Systemic Functional Linguistics at the Crossroads: Intercultural and Contrastive Descriptions of Language (original) (raw)

From a systemic functional perspective, language is considered essentially a probabilistic system. An important part of the meaning of any feature is its relative probability in relation to other mutually defining features and, therefore, language description is intimately related to the (un)expectedness of the behaviour, presence, absence, etc. of linguistic phenomena. However, globalization is dynamically pervading cultural and historical groups, identities and languages to an unprecedented extent and thus it is not surprising that cultural differences, hybridizing processes and diversity are challenging our knowledge and our expectations on the probability and extent of linguistic phenomena and their behaviour. Thus, by postioning linguistics at the crossroads, the conference invites participants to explore how cultural dynamics challenges linguistic description both in theory and practice from a variety of perspectives, including how paradigmatic choices are realized syntagmatically in different languages, how experience is construed in different settings, or how social roles and relations are enacted in culturally diverse situations, just to name a few. The conference also aims at addressing the question of how SFL is located at the crossroads between past and future in terms of the theoretical achievements and practical applications so far achieved and, therefore, it also invites proposals dealing with up-to-date theoretical constructs and practical applications from intra-and inter-disciplinary perspectives which show how SFL is at the cutting edge of linguistic description.