To Make A Difference: Interpersonal Meanings in Museum-Texts: A Case-Study of the Children’s Museum in Amman

Abstract

Systemic Functional Linguistics explicates how texts communicate ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings. Texts produced by cultural and pedagogic institutions, such as museums, depend on several discursive choices to construct interpersonal meanings communicated through the interaction between the institution, and what it stands for, and the interactant visitors. Museum-texts communicate to/with visitors meanings pertaining to social relationships construed by both the museum and its audience and communicate the mutual relationships between them in relation to role, status, social distance, and feelings of solidarity and affiliation. Meanwhile, children museums have become a widespread phenomenon that promote edifying missions communicated to children through entertaining, interacting, and learning. This study recognises how one exhibition, named ‘I am Change’ in the Children’s Museum in Amman, relies on verbal interpersonal communication to align its young visitors into shared dispositions and perspectives towards environmental concerns related to the importance of conserving electric energy and water resources in Jordan.