In this autobiographical essay I reflect on my training in linguistics and the way it affected my interpretation and development of SFL theory. In particular I am concerned to show how I tried to help SFL evolve, accumulating previous understandings into a model with additional theoretical architecture taking descriptive responsibility for a wider range of linguistic data. This evolution is ill...

No theory is an island. In the case of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), its most long-standing and intense relationship has been with code theory, a sociological framework originated by Basil Bemstein that has recently been developed into Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (Maton2014b). From their beginnings, scholars developing these approaches have engaged in exchanges over a wide range of ...

This paper gives a brief overview of the development of Michael Halliday’s work in Systemic Functional Linguistics over the last sixty years and recalls some anecdotes relating to the research projects he directed at University College London in the 1960s. It locates the author’s approach in relation to Systemic Functional Linguistics and raises some questions to do with possible avenues of fut...

Systemic Functional Linguistics provides a semiotic perspective on language. The text analysis described in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) can be of critical value in real-world applications. But parsing with SFL grammars is computationally intensive task and parsers for this level of description to date have not been able to operate on unrestricted input. This paper describes a graph-ba...

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an internationally based open access platform where professionals from various fields are invited to give speeches, and share ideas with like-minded people. In recent years, topics related the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) or COVID-19 pandemic have become most popular speech on TED. This paper selects speech-related TED during pandemic, by usin...