ABSTRACT
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has been part of the linguistics landscape for more than half a century (a seminal paper being Halliday, 1961), and has been applied in numerous subdisciplines of linguistics and communication studies, such as, among others, child language development, computational linguistics and natural language processing, language education and second language teaching, multimodal communication and visual arts, and clinical linguistics. The bibliographies and links to resources available on the website “Information on Systemic Functional Linguistics” (www.isfla.org), maintained by Mick O’Donnell, provide a useful starting point for exploring the world of SFL. Book-length introductions to SFL are Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), and, somewhat more user-friendly for the beginner, Eggins (2004). A chapter-length overview, with specific reference to clinical linguistics, is provided by Ferguson and Thomson (2008). In this section, we present some basics of SFL. This discussion is of necessity selective, and specifically relates to the overall theme of this volume, namely qualitative methods in and approaches to disordered communication. This will be followed by examples of the use of specific tools from the SFL arsenal, applied to conversations with people with dementia.
