This stimulating volume provides fresh perspectives on choice, a key notion in systemic functional linguistics. Bringing together a global team of well-established and up-and-coming systemic functional linguists, it shows how the different senses of choice as process and as product are interdependent, and how they operate at all levels of language. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it covers a range of linguistic viewpoints, informed by evolutionary theory, psychology, sociology and neuroscience, to produce a complex but unifying account of the issues. This book offers a critical examination of choice and is ideal for students and researchers working in all areas of functional linguistics as well as cognitive linguistics, second-language acquisition, neurolinguistics and sociolinguistics.
Introduction: choice in contemporary systemic functional theory Lise Fontaine; Part I. Choice: Theory and Debate: 1. Meaning as choice M. A. K. Halliday; 2. The teleological illusion in linguistic 'drift': choice and purpose in semantic evolution David G. Butt, Alison Moore and Kathryn Tuckwell; 3. Choice and language variation: some theoretical reflections Maria Freddi; 4. Grammatical choice and communicative motivation: a radical systemic approach Carl Bache; 5. Semantic options and complex functions: a recursive view of choice Lise Fontaine; 6. Choice and choosing in systemic functional grammar: what is it and how is it done? Robin P. Fawcet; Part II. Cognitive and Neurolinguistic Views on Choice: 7. Systemic networks, relational networks, and choice Sydney Lamb; 8. The twin paradoxes of unconscious choices and unintentional agents: what neurosciences say about choice and agency in action and language Elissa Asp; 9. A neurocognitive interpretation of systemic functional choice José María Gil; Part III. Linguistic Constraints on Choice: 10. There-constructions as a choice for coherence in the recent history of English Ana Elina Martínez-Insua; 11. Picking an argument: politicians' choice of persuasive strategies Geoff Thompson; 12. A dynamic view of choice in writing: composition as text evolution Michael O'Donnell; Part IV. Cultural and Contextual Constraints on Choice: 13. Choice, system, realization: describing language as meaning potential Ruqaiya Hasan; 14. 'Choice' in relation to context: a diachronic perspective on cultural valeur Claire Urbach; 15. Material action as choice in field Wendy L. Bowcher; 16. 'I'll manage the context': context, environment and the potential for institutional change Tom Bartlett; 17. Towards a study of the differences between formal written English and informal spoken English Margaret Berry; 18. Genre-driven constraints on semantic choice Víctor M. Castel; Part V. Interpreting Choice: 19. Choices in analyzing choice: methods and techniques for register analysis Elke Teich; 20. 'Register-idiosyncratic' evaluative choice in congressional debate: a corpus-assisted comparative study Donna Miller and Jane Johnson; 21. Not exactly black letter law: emergent choices and textual symbolic design in Athenian legal-political oratory Astika Kappagoda; 22. Interlanguage lexicogrammatical fossilization or not? That's an SFL-related question from the viewpoint of choice Pedro Henrique Lima Praxedes Filho.
