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19 - Language Development

from Part III - SFL in Application

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

Geoff Thompson
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Wendy L. Bowcher
Affiliation:
Sun Yat-Sen University, China
Lise Fontaine
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
David Schönthal
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
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Summary

Language development has been a central concern in the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) since its early stages. Halliday’s influential volume, Learning How to Mean, marked a shift from a structural account of child language acquisition to a focus on children’s development of their capacity to mean in various ways and across various situations. This chapter describes the SFL account of the emergence of protolanguage in children and demonstrates the value of a sustained focus and systematic mapping of an individual’s language development. Following from this, the focus in the second part of the chapter is on a particular aspect of Hasan’s work on child language development, focusing particularly on the questions she asked about language development and family social positioning. For example, like Hasan we want to consider whether children developing language in contrasted social locations within the same culture might learn to mean in different or similar ways, depending on their environments. The chapter shows how most acts of speaking involve not only dialectal and register variation but also semantic variation that realizes very different orientations to living and meaning in the one culture.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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