ABSTRACT
Jay Lemke had already taken a semiotic approach to language, what people today call as multimodality, and to expand the application of systemic linguistics from the analysis of discourse, to the analysis of multimodal activity and multimodal texts. Michael Halliday had already intended and made clear that the purpose of the systemic functional linguistics was to provide a tool for critical social analysis in the book Language as social semiotic in the year 1978. In particular, Jay Lemke thinks that multimodal analysis with grounding in social semiotic approaches, and ultimately in principles deriving from SFL, is potentially a very important tool for the design of better scientific representations and also for new scientific representations. Social semiotics and SFL have a significant footprint in the United States, but not in the linguistics departments and the formal linguistics as a discipline.
