and verbal modes in these picture books that challenge male gender stereotypes within family environments.

Since the beginning of this century, oratory, or public speaking, has been the object of a renewed global interest, which can notably be explained due to the digital revolution and the new public speaking formats engendered by the digital interface. In such a context, oratory has become a key contemporary communicational competence in almost every sector of society. SFL offers an opportune framework to appraise the unique type of discourse practice within the social semiotic that is oratory — from its grammar (it represents a hybrid between prototypical spoken and written language), to its multimodal resources and the variation of these different resources within the new digital context. SFL therefore provides an extremely appliable theory via which a pedagogy of oratory can be developed. After briefly reviewing the literature that reports on the absence of an adequate pedagogy when it comes to public speaking, this chapter concretely demonstrates the use of the aforementioned dimensions of SFL theory within a pedagogy of oratory. The contribution also reports on two experiences of teaching oratory in the context of France, one in English to non-native speakers, the other as part of the continuous learning and training provided to professionals at manager level in their native language.

The concept of Sprachbund, first articulated by Trubetzkoy (1930, p. 17), has played a pivotal role in areal linguistics by foregrounding the possibility that languages converge structurally through prolonged contact rather than shared descent. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), in turn, offers a typological perspective centred on meaning: the systemic resources through which languages construe experiential, interpersonal, and textual meaning. This chapter proposes a reappraisal of Sprachbund by bringing it into dialogue with systemic functional typology and its metafunctional orientation. Using the construct of Standard Average European (SAE), leconceptualized by Haspelmath (1998a and 1998b) as a prototype-defined areal phenomenon, this study argues that SAE can be fruitfully reinterpreted as a metafunctional Sprachbund.

This study re-examines fragmentary expressions in English from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective, focusing on their interaction with the clause-level Theme-Rheme organisation and discourse-semantic periodicity. Building on earlier work that conceptualised fragments as thematic orienting points of departure, this paper explores whether fragmentary utterances can also carry focal prominence (functioning as New) or occupy (transitional) positions within the unfolding textual wave. Fragments are treated as entrenched form — meaning pairings rather than elliptical residues and may therefore operate strategically within the textual metafunction. The analysis highlights that their textual role is context-sensitive and reflects the dynamic interaction between clause-level organisation and higher-level periodic structuring across strata. Fragmentary constructions illustrate how textual prominence may be recalibrated as discourse unfolds.

By integrating non-canonical constructions into developments in SFL discourse semantics, this paper contributes to the understanding of how fragments participate in the organisation of meaning across clause and discourse.

This chapter examines ongoing language change in American English by analyzing past perfect counterfactual conditionals from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. It focuses on the increasing use of the non-standard if I would have construction in conversational registers, specifically basketball podcasts. Adopting a trinocular approach, the study treats this development as a registerial feature and demonstrates how SFL accounts for the interaction between lexicogrammatical choices, discourse environments and social context. The chapter also contributes to the accessibility of SFL by providing a clear, detailed account of the English verbal group, with particular attention to past perfect counterfactuals. As a result, the analysis is intended to be accessible to a broad readership, both within and beyond SFL-oriented research.

This paper applies Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to examine the circumstantial elements of Space, Time, and Manner in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37, King James Version). Through a qualitative clause-level analysis, the study identifies and classifies the circumstances before synthesizing their patterned deployment: spatial elements, such as ‘from Jerusalem to Jericho’ and ‘to an inn’, establish polarity between sacred safety and perilous danger; temporal elements, such as ‘as he journeyed,’ ‘on the morrow’, etc., mark immediacy and sustained commitment, contrasting fleeting indifference with extended compassion; and manner elements, such as ‘pouring in oil and wine,’ ‘by chance’, etc., foreground deliberate, sacrificial care against mechanical avoidance. These patterns realize the parable’s socio-semiotic force. They experientially encode compassion as boundary-transgressing praxis, interpersonally challenge the lawyer’s self-justification, and textually advance a register of ethical imperative (‘go, and do thou likewise’). The findings demonstrate SFL’s capacity to reveal how grammar itself enacts the parable’s moral and ideological messages, offering insights into biblical narrative beyond thematic description and contributing to functionalist approaches in theological linguistics.

This chapter reports findings from a ten-year research initiative in Chile and Argentina that united scholars in health communication. The project aimed to guide healthcare professionals, caregivers, and policymakers on the implications of linguistic choices in clinical interactions. Using the Appraisal framework, linguists analysed autobiographical accounts of chronic pain patients to explore interpersonal meanings in healthcare contexts. While the analysis yielded insights into affect and emotion, interdisciplinary collaboration posed challenges: mental health researchers often viewed Appraisal categories as impressionistic and lacking psychological rigor. Drawing on our experience, we critically assess the framework’s applicability for interdisciplinary health research and propose directions for integrating linguistic and psychological perspectives.

This contribution explores the challenges and opportunities of making Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) more accessible to a diverse audience and enhancing its appliability in various linguistic contexts. In particular, SFL will be used to explore how Generative AI encodes its language instantiations. The author will discuss how programming constructs and computational processes can be analogous to linguistic structures and functions from an SFL perspective, illuminating the interconnectedness between language structures and programming syntax. As technological advancements continue to reshape the landscape of linguistic research and computational applications, the fusion of SFL and Generative AI opens up avenues for innovative solutions in natural language understanding, human-computer interaction, and educational technology.

Fake news is a phenomenon as old as news itself. Likewise, the effects of news bias have been exploited for centuries to push hidden agendas and spread ideologies. These commonplaces were not only ignored by those in power but willingly abused in the pursuit of their own interests. With the rapid advent of the social media, which have by and large escaped public regulation and can now be (ab)used by anyone, things have started to change. There are now urgent calls from governments and educational authorities to better equip citizens with critical media literacy skills. This paper explores how established methods of SFL can be used to unveil editorial bias in newspapers: the systemic analysis of modal expressions in news texts helps to unveil Authorial Orientation and the pretence of objectivity; the thorough analysis of Judgement and Engagement — two categories from Appraisal Theory — allows students to explore evaluative stance and editorial bias.

This book chapter explores the underutilized yet promising application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in analysing oral academic discourse, focusing on applied linguistics doctoral defence sessions in Iran. Despite the prevalence of SFL in examining written academic texts, its application to high-stakes oral interactions has been sparse. This study bridges the gap by utilizing Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Framework to investigate the attitudinal resources — Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation — employed by doctoral defence examiners. Drawing from transcripts of Iranian doctoral defences, this study examines how linguistic choices reflect evaluative attitudes, foster professional engagement, and create collegial atmospheres during critical interactions. The findings of this study highlight discursive positivity of the examiners as an evaluation inclination which underscores the relevance of SFL in understanding complex academic interactions and has pedagogical implications for academics, particularly novice examiners.

This chapter enhances understanding of interpersonal negotiation and appraisal in spoken dialogic academic discourse, aiming to help EAP economics students develop discipline-specific multimodal literacy and engage more effectively in the specialist field of their studies. The chapter provides a multimodal analysis of selected still frames of an excerpt from an online academic conversation on economic issues, using a social semiotic metafunctional framework. This framework combines Halliday’s metafunctional theory (extended to other semiotic resources), Bakhtin’s views on genre and intertextuality, and Gregory’s concept of textual phase and transition. The combined analytical approach examines how paralinguistic resources (i.e., gesture, facial expression, posture, intonation) intertwine with spoken language to create overall meaning. It also highlights the discipline-specific devices economists use to express opinions, make evaluations, and guide audience alignment.

This chapter applies systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis to refugee-themed picture books to examine how parenthood is constructed intersectionally across verbal and visual modes. The findings reveal strongly gendered patterns that mirror those identified in migration studies: mothers appear as primary caregivers, while fathers are linked to provision and protection. These representations reflect broader cultural narratives of migrant family life and emotional resilience. By linking literary portrayals to real-world experiences, the chapter demonstrates the value of SFL in bridging discourse analysis, multimodal literature, and interdisciplinary research on forced displacement.

This study investigates the multimodal strategies through which writers and illustrators foster interaction between child readers and the characters in three picture books portraying same-sex male parent families. The theoretical approaches applied in this study are Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Social Semiotics (2006), later developed by Painter, Martin and Unsworth (2013) for the analysis of visual narratives. The results reveal that eye-level angles, middle shots, a notable presence of frontal images, together with a generic drawing style and vibrant, warm and familiar colours, in combination with verbal language, are the main semiotic resources through which illustrators foster a sense of connection and engagement between the story’s characters and the child reader. Some demand images and close-ups, although smaller in number, also contribute to aligning the visual readers with the characters at important points of the stories. Visual Social Semiotics, therefore, seems to be an appropriate approach to examine the interactive potential inherent in the interplay between visual and verbal modes in these picture books that challenge male gender stereotypes within family environments.

Since the beginning of this century, oratory, or public speaking, has been the object of a renewed global interest, which can notably be explained due to the digital revolution and the new public speaking formats engendered by the digital interface. In such a context, oratory has become a key contemporary communicational competence in almost every sector of society. SFL offers an opportune framework to appraise the unique type of discourse practice within the social semiotic that is oratory — from its grammar (it represents a hybrid between prototypical spoken and written language), to its multimodal resources and the variation of these different resources within the new digital context. SFL therefore provides an extremely appliable theory via which a pedagogy of oratory can be developed. After briefly reviewing the literature that reports on the absence of an adequate pedagogy when it comes to public speaking, this chapter concretely demonstrates the use of the aforementioned dimensions of SFL theory within a pedagogy of oratory. The contribution also reports on two experiences of teaching oratory in the context of France, one in English to non-native speakers, the other as part of the continuous learning and training provided to professionals at manager level in their native language.

The concept of Sprachbund, first articulated by Trubetzkoy (1930, p. 17), has played a pivotal role in areal linguistics by foregrounding the possibility that languages converge structurally through prolonged contact rather than shared descent. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), in turn, offers a typological perspective centred on meaning: the systemic resources through which languages construe experiential, interpersonal, and textual meaning. This chapter proposes a reappraisal of Sprachbund by bringing it into dialogue with systemic functional typology and its metafunctional orientation. Using the construct of Standard Average European (SAE), leconceptualized by Haspelmath (1998a and 1998b) as a prototype-defined areal phenomenon, this study argues that SAE can be fruitfully reinterpreted as a metafunctional Sprachbund.

This study re-examines fragmentary expressions in English from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective, focusing on their interaction with the clause-level Theme-Rheme organisation and discourse-semantic periodicity. Building on earlier work that conceptualised fragments as thematic orienting points of departure, this paper explores whether fragmentary utterances can also carry focal prominence (functioning as New) or occupy (transitional) positions within the unfolding textual wave. Fragments are treated as entrenched form — meaning pairings rather than elliptical residues and may therefore operate strategically within the textual metafunction. The analysis highlights that their textual role is context-sensitive and reflects the dynamic interaction between clause-level organisation and higher-level periodic structuring across strata. Fragmentary constructions illustrate how textual prominence may be recalibrated as discourse unfolds.

By integrating non-canonical constructions into developments in SFL discourse semantics, this paper contributes to the understanding of how fragments participate in the organisation of meaning across clause and discourse.

This chapter examines ongoing language change in American English by analyzing past perfect counterfactual conditionals from a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. It focuses on the increasing use of the non-standard if I would have construction in conversational registers, specifically basketball podcasts. Adopting a trinocular approach, the study treats this development as a registerial feature and demonstrates how SFL accounts for the interaction between lexicogrammatical choices, discourse environments and social context. The chapter also contributes to the accessibility of SFL by providing a clear, detailed account of the English verbal group, with particular attention to past perfect counterfactuals. As a result, the analysis is intended to be accessible to a broad readership, both within and beyond SFL-oriented research.

This paper applies Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to examine the circumstantial elements of Space, Time, and Manner in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37, King James Version). Through a qualitative clause-level analysis, the study identifies and classifies the circumstances before synthesizing their patterned deployment: spatial elements, such as ‘from Jerusalem to Jericho’ and ‘to an inn’, establish polarity between sacred safety and perilous danger; temporal elements, such as ‘as he journeyed,’ ‘on the morrow’, etc., mark immediacy and sustained commitment, contrasting fleeting indifference with extended compassion; and manner elements, such as ‘pouring in oil and wine,’ ‘by chance’, etc., foreground deliberate, sacrificial care against mechanical avoidance. These patterns realize the parable’s socio-semiotic force. They experientially encode compassion as boundary-transgressing praxis, interpersonally challenge the lawyer’s self-justification, and textually advance a register of ethical imperative (‘go, and do thou likewise’). The findings demonstrate SFL’s capacity to reveal how grammar itself enacts the parable’s moral and ideological messages, offering insights into biblical narrative beyond thematic description and contributing to functionalist approaches in theological linguistics.

This chapter reports findings from a ten-year research initiative in Chile and Argentina that united scholars in health communication. The project aimed to guide healthcare professionals, caregivers, and policymakers on the implications of linguistic choices in clinical interactions. Using the Appraisal framework, linguists analysed autobiographical accounts of chronic pain patients to explore interpersonal meanings in healthcare contexts. While the analysis yielded insights into affect and emotion, interdisciplinary collaboration posed challenges: mental health researchers often viewed Appraisal categories as impressionistic and lacking psychological rigor. Drawing on our experience, we critically assess the framework’s applicability for interdisciplinary health research and propose directions for integrating linguistic and psychological perspectives.