2006 Handbooks

Language is a network of choices available to speakers. Those choices arise in specific cultural contexts, and the choices themselves are most usefully pictured as grouped into interrelated systems (choices that depend on each other more than they depend on choices elsewhere across the network).

The course elaborates the major systems of meaning making that have emerged in English grammar; furthermore, it relates these major systems to choices at the strata above grammar - for example, logical argument at the semantics, and different fields and actions at context.

The practical outcomes of the course include: the drawing and evaluation of linguistic networks; the application of networks to naturally occurring discourse; and the development of databases and resources for being explicit about the 'meaning potential' of interactants. The issues, therefore, relate to fields as diverse as grammar, aesthetics, cultural studies, cognitive science and speech pathology.