Language in context seminar

Speaker: Dr Tom Bartlett (Professor of Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University and Reader in Functional and Applied Linguistics at the University of Glasgow)

Title: No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Towards a materialist account of context and social change

Abstract: In this talk I will bring together the architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory which normally considers language as a social phenomenon to the relative neglect of the psychological, with concepts from systems theory (Kretzschmar 2015), evolutionary biolinguistics (Pennisi and Falzone 2016) and cultural evolution (Rogers 1989; Rendell et al. 2010; Pagel 2012). Combining these frameworks goes some way to providing a materialist account of the relationship between language and context as a metastable system – a system that is stable enough to be recognisable and usable, yet dynamic enough to cater to synchronic variation and stimulate diachronic change.

In the first part of the talk I will provide an outline of the architecture of SFL, with a focus on the indeterminate relationship between context and semantics - “the cracks where the light gets in” (Cohen 1992) and through which social innovation emerges. In the second part, I will draw on evolutionary theory to account for the contours of variation across contexts and the processes of change that typify a metastable system. And in the third part, I will discuss the implications of the theoretical framework in analysing data from nursing handover meetings.

Further information

Following the online seminar via Blackboard Collaborate questions and further discussion will be possible.