This edited volume gathers corpus-based studies on topics including English grammar and discourses on media and health, mainly from a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective, in order to reveal the potential of SFL, which has been emphasized by Halliday. Various other perspectives, such as philosophy, statistics, genre studies, etc. are also included to promote SFL's potential interaction with other theories. Though they employ a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, all the chapters focus on exploring language in use with the corpus method. The studies collected here are all original, unpublished research articles that address significant questions, deepen readers' understanding of SFL, and promote its potential interaction with other theories. In addition, they demonstrate the great potential that SFL holds for solving language-related questions in a variety of discourses.

This book focuses on the structural diversity, semantic variability, case choice, stylistic characteristics and diachronic distribution of English absolute clauses. The syntactic roles assumed by absolute clauses in the traditional sense can be categorized into clausal adjuncts, attendant circumstances and appositives. These three types of function correspond to the three hypotactic expansions in the relation system of clause complexes in Systemic Functional Linguistics, i.e., elaboration, extension and enhancement. This research, therefore, redefines absolute clauses in the framework of SFL and proposes four syntactic types of absolute clauses: absolute paratactic clauses (elaboration), absolute hypotactic clauses (extension and enhancement), absolute projected clauses (fact and act) and absolute embedded clauses (subject). Based on the Brown family corpora, BNC and COHA, this research finds that different function types of absolute clauses differ in terms of their stylistic and diachronic distributions, and both nominative and accusative cases are acceptable.

'Non-finiteness' is a phenomenon that occurs in most natural languages, whereby a verb is not inflected by grammatical tense, and does not possess the grammatical features of aspect, mood or voice. Various theories have been developed to explain their distribution and their role in clause structure, but many instances of non-finiteness remain unaccounted for. Taking a functional approach, this study proposes a 'process relation framework' to explain the more complex, previously unaccounted for, instances of non-finiteness in clause structure. It applies the framework comparatively to non-finiteness in English and Chinese, showing how it can be applied across typologically distinct languages. Drawing on corpus-based instances and observations, it introduces numerous thought-provoking cases, in which constructional (or combining) types and the predictability of non-finiteness co-occur. In terms of application, non-finiteness is decisive in categorising language types, and it is critical in processing natural languages, text segmentation and annotation in particular.

In recent years, research has prospered in the study of language policy. However, there are still many problems behind this prosperity. For example, much of the research lacks theoretical intervention and neglects perspectives of linguistic theories. This book, a trailblazer for academic researchers in the fields of language policy and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as appliable linguistics, examines language policy from the perspective of SFL, which could provide different angles for language policy and offer a valuable attempt to test SFL as appliable linguistics. This book also explores many typical controversial issues in Chinese language policy with an SFL approach, such as ongoing conflicts between Putonghua and dialects. It not only addresses authentic problems emerging from the implementation process of Chinese language policy, but also has produced some feasible and customized suggestions to improve Chinese language policy.

In recent years, research has prospered in the study of language policy. However, there are still many problems behind this prosperity. For example, much of the research lacks theoretical intervention and neglects perspectives of linguistic theories. This book, a trailblazer for academic researchers in the fields of language policy and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as appliable linguistics, examines language policy from the perspective of SFL, which could provide different angles for language policy and offer a valuable attempt to test SFL as appliable linguistics. This book also explores many typical controversial issues in Chinese language policy with an SFL approach, such as ongoing conflicts between Putonghua and dialects. It not only addresses authentic problems emerging from the implementation process of Chinese language policy, but also has produced some feasible and customized suggestions to improve Chinese language policy.

This edited volume gathers corpus-based studies on topics including English grammar and discourses on media and health, mainly from a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective, in order to reveal the potential of SFL, which has been emphasized by Halliday. Various other perspectives, such as philosophy, statistics, genre studies, etc. are also included to promote SFL's potential interaction with other theories. Though they employ a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, all the chapters focus on exploring language in use with the corpus method. The studies collected here are all original, unpublished research articles that address significant questions, deepen readers' understanding of SFL, and promote its potential interaction with other theories. In addition, they demonstrate the great potential that SFL holds for solving language-related questions in a variety of discourses.