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14 - Discourse Semantics

from Part II - Discourse Analysis within SFL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

Geoff Thompson
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Wendy L. Bowcher
Affiliation:
Sun Yat-Sen University, China
Lise Fontaine
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
David Schönthal
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
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Summary

Diachronic linguistics is the study of the development of language over time. Such studies are relatively rare in SFL; this chapter outlines those that exist, and comments briefly on some compatible studies. Cummings has studied Old English, in comparison with present-day English. For example, Old English modal operators still had lexical content, and the fused finite was common in polar questions. Halliday has made an important contribution in the diachronic study of scientific text. He has studied Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, and in a range of texts from Newton to Darwin, he shows how nominalization is used in thematic progression to carry forward the argument. In my own work I have studied the scientific research article, notably in the Philosophical Transactions, 1700-1980, and in the Journal des Sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions, 1665-1700, including consideration of thematic structure, process type, modality, and grammatical metaphor. Other work includes that of Martinez-Insua, Starc, O’Halloran, and Urbach. Work that is not SFL, but compatible with it, includes that of Traugott, Salager-Meyer, Valle, and Biber and Gray. Halliday and Webster have recently taken up one of Halliday’s older ideas that English is moving from a transitive to an ergative situation.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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