This paper aims to show how concepts and analytical methods of systemic functional linguistics can work congruently with other human practices to improve outcomes for those undergoing the suffering around loss of meaning and the absence of purposeful, self-directed experience. Based on a two-decade collaboration between linguists and psychotherapists in Sydney, Australia, and using the tools of text linguistics as developed by Michael A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan in systemic functional theory, the paper presents an indicative selection of intense exchanges between traumatized persons and therapists (centrally the experience of ‘Ruth’). The level by level linguistic descriptions of these exchanges offer opportunities for understanding how progress in the clinical interaction might be achieved. The descriptions can also be evaluated against the theoretical claims of psychotherapy in psychiatry – in particular, the emphasis of the Conversational Model of Psychotherapy developed in England and Australia by Robert Hobson and Russell Meares, whose characterization of disorders involves an emphasis on ‘co-ordination’ and ‘cohesion’ within frontal lobe activity of traumatized patients. In this way the paper also explores conceptual parallels and intellectual antecedents shared between the Conversational Model and Systemic Functional Linguistics, contributing to the broader intellectual history of the human sciences.

Michael Halliday’s and Ruqaiya Hasan’s estates have been found to include a large amount of unpublished materials: draft papers, research notes, photographs, comments on student papers and so on. They comprise important elements of their legacy and a potential research resource. In this paper we outline a project to preserve and digitise these materials and to make them readily available internationally. The project is being carried out under the auspices of, and with the support of, the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association Inc. (ASFLA).

The discussion sets out from ten vectors of linguistic endeavour – domains of linguistics that Christian Matthiessen has developed through advances of theory (e.g. in lexicogrammar and rhetorical structure), of tool power (e.g. in computational modelling), and of practical extensions of systemic "mapping" (i.e. in linked networks of speaker "choice"), as well as in his situational or register descriptions (especially in professional discourses). The crucial characteristic of Matthiessen's work is what we might call convergence, namely, the way his depth in a number of cognate disciplines allows him to bring out the relevance of language study to holistic issues, for instance, of human evolution, of learning, of brain sciences, and of semiotic forms that are analogues of language, or which recruit language to cultural innovation. Like his mentor, M.A.K. Halliday, Matthiessen seeks an integration that will enable linguistics to take on a central role in sciences in which the accuracy, range of coverage, and quantification of evidence promote social cohesion and "self" discoveries. The Matthiessonian cartography is here considered through references to stages in his career and by a number of comparisons with the work of other prodigious figures in 20th-century linguistics.

Michael Halliday's and Ruqaiya Hasan's estates have been found to include a large amount of unpublished materials: draft papers, research notes, photographs, comments on student papers and so on. They comprise important elements of their legacy and a potential research resource. In this paper we outline a project to preserve and digitise these materials and to make them readily available internationally. The project is being carried out under the auspices of, and with the support of, the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association Inc. (ASFLA).

AbstractThe paper argues for a semiotic – in fact, a grammatical – origin to a profound dimension of the human psyche: William James (1890,1920[1892]) observed how there were far reaching effects from what he characterised as the “duplex self”. This ME/I relation requires cohesion, or co-ordination, much as first suggested by Hughlings Jackson and Théodule Ribot in the mid nineteenth century. The analysis of grammatical equations (identifying clauses) by the functional linguist M. A. K. Halliday can be called upon to show how many important relationships are enfolded in the apparently simple syntax of BE, and of some other cognate verbs. Through detailed exemplification, the paper shows how a double narrative of the “self” is an inevitable consequence of the first person taking on different combinations of grammatical address. This semiotic aspect of the psyche is also discussed in relation to bilaterian or “doubles” in a number of human sciences.

Linguistics has embraced the functional and contextual turn but, when building tools for systematic contextual description, we have not made as much use as we could of our own functional traditions. Rather, we have largely relied on the metaphors of law and rule, which do not adequately capture tensions between consistency and variability in how language and context relate to each other. Our aim in this paper is to show the economy and practicality of representing context as a pathway through a network, drawing on the network technique for mapping systems of grammatical choice introduced by Michael Halliday, and on its application to other linguistic strata first offered by Ruqaiya Hasan. The paper begins by outlining why alternative frameworks are needed for describing context-language relations. We then present a contextual network for one specific domain of the Systemic Functional Linguistic notion of Tenor, namely social distance , and use this to explore how different configurations of features of social distance influence the way that traditions of practice are passed on as a specialised legacy in two different professional collaborations. While the kind of context modelling discussed here is in a very early phase of development compared to phonetic, morphological and grammatical description, it has many advantages: contextual networks are paradigmatic in orientation; they help display and theorise metastability in language; they are “ad hoc” in Firth’s positive sense; and they constitute a proposal to be tested against observed behaviour within specific cultural and situational settings.

As major world languages - Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, for instance - become the medium of university networks, it may be the right time to take stock of the influence that English has had over the way the disciplines of humanities and sciences have been shaped, directed and evaluated, in particular in the second half of the 20th century. This paper is an attempt to understand some of the textual, linguistic and historical determinants of Disciplinary English (DE) specifically in the spectrum of technical subjects. DE is now a way of meaning which has become associated with objective authority. From this association, DE has shaped our disciplinary knowledge and spread across to registers of bureaucratic and political subject matter. The discussion also considers innovative potential in disciplinary discourses, in particular what Halliday regarded as the "knight's move" in text: this is the related, analogical effect of Hasan's "symbolic articulation" in verbal art and grammatical metaphor in the language of technical disciplines.

Measuring adherence to a given psychotherapeutic approach has numerous benefits, such as ensuring therapist fidelity in the reporting of patient outcomes, the verification of therapist expertise, and facilitating the training of new psychotherapists by minimizing the cognitive load within a complex skill- set. The Conversational Model Therapy Adherence Scale (CoMTAS) was developed by Russell Meares, one of the founders of Conversational Model Therapy (CMT). Further refinement of the CoMTAS involved consultation with Meares and several workshops with senior clinicians. Pilot testing followed with expert and novice CMT clinicians rating gold standard CMT recordings, more robustly diverse therapy recordings of novice therapists, and also recordings where the raters were blind to the identity of the therapist and patient. The CoMTAS showed consistently high inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability over a period of 11 weeks. Furthermore, expert clinicians rated similarly with novice clinicians, thereby suggesting that minimal training in CMT is required to make reliably valid judgements of CMT adherence on the CoMTAS.