Call for papers
Growth. Growth! Growth?
[G]rowth is good. Many is better than few, more is better than less, big is better than small, grow is better than shrink, up is better than down. Gross National Products must go up, standards of living must rise, productivity must increase. But we know that these things can't happen.” (Halliday 1990 [2003]: 162)
At the 35th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference, we want to celebrate, interrogate, and critique the notion of growth: the growth of SFL as a theory and as an appliable linguistics; the growth of individuals and communities of language users and language learners; the growth and development of SFL descriptions of languages, especially those other than English; the growth of new technologies and their impacts on languages, language learning, languaging, and linguistic analysis; the growth of SFL in, with, and alongside other theories and methods; and the questions raised by Halliday in the paper quoted above concerning the lexicogrammar of growth and “growthism” (and its potential implications for the environment and environmental discourse).
We invite papers that address these and other issues from a variety of SFL and SFL-related perspectives. These include, but are not limited to:
- SFL theory and description
- Education, educational linguistics, (multi)literacies
- Multimodality, intersemiosis
- Environmental communication, sustainability, the other-than-human world
- Digital media, generative artificial intelligence
- Language typology, language description
- Applied/appliable linguistics
- Discourse studies, critical/positive discourse analysis
- Corpus linguistics, corpus-assisted discourse studies
- Translation studies
- Law and forensic linguistics
- Comparative text analysis
- Healthcare communication
- Clinical linguistics
- Literature studies, stylistics, verbal art
- Legitimation Code Theory
- Ecolinguistics
We welcome proposals for papers, posters, and colloquia.
Abstracts for all presentation types should be no more than 350 words (excluding references). They should clearly present the aims of the contribution and its relevance to the theme and/or SFL more generally. If your contribution describes a work in progress, please indicate this in the abstract.
The language of the conference (and abstracts) is English.
Deadline: 22 January 2027
Abstracts should be submitted via the Oxford Abstracts platform: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/83906/submitter
References
Halliday, M. A. K. 2003 [1990]. "New ways of meaning: the challenge to applied linguistics." In On language and linguistics. Volume 3 in the collected works of M. A. K. Halliday, edited by Jonathan J. Webster, 139-174. London: Continuum.