ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the language of physics utilising both systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and legitimation code theory (LCT). It shows that even from very early on in schooling, the forms of language particular to science work to build large and interconnected meanings that underpin physics knowledge. The chapter introduces two crucial linguistic resources that pervade physics discourse, known as grammatical metaphor and technicality. Semantics is concerned with how meanings relate to their context and to each other, and involves two variables, semantic gravity (SG) and semantic density (SD). With the advent of multimodal discourse analysis, there has been an explosion of research into non-linguistic semiotic resources. This has expanded the horizons of text analysis and promoted a much broader view of semiosis. The relative independence of mood choices with transitivity indicates their potential to be part of distinct functional components that are the basis of metafunctions.
