Suzanne Eggins

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Suzanne Eggins is an Australian linguist who is an Honorary Fellow at Australian National University (ANU), associated with the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care. Eggins is the author of a best selling introduction to systemic functional linguistics [1] and she is known for her extensive work on critical linguistic analysis of spontaneous interactions in informal and institutional healthcare settings.  

Contents

Biography

Suzanne Eggins was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire UK, to Australian parents living and working in the UK at the time. After her family returned to Australia, she grew up in Inverell, New South Wales and then moved to Sydney.[ citation needed ] After completing her Bachelor of Arts, Honours (first class) at the University of Sydney in 1982, she started a master's degree in linguistics on ergativity in English under the supervision of Michael Halliday. She decided to defer this admission when she was awarded a scholarship from the French government. From September 1983 to June 1985, she studied at the Université de Nancy II (now Université de Lorraine), completing a Maîtrise des Sciences du Langage and a Diplôme des Etudes Approfondies, under the direction of Philip Riley and Henri Holec. Upon returning to Australia in mid-1985, she resumed her deferred postgraduate degree (converted to a PhD) under the supervision of Michael Halliday and J. R. Martin at the University of Sydney. In 1986/1987, Eggins was asked to lecture the course ‘Language as Content’ for students preparing to study the MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sydney and these lectures formed the basis of the first edition of her book 'An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics' [2] in 1994. She received her PhD in 1991 and the title of her thesis was 'Keeping the conversation going: A systemic-functional analysis of conversational structure in casual sustained talk'. [3]

From 1992 to 2006, Eggins was an academic at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of English (now a part of UNSW School of the Arts and Media), with a period as a Head of School (2001–2003). During this time, she developed a number of courses focusing on systemic functional linguistics, text analysis, children's literature and literacy, and professional writing. In 2005, she also formalised her interests in editing, literary studies and writing by completing a Master of Arts in professional communication at Deakin University. [4] From 2007 to 2009, she was the Editor of The School Magazine, which is a suite of illustrated literary magazines for children widely distributed throughout primary schools across Australia. Before accepting a role of an Honorary Fellow at Australian National University in 2017, she had spent seven years at The University of Technology Sydney as a Research Fellow involved in a national study of clinical handover communication led by Prof Diana Slade and funded by Australian Research Council. [5]

Contributions to linguistics

An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics

To cater for the needs of undergraduate UNSW students coming from educational rather than linguistic backgrounds, Suzanne Eggins converted her lecture notes into a textbook introducing systemic functional linguistics. The first edition closely followed Michael Halliday's 'Introduction to Functional Grammar' (IFG) [6] and was intended to contextualise it within social functional linguistic theory. Furthermore, it aimed to provide analysed examples of ‘real texts’, rather than the short clause-length examples that students encountered in Halliday's IFG. The book concentrated on clause-level grammar and grammar's interface with social life through chapters on genre, register and cohesion. When first published, the 'Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics [2] was one of only two or three introductory books on systemic functional linguistics available. It was critically acclaimed, quickly becoming a bestseller. [1] In his book review for the 'Functions of Language' journal, Martin Davis said, "I would put a copy [of this textbook] in the hands of every teacher in training in the UK - not just teachers of English and not teachers only in schools: university teachers in English-speaking institutions world-wide, or whatever discipline, would profit greatly from it." [7] The second edition of the book was published in 2004 and it includes a chapter on the clause complex and draws on a wider variety of textual examples, including literary texts and writing by children. It also reflects a more ‘critical’ approach to applying functional grammar that had been developing as a result of the rise of Norman Fairclough’s work on Critical Discourse Analysis. [8]

Analysing casual conversation

Eggins is the co-author of the book 'Analysing Casual Conversation' [9] [10] Using casual conversation from workplaces and social settings, the book offers the first critical and theorised account of conversation within systemic functional linguistics and provides practical analytical tools for researchers working on spoken interaction. According to Suzan Feez, "the insights contained in the material are made available both for theoretical pursuit within the academy and for more practical application in the classroom." [11]

Healthcare communication

As National Linguist on the ARC-funded project ‘Effective Communication in Clinical Handover’, Eggins carried out linguistic ethnographic fieldwork at a metropolitan public hospital and advised research teams in other states on the analysis and interpretation of language data. With Diane Slade, she observed and recorded hundreds of hours of nursing and medical clinical handovers. Afterwards, they published widely on the communication patterns and developed training courses for nurses in ‘better bedside handovers’ that have been delivered to several hundred nurses at Canberra Hospital. This training has since been adapted and delivered at hospitals in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Australia. [12] [13]

Selected publications

Books

Book chapters

Related Research Articles

Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Halliday</span> British linguist

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at language from every possible vantage point", and has described his work as "wander[ing] the highways and byways of language". But he said that "to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: language as the creature and creator of human society".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Systemic functional grammar</span> Primary tenets

Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a form of grammatical description originated by Michael Halliday. It is part of a social semiotic approach to language called systemic functional linguistics. In these two terms, systemic refers to the view of language as "a network of systems, or interrelated sets of options for making meaning"; functional refers to Halliday's view that language is as it is because of what it has evolved to do. Thus, what he refers to as the multidimensional architecture of language "reflects the multidimensional nature of human experience and interpersonal relations."

In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases the boundary between them depends on which specific grammatical theory is being used to analyze the sentence.

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal, choosing words that are considered more "formal", and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't and y'all.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Systemic functional linguistics</span>

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, that considers language as a social semiotic system.

Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguistics is concerned with both the cognitive and social aspects of language. It is considered a scientific field as well as an academic discipline; it has been classified as a social science, natural science, cognitive science, or part of the humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruqaiya Hasan</span>

Ruqaiya Hasan was a professor of linguistics who held visiting positions and taught at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University in Sydney, from which she retired as emeritus professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.

Lexicogrammar is a term directly related to systemic functional linguistics. Systemic functional linguistics is a specific approach to adding as much detail as possible when describing lexicogrammar. It was coined by Michael Halliday, the father of systemic functional linguistics, to describe the continuity between grammar and lexis. For many linguists, these phenomena are discrete. But Halliday brings them together with this term. As with other dimensions of Halliday's theory, he describes the relation of grammar to lexis as one of a 'cline', and therefore, one of 'delicacy'. In 1961, he wrote 'The grammarian's dream is...to turn the whole of linguistic form into grammar, hoping to show that lexis can be defined as "most delicate grammar". In 1987, Ruqaiya Hasan wrote an article titled 'The grammarian's dream: lexis as delicate grammar', in which she laid out a methodology for mapping lexis in Halliday's terms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. R. Martin</span> Canadian linguist

James Robert Martin is a Canadian linguist. He is Professor of Linguistics at The University of Sydney. He is the leading figure in the 'Sydney School' of systemic functional linguistics. Martin is well known for his work on discourse analysis, genre, appraisal, multimodality and educational linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C.M.I.M. Matthiessen</span>

Christian Matthias Ingemar Martin Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) school, having authored or co-authored more than 100 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. One of his major works is Lexicogrammatical cartography (1995), a 700-page study of the grammatical systems of English from the perspective of SFL. He has co-authored a number of books with Michael Halliday. Since 2008 he has been a professor in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before this, he was Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney.

The term metafunction originates in systemic functional linguistics and is considered to be a property of all languages. Systemic functional linguistics is functional and semantic rather than formal and syntactic in its orientation. As a functional linguistic theory, it claims that both the emergence of grammar and the particular forms that grammars take should be explained "in terms of the functions that language evolved to serve". While languages vary in how and what they do, and what humans do with them in the contexts of human cultural practice, all languages are considered to be shaped and organised in relation to three functions, or metafunctions. Michael Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics, calls these three functions the ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The ideational function is further divided into the experiential and logical.

Anne Burns is a British-born Australian educational linguist internationally known for her work on genre-based pedagogy in TESOL and EAP/ESP. She is Professor Emerita in Language Education at Aston University (UK) and Professor of TESOL at the University of New South Wales (Australia). The TESOL International Association named her one of the '50 at 50', leaders who had made a significant contribution to TESOL in its first 50 years.

Alice Marie-Claude Caffarel-Cayron is a French-Australian linguist. She is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Caffarel is recognized for the development of a Systemic Functional Grammar of French which has been applied in the teaching of the French language, Discourse analysis and Stylistics at the University of Sydney. Caffarel is recognised as an expert in the field of French Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

Louise Jane Ravelli is an Australian linguist. She is a professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research expertise includes multimodal communication, museum communication, discourse analysis, and systemic functional grammar, using the frameworks of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Social Semiotics, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis.

Michele Zappavigna is an Australian linguist. She is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her major contributions are based on the discourse of social media and ambient affiliation. Her work is interdisciplinary and covers studies in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), corpus linguistics, multimodality, social media, online discourse and social semiotics. Zappavigna is the author of six books and numerous journal articles covering these disciplines.

Kay L. O'Halloran is an Australian-born academic in the field of multimodal discourse analysis. She is Chair Professor and Head of Department of Communication and Media in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool and Visiting Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University (2017–2020). She is the founding director of the Multimodal Analysis Laboratory of the Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is widely known for her development of systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) and its application in the realm of mathematical discourse and multimodal text construction. Her current work involves the development and use of digital tools and techniques for multimodal analysis and mixed methods approaches to big data analytics.

Frances Helen Christie, is Emeritus professor of language and literacy education at the University of Melbourne, and honorary professor of education at the University of Sydney. She specialises in the field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and has completed research in language and literacy education, writing development, pedagogic grammar, genre theory, and teaching English as a mother tongue and as a second language.

Mary J. Schleppegrell is an applied linguist and Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. Her research and praxis are based on the principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory derived from the work of social semiotic linguist Michael Halliday. Schleppegrell is known for the SFL-based literacy practices she has continuously helped to develop for multilingual and English language learners throughout her decades long career, which she began as an educational specialist before transitioning to the field of applied linguistics. As a result, her publications demonstrate a deep understanding of both the theories and practices related to teaching and learning.

References

  1. 1 2 Bloomsbury.com. "Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics". Bloomsbury Publishing. Retrieved 15 December 2019.
  2. 1 2 Eggins, Suzanne. (1994). An introduction to systemic functional linguistics. London: Pinter Publishers. ISBN   1-85567-208-1. OCLC   30891984.
  3. ↑ Eggins, Suzanne (1990). Keeping the conversation going : a systemic-functional analysis of conversational structure in casual sustained talk (PhD thesis).
  4. ↑ Director (Research Services Division). "Dr Suzanne Eggins". researchers.anu.edu.au. Retrieved 15 December 2019.
  5. ↑ "Grant - Grants Data Portal". dataportal.arc.gov.au. Retrieved 29 December 2019.
  6. ↑ Halliday, M. A. K. (Michael Alexander Kirkwood), 1925- (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: E. Arnold. ISBN   0-7131-6365-8. OCLC   15488401.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ Davies, Martin (31 December 2000). "Review of "An Introduction to Systemic-Functional Linguistics", by Suzanne Eggins". Functions of Language. 7 (2): 300–303. doi:10.1075/fol.7.2.10dav. ISSN   0929-998X.
  8. ↑ Eggins, Suzanne. (2004). An introduction to systemic functional linguistics (2nd ed.). New York: Continuum. ISBN   0-8264-5787-8. OCLC   59112259.
  9. ↑ Eggins, Suzanne. (1997). Analysing casual conversation. Slade, Diana. London: Cassell. ISBN   0-304-33729-3. OCLC   35650732.
  10. ↑ Eggins, Suzanne. (2004). Analysing casual conversation. Slade, Diana. (Pbk. ed.). London: Equinox. ISBN   1-84553-046-2. OCLC   56965064.
  11. ↑ "Analysing Casual Conversation; Suzanne Eggins; Diana Slade". Equinox Publishing. Retrieved 16 December 2019.
  12. ↑ Effective communication in clinical handover : from research to practice. Eggins, Suzanne,, Slade, Diana,, Geddes, Fiona. Berlin. 15 October 2015. ISBN   978-3-11-037905-1. OCLC   945740890.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  13. ↑ Eggins, Suzanne; Slade, Diana (17 December 2015). "Communication in clinical handover: improving the safety and quality of the patient experience". Journal of Public Health Research. 4 (3): 666. doi:10.4081/jphr.2015.666. ISSN   2279-9036. PMC   4693345 . PMID   26753165.
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