The present volume draws on the experience of the Workshop held in Germany in late 2018 to combine the specialisations of the two linguistic research teams of the two partner universities, Sun Yat-sen University in China and Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. It combines more theoretical approaches by experienced scholars and case studies by young researchers on topics and texts on current Chinese developments. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse.

This edited volume gathers corpus-based studies on topics including English grammar and discourses on media and health, mainly from a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective, in order to reveal the potential of SFL, which has been emphasized by Halliday. Various other perspectives, such as philosophy, statistics, genre studies, etc. are also included to promote SFL’s potential interaction with other theories. Though they employ a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, all the chapters focus on exploring language in use with the corpus method. The studies collected here are all original, unpublished research articles that address significant questions, deepen readers’ understanding of SFL, and promote its potential interaction with other theories. In addition, they demonstrate the great potential that SFL holds for solving language-related questions in a variety of discourses.

Corpus linguistics has had a revolutionary impact on grammar and discourse research. Not only has it opened up entirely new theoretical perspectives and methodological possibilities for both fields, but it has also to a considerable extent erased the boundaries that have traditionally been drawn between them. This book showcases a variety of current corpus-based approaches to the study of grammar and discourse, and makes a case for seeing grammar and discourse as fundamentally inter-related phenomena. The book features contributions from leading experts in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, critical discourse studies, genre and register analysis, phraseology, language learning and teaching, languages for specific purposes, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, systemic functional linguistics and text linguistics. An essential reference point for future research, Corpora, Grammar and Discourse has been edited in honour of Susan Hunston, whose own work has consistently pushed at the boundaries of corpus-based research on grammar and discourse for over three decades.

This volume addresses the increasingly typical nature of text and discourse: 'hybridity'. In an SFL perspective, this means that the cultural and situational contexts that tend to activate meanings and wordings must also be seen as being 'hybrid', or as Hasan (2000) has more fittingly put it, 'permeable': "It is not simply that predetermined qualities of genres are being mixed, combined, hybridized: the fact of the matter is that by these devices people extend, elaborate and reclassify their discursive contexts. Derrida's celebrated claim that one cannot not mix genres should really be rephrased as contexts of life cannot but be permeable; the rest follows by the dialectic of language and discursive situation." This is indeed the main message, and mission, of the book, which focuses on hybridity/permeability within the social and cultural contexts in which discourse occurs and of discourse types (covering a wide range of genres, registers, text-types, etc.), but also hybridity within the stratum of lexicogrammar itself. The volume also addresses the implications of hybridity for education and the professions.

The present volume draws on the experience of the Summer School held online in 2021 and in Serbia in August 2022, where graduate students and experienced scholars met from Germany, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Northern Macedonia, and Croatia. All contributions discuss original empirical research on the construction of confidence and trust online and offline in the case of academic or journalistic writing, mainly from South Eastern European but also from German perspectives. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse in joint teaching, research and publishing.

This book reports research on the Problem-Solution rhetorical pattern, which has to date received very little attention in corpus-based studies. Insights from genre analysis and systemic-functional grammar are also applied to the analysis of the Problem-Solution pattern, thus moving towards a more multi-faceted analysis of corpus data. The pattern is investigated in two specialized corpora of technically-oriented report writing, a professional corpus and a student corpus, using a key word and key-key word analysis. Phraseological analyses of key words in both corpora are presented. Data show that students’ writing lacks a range of lexico-grammatical patternings for expressing the Problem and Solution elements of the pattern. The book concludes with some pedagogic implications and applications of the findings. Suggested concordancing activities are discussed within the context of key issues in the field of data-driven learning.

Presenting a field-defining overview of one of the most appliable linguistic theories available today, this Handbook surveys the key issues in the study of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), covering an impressive range of theoretical perspectives. Written by some of the world's foremost SFL scholars, including M. A. K. Halliday, the founder of SFL theory, the handbook covers topics ranging from the theory behind the model, discourse analysis within SFL, applied SFL, to SFL in relation to other subfields of linguistics such as intonation, typology, clinical linguistics and education. Chapters include discussion on the possible future directions in which research might be conducted and issues that can be further investigated and resolved. Readers will be inspired to pursue the challenges raised within the volume, both theoretically and practically.