Limitations Of Theoretical Frameworks Research Articles

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as Sociolinguistic and Sociological Conception: Possibilities and Limits of Theoretical Framework

The paper aims at examining possibilities and limits of Systemic functional linguistics theoretical framework. Ideologically SFL concept was associated with the ideas of social justice and equality, the building of the society of equal opportunities through the educational system. The most interesting ideas arose when the SFL representatives thought about the development of English as a native language and were connected with the overcoming of class distinctions. The current version - genre-based approach – has serious limits. The desire of a genre-based approach to the systematization of genres carries a risk of cultural contradictions and conflict of cultures. However, the basic theoretical SFL principles are still in the stage of formation, as SFL researchers seek to avoid some rigidity of the classical institutional (genre) approach, which is in contradiction with the principles of diversity. The founder M. Halliday offered ideas for the organization of a flexible approach based on International English that may become World Englishes, developing in order to adapt to the meanings of other cultures. Therefore, an SFL approach still needs some alterations to spread outside the Western world and conform to the new culture for it. Besides, we can think about proposals of Halliday’s supporters to develop the own version of English for non-Western countries, considering its culture and mentality.

Symptom: Subjectivities, Social Ills, Technologies

In the domain of health, not only are the raw effects of economic, social, and medical inequalities continually devastating, but novel processes of reconfiguring illness experience, subjectivity, and control are also underway. Human relationships to medical technology are increasingly constituted outside the clinical encounter. In this article we explore how the domestic encroachment of medical commodities affects social bonds in both affluent and resource-poor contexts, as well as how these commodities become interwoven in the very fabric of symptoms and identities. Symptoms are more than contingent matters; they are, at times, a necessary condition for the afflicted to articulate a new relationship to the world and to others. In exploring how people conceptualize technological self-care, we are specifically concerned with disciplinary modes of evidence-making and ask the following: what are the possibilities and limitations of theoretical frameworks (such as structural violence, biopower, social suffering, and psychoanalysis) through which these conceptions are being analyzed in contemporary anthropological scholarship? What can the unique capacities of ethnography add to the task of capturing the active embroilment of reason, life, and ethics as human conditions are shaped and lost? The intellectual survival of anthropological theory, we argue, might well be connected to people's own resilience and bodily struggles for realities to come.