M.A.K. Halliday's Categories of the Theory of Grammar (1961) was published in WORD (Vol. 17, Issue 2, pp. 241-292). Categories was Halliday's first journal article following the completion of his doctoral dissertation six years earlier. Firth's influence is evident in this paper, which Jim Martin describes as "generally landmarked as the founding paper for what evolved as systemic functional linguistics" (WORD, Vol. 62, Issue 1, pp. 35-58). What becomes evident from this comparison between the seminal concepts presented in Categories and the current state of SFL theorizing about language is that the same brilliant mind that produced Categories never ceased in the pursuit of a better understanding of how language works to make meaning.

Literary creativity in Outer and Expanding Circle varieties of world Englishes has resulted in what Braj Kachru referred to as “contact literatures”. Other labels such as “colonial” and “postcolonial” reflect a more diachronic perspective which fails to fully capture what motivates and inspires current writers whose identity and experience is not tied to a colonial past.

1 Leeds was (and still is) a prosperous town in the North of England, with a population around 450,000 at that point.The major industries were tailoring, publishing and brewing.Michael was the only child of two teachers, who taught at the secondary level at Pudsey Grammar School (fairly well respected in those days, now called Grangefield School, Pudsey, half-way between Leeds and Bradford).His father, Wilfrid Joseph Halliday, taught English and Latin, his mother taught French.Wilfrid was born in 1889. 2 During the First World War, in his Twenties, he entered the army, with the West Yorkshire Regiment.He worked his way up the ranks, from sergeant, to eventually became an officer.He saw service at the Front in France, but was wounded, and discharged on the basis of his wounds.Back in England, he turned to teaching, at Pudsey Grammar School.English was his main love, which he taught both in terms of literature and language (as was usual in those days). 3 Outside of school, his life work was Yorkshire Dialectology: he spent most of his adult life as a member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, usually in some official role: Chairman, Secretary, or Publications Secretary.He was involved with the Society for over half a century.He also published various works related to Yorkshire Dialectology, including co-editing one of the major contributing works to the Linguistic Atlas of England. 4 Other works include anthologies of poems, and prose.His interest in dialects fed back into his teaching: he taught his students that dialect was not necessarily bad English 5 (a theme to be picked up again by his son in the 1950s and 60s

We present an annotation scheme and a dataset of teacher feedback provided for texts written by non-native speakers of English. The dataset consists of student-written sentences in their original and revised versions with teacher feedback provided for the errors. Feedback appears both in the form of open-ended comments and error category tags. We focus on a specific error type, namely linking adverbial (e.g. however, moreover) errors. The dataset has been annotated for two aspects: (i) revision outcome establishing whether the re-written student sentence was correct and (ii) directness, indicating whether teachers provided explicitly the correction in their feedback. This dataset allows for studies around the characteristics of teacher feedback and how these influence students’ revision outcome. We describe the data preparation process and we present initial statistical investigations regarding the effect of different feedback characteristics on revision outcome. These show that open-ended comments and mitigating expressions appear in a higher proportion of successful revisions than unsuccessful ones, while directness and metalinguistic terms have no effect. Given that the use of this type of data is relatively unexplored in natural language processing (NLP) applications, we also report some observations and challenges when working with feedback data.

This paper describes a writing assistance system that helps students improve their academic writing. Given an input text, the system suggests lexical substitutions that aim to incorporate more academic vocabulary. The substitution candidates are drawn from an academic word list and ranked by a masked language model. Experimental results show that lexical formality analysis can improve the quality of the suggestions, in comparison to a baseline that relies on the masked language model only.

Background: Working environments and relationships influence healthcare workers’ satisfaction and intent to stay, as well as service-user outcomes. With staff shortages a global issue, co-creation of effective workplace cultures that are also good places to work is more important than ever. Since our original research in 2011, a growing body of theoretical insights into workplace cultures has shown how complex it can be to develop them. We were curious about what staff felt works or what is needed. Aim: To develop a guiding theory with and for healthcare practitioners on effective workplace cultures in settings that are also good places to work. Methods: A three-phase study was used, based on principles of appreciative inquiry and realist evaluation. A blog generated initial interest, followed by a Twitter chat posing provocative questions. A series of Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) configurations emerged and were presented to a new audience during an international conference. Endorsements and additions enabled further refinement of the initial programme theories, which were again presented for reflections during a second Twitter chat. Subsequent analysis resulted in a realist programme theory ready for further testing in practice. Findings/results: There are four guiding lights for co-creating effective workplace cultures in settings that are also good places to work: collective leadership; living shared values; safe, critical, creative learning environments; and change for good that makes a difference. When each is given adequate attention and all are combined, the ultimate outcomes include: high-performing teams that flourish and provide person- and relationship-centred care that is safe, effective and independent of the agency of specific individuals; and teams that develop effective partnerships within and across boundaries. Conclusions: Based on the voices of international frontline healthcare staff, we propose the retention of staff committed to providing care valued by staff and service users can be achieved by: collective leadership; living shared values; safe, critical, creative learning environments; and change for good as determined by those providing and experiencing care. Implications for practice: Healthcare managers, leaders and commissioners need to recognise and support microsystem culture development that staff and service users experience as good and safe Workplace culture development should be continuous, collaborative, inclusive and participatory, and driven by staff and service-user experiences, not top-down action planning and box ticking Responsive and person-centred leadership enables effective workplace cultures and collective leadership

Michael Halliday once stated that all theories employ metaphors in order to express their essence, which might be restated as 'every theory is a myth for what it is theorizing'. In his early work, Braj Kachru set out to creatively and critically 'de-mythologize' the English canon, and in its stead introduced the new metaphor of the 'Three Circles', and the innovative, and redeeming, myth of 'world Englishes', changing the history of English studies in the process.

Proficiency in English academic writing is critical to students' success at university. With recent advances in language technology, a computer-assisted language learning approach can potentially provide students with additional practice and feedback. We describe our effort in building a tool that promotes greater awareness of how students can expand their registerial repertoire by employing grammatical metaphor, in particular through feedback on the lexico-grammatical options in the nominalization of clauses. An empirical study shows that this tool can help university students produce grammatically appropriate nominalization. Finally, we present detailed analysis on students’ common errors when attempting nominalization.

This article reviews Society in language, language in society: Essays in honour of Ruqaiya Hasan 978-1-137-40286-8

Nominalization is a common linguistic feature in academic writing. By expressing actions or events (verbs) as concepts or things (nouns), nominalization produces more abstract and formal text, and conveys a more objective tone. We report our progress in developing a system that offers automatic assistance for nominalization. Given an input sentence with a complex clause, it paraphrases the sentence into a simplex clause by transforming verb phrases into noun phrases. Preliminary evaluations suggest that system performance achieved high recall.

This article describes a Greek-Chinese interlinear glossed text consisting of the four gospels in the New Testament. Each word in the original Koine Greek text is annotated with several layers of linguistic information, including its Chinese gloss; word alignments to its Chinese counterparts in the Revised Chinese Union Version, a modern Chinese translation of the Bible; and its morphological and syntactic information, adapted from the PROIEL project. We evaluate the precision and consistency of the Chinese gloss. We report a pilot study on using this interlinear to teach Greek to beginner students, illustrating how it can facilitate data-driven learning for aspects of grammar and lexical usage.

This paper discusses meaning-making in serialized adventure manga (Japanese comics) by examining its metafunctional organization. Manga, whose components cover a multimodal cline from graphics to verbals, is seen as a multimodal narrative whose features are mapped onto the different metafunctions: time -experiential, with diegetic time lapse defining the start point to construe experience; cause-effect - logical, with relative positioning of components reflecting logical relations diegetically; space - compositional, with diegetic and extradiegetic spaces contributing to the coherence and cohesion of the story. The overarching interpersonal aspect of manga makes it a medium of exchange between the author and the reader and encourages the reader to actively decode idiosyncratic meanings.

Learner corpora consist of texts produced by non-native speakers. In addition to these texts, some learner corpora also contain error annotations, which can reveal common errors made by language learners, and provide training material for automatic error correction. We present a novel type of error-annotated learner corpus containing sequences of revised essay drafts written by non-native speakers of English. Sentences in these drafts are annotated with comments by language tutors, and are aligned to sentences in subsequent drafts. We describe the compilation process of our corpus, present its encoding in TEI XML, and report agreement levels on the error annotations. Further, we demonstrate the potential of the corpus to facilitate research on textual revision in L2 writing, by conducting a case study on verb tenses using ANNIS, a corpus search and visualization platform.