This comparative study investigates how digital support and interpersonal engagement are presented in the discourse surrounding public hospice center websites from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom (UK). As primary platforms for disseminating health information and hospice resources, these websites play a vital role in supporting patients with terminal illnesses. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics and focusing on the interpersonal metafunction, this study examines how lexicogrammatical choices construct discourse semantics and reflect the values and professional roles of service providers, patients, and communities. A corpus of 40 websites (20 from each region, totaling 52,086 words) was compiled between January and March 2025. Computational methods, including Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based topic modeling and corpus tools, were used to identify significant thematic and lexicogrammatical patterns. Qualitative analysis of collocations and concordances was performed to explore language use in key website sections, such as "About Us," "Our People," and "Our Services." Findings suggest cultural and institutional differences in end-of-life care discourse. Hong Kong websites tend to emphasize holistic palliative care for the elderly and multidisciplinary teams, employing institutional and service-oriented language, with frequent references to "elderly," "residential care," and "stage of illness." In contrast, UK websites foreground family and community support, charitable organizations, and professional identities, adopting a narrative-driven and emotionally engaging style. The use of personal pronouns, storytelling, and emotionally charged collocations contributes to a relational, inclusive discourse. This study enhances understanding of cultural and linguistic variation in digital healthcare communication, offering insights into the emerging discourse of hospice care in a globalized digital context.

This study investigates how YouTube food travel vloggers semiotically construct destination images and potentially function as informal culinary ambassadors through gastrodiplomacy mechanisms, using Uzbekistan as a case study of emerging tourism markets. Although digital content creators are increasingly recognised as shaping tourism flows, a systematic understanding of the multimodal semiotic mechanisms through which food travel vlogs construct destination meanings remains limited. Using multimodal discourse analysis, this study examines six YouTube food travel videos on Uzbekistan (over 28 million combined views) from two prominent creators. The analysis integrates Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, van Leeuwen’s sound semiotics, and Norris’s multimodal interaction analysis to code a 60-segment corpus. Comparative analysis reveals 25 notable differences in semiotic features between the two creators, identifying two distinct semiotic profiles. Vlogger 1 primarily follows a parasocial intimacy model marked by direct gaze (89.2%), frequent second-person address (78.4%), and comparatively minimal editing. In contrast, Vlogger 2 adopts a cinematic documentary model characterised by first-person narration (56.5%), constructed visuals (60.9%), and gastronomic heritage narratives (34.8%). Despite these divergences, shared conventions centred on food composition, upbeat music, positive evaluation, and sharing gestures indicate a stable semiotic grammar of food travel vlogging. Analysis further reveals that orientalist dynamics and resistance to orientalism coexist within the same representational practice phenomenon termed ‘layered orientalism’, with distinct implications for how emerging destinations are mediated to international audiences. These findings suggest that digital content creators may employ distinct semiotic strategies that could function as informal culinary ambassadors through gastrodiplomacy mechanisms, potentially constructing destination awareness and cultural meaning for international audiences. This study contributes to theory on multimodal destination image construction and offers implications for how emerging tourism destinations might leverage multi-creator strategies to build culturally grounded destination brands.

This study aims to identify and analyze the appraisal system in the news text entitled “Prabowo-Gibran’s Free Nutritious Meal Program Can Create New Jobs” published by the digital news portal Liputan 6. The study is grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly the appraisal framework, which examines how language constructs evaluative meanings, ideological positions, and interpersonal relations between writers and readers. Using a qualitative descriptive method, this research focuses on linguistic units in the form of words, phrases, and clauses that contain evaluative meanings related to affect, judgment, and appreciation. The data were collected through document analysis by carefully reading the news text, identifying clauses containing appraisal elements, coding them based on appraisal categories, and interpreting their evaluative tendencies. The findings show that the news text is dominated by positive appraisal resources. Affect is realized through expressions of hope, optimism, confidence, and expectation toward the implementation of the Free Nutritious Meal Program. Judgment appears mainly in the form of capacity, portraying the program as capable of generating economic benefits, creating employment opportunities, and strengthening rural communities. Appreciation is expressed through positive evaluation and institutional support, especially by emphasizing the usefulness, feasibility, and legitimacy of the program. These findings indicate that the news writer does not merely present information neutrally but also constructs a supportive and persuasive discourse. The text positions the MBG program as a beneficial public policy and implicitly functions as a soft campaign discourse that shapes readers’ positive perception and strengthens policy legitimacy. This study confirms that appraisal analysis is useful for revealing ideological tendencies in news discourse.

Language functions as a medium of communication but also as a tool for establishing social roles and relationships. This study explores the construction of interpersonal meaning in a political speech delivered by B.J. Habibie, the third President of Indonesia, through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The research specifically investigates how mood and modality are employed to enact interpersonal functions. The objectives of this study are threefold: (1) to identify the types of mood and modality used in the speech, (2) to determine the dominant mood and modality, and (3) to analyze how interpersonal meaning is constructed through their use. This qualitative study employed document-based content analysis using Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) framework. The data consisted of a transcript of Habibie’s “Indonesian Historical Evolution,” speech delivered at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Clauses were analyzed for grammatical mood types, declarative, interrogative, imperative, and degrees of modality: low, medium, and high. The findings indicate that declarative mood (82.4%) and low-degree modality (47%) dominate the speech, suggesting a rhetorical strategy to inform and engage the audience respectfully, rather than commanding. The use of high-modality expressions like “have to” signals moments of urgency and persuasion. These patterns reflect the speaker’s intent to maintain authority while fostering inclusivity and national reflection. The study concludes that mood and modality play a pivotal role in shaping the interpersonal dynamics of political discourse. It recommends further cross-cultural investigations to examine how political figures employ interpersonal strategies in global communication contexts.

Background: Hospice refers to specialised end-of-life care that supports patients and families, making it an important area for studying how language shapes experiences and expectations of care. This study compares hospice discourse on websites in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, analysing how NLP-based sentiment and interpersonal features, such as personal pronouns and conjunctions, shape logical relations, structure information, and express emotion in patient narratives. Methods: Using a mixed approach that integrates sentiment analysis with Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and taxonomy of conjunctions in particular, this study draws on a 52,086-word corpus from 40 hospice websites (20 from each region). The corpus analytical tool AntConc was used to identify co-occurrence, interpret log-likelihood, and perform concordance analysis. Results: The findings reveal significant differences in the digital delivery of hospice care across regions. According to our data, UK websites tend to express a wider range of personal emotions and frequently use concessive conjunctions when discussing sensitive palliative care topics. In contrast, Hong Kong websites tend to use more additive and causal conjunctions, projecting a stronger focus on institutional care. For example, Hong Kong texts tend to use formal, service-oriented connections such as “we + offer”, reflecting a more informational communicative style. However, both regions frequently use personal pronouns such as “you” and “we” to convey positive sentiment and demonstrate empathy towards patients and their caregivers. Conclusion: These patterns appear to be used strategically by hospice providers to build trust, signal alignment, and strengthen relationships tailored to each region. Lastly, this study makes an original contribution by combining computational and functional linguistic approaches to develop a systematic method for examining culturally shaped digital communication in end-of-life contexts, thereby enriching the field of healthcare discourse analysis.

ABSTRACT Thai literary classics constitute an important medium for the interaction of Southeast Asian multicultural traditions, containing rich narrative symbols, identity construction mechanisms, and cross‐text cultural influence patterns. However, existing approaches to cross‐cultural influence analysis largely rely on manual interpretation or coarse representations, which limits their ability to capture contextual dependencies and systematically reconstruct cultural symbol systems. To address these challenges, this study proposes an automated cross‐cultural influence identification and visualization framework that integrates systemic functional linguistics with graph‐based learning. The proposed framework models culturally embedded narrative roles through a structured narrative function representation and captures influence relationships across literary texts in an interpretable manner. Experiments conducted on a newly constructed multilingual Thai literary corpus demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms representative baseline methods in cultural narrative function recognition accuracy, structural coherence, and cross‐context generalization. In particular, the framework shows clear advantages in identifying low‐frequency cultural functions and implicit symbolic expressions. Overall, this work provides a scalable computational framework for cross‐cultural narrative structure modeling and visualization in Thai literature, contributing methodological support to digital humanities research and regional literary education.

Children's literature holds many moments of crisis, where characters make moral choices and reflect on the reasons behind those choices. This study applies transitivity theory from Systemic Functional Linguistics to examine how language constructs meaning by focusing on participants, processes, and circumstances related to the main character in The Selfish Giant. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the Giant’s transitivity patterns evolve over the course of the narrative, particularly in relation to his changing moral stance, and to investigate whether these linguistic choices reflect his moral transformation and contribute to the narrative’s themes. The results reveal a shift from material to mental processes, reflecting the Giant’s changing internal state, while dominant spatial circumstances illustrate the story’s movement from isolation to renewal. This study argues that the evolving linguistic choices in The Selfish Giant represent the Giant’s character development and support the narrative’s central themes.

Over the past decades, Yorùbá movies have become a critical conduit for cultural transmission, reflecting both continuity, transformation and globalisation of Yorùbá identity. Yorùbá films increasingly blend indigenous epistemologies with modern sensibilities, creating hybrid narratives that challenge, educate, restrategise and reimagine societal norms. In spite of the recent spike in the re-emergence of cultural renaissance in Yorùbá films and Nollywood as a whole, there is a dearth of researches on the exploration of cultural hybridity in Yorùbá movies. This study investigates the cultural hybridity in Àdìrẹ, an epic Yorùbá movie with the view to presenting the ideological synergy and contrast that permeate the work. Anchored on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study adopts a qualitative and interpretive approaches to investigate the manifestation of cultural hybridity in Àdìrẹ. The study identified that hybridity in dressing, cushiness, philosophical ideology, and language are the forms of cultural fusions in Àdìrẹ, an intentional mechanism the filmmaker uses to gain the local and foreign audience for globalisation of Yorùbá culture and films. In spite of the locality, the filmmaker prioritises the global aesthetics rather than only local ones which in turn give massive recognition to the film and ensure globalisation. The study therefore, recommends that the filmmakers be intentional in the blending of indigenous culture and new culture to breed viable form of hybridity suitable for improved standard of living. The stakeholders and audiences should reciprocate the desires of the filmmakers with accolades when the metrics of culture are exhibited positively.

This study examines the impact of genre-based instruction (GBI) supported by online platforms—Blackboard and YouTube—on Saudi undergraduate EFL learners’ writing development. Grounded in systemic functional linguistics, the intervention was designed to enhance students’ genre awareness, workplace writing performance, and engagement with digital learning tools. A quasi-experimental design was employed with 88 first-year students divided into an experimental group (n = 45) receiving GBI and a control group (n = 43) following a traditional skills-based curriculum. Data were collected through pre- and post-tests of writing tasks, a genre awareness scale, platform engagement metrics, and follow-up interviews with a purposive subsample. Quantitative analyses included paired- and independent-samples t-tests, ANCOVA, regression, and mediation/moderation models, while qualitative data were thematically analyzed. Results indicate that GBI significantly improved students’ genre awareness and writing performance compared to the control group, with active participation on Blackboard and YouTube further predicting stronger outcomes. Engagement was found to mediate the relationship between genre knowledge and writing performance, while English proficiency moderated the relationship between engagement and writing performance. Qualitative findings reinforced these trends, highlighting the perceived value of online tools in extending classroom practice. The study underscores the pedagogical potential of integrating genre pedagogy with digital platforms to foster transferable writing skills in EFL contexts.

This paper explores the construction of ideational meanings in the speeches of Nouman Ali Khan using the choice of transitivity in Transitivity in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study uses the ideational meta-function provided by Halliday to examine 20 thematic lines of the speeches in four themes: Identity and Purpose, Youth and Struggle, Marriage and Family, and Quranic Reflection. The clause is used as the unit of analysis; the 20 lines were divided into 39 clauses, which were coded according to the type of processes (material, mental, relational, verbal, behavioral, existential), role of a participant (e.g., Actor, Goal, Senser, Carrier, Sayer), and the circumstances. Results suggest that there is a predominance of material processes, which means that the discourse chosen to work with religiosity focuses on action, reform, and transformation as the main aspects of religiosity. The relational processes prove to be evident in order to construct and reform the main notions like identity, faith, failure, and moral value, and mental processes are concerned with inner consciousness and the evaluative perception. Verbal processes are also localized in the Quran Reflection lines, in which Allah and the Quran are often placed as Sayers, as a reinforcement of scriptural and divine authority, through communicative representation. All in all, the patterns of transitivity demonstrate systematic grammatical strategies by which the speeches assign responsibility to the audience, keep the divine witnessing and guidance as the dominant meaning, and create religious identity through definition networks. The paper shows that transitivity analysis is a strict tool explaining how the modern Islamic motivational text creates experience, agency, and ideology on the level of the clauses (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014; Thompson, 2014).

This study examines how linguistic patterns and stylistic preferences function as empirical markers of authorial identity and self-representation in contemporary Pakistani fiction. Despite growing scholarly interest in identity construction, existing research largely relies on qualitative interpretation, thereby leaving a gap in empirical, corpus-based evidence. Therefore, this study aims to identify recurrent linguistic patterns and analyze how these patterns construct and signify authorial identity. The research is grounded in a combined theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, corpus stylistics, and discourse theory, which together conceptualize language as a meaning-making system shaped by choice and context. A mixed-method corpus-based approach was adopted to achieve these objectives. A corpus of contemporary Pakistani fiction (2000–present) was compiled and analyzed using corpus tools such as AntConc. Quantitative techniques, including frequency, keyword, collocation, and concordance analyses, were employed, followed by qualitative interpretation of linguistic patterns. The findings revealed that identity-related lexical fields, first-person narration, metaphorical expressions, and collocational patterns of silence and voice dominate the corpus. These patterns were found to function as consistent markers of fragmented subjectivity and self-representation. The study concludes that authorial identity is not merely interpretive but linguistically traceable through systematic patterns. These findings have contributed to bridging the gap between qualitative literary analysis and quantitative corpus evidence. It is recommended that future research expand corpus size, include multilingual texts, and apply comparative approaches across South Asian literature.

Grammatical metaphor, a significant theoretical innovation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), extends meaning realization from the lexical to the grammatical stratum, providing a powerful framework for analyzing abstraction and technicality in academic and scientific discourse. Adopting a methodology of combining systematic retrieval with thematic analysis, this article reviews 293 primary studies on grammatical metaphor within SFL since Halliday initial proposal. We first trace Halliday's three-stage theoretical development of grammatical metaphor. Subsequently, our thematic synthesis reveals predominant sub-themes within two major streams: theoretical development (encompassing semantic and characteristic discussion, interdisciplinary dialogues with Cognitive Linguistics and educational sociology, and typological debates) and practical application (covering language teaching, textual analysis, and translation studies). Based on the synthesis, we propose four key directions for future research: expanding the linguistic scope, broadening the population of second language learners, establishing identification criteria for grammatical metaphor in non-English languages, and delineating demetaphorization. The findings of this review offer valuable theoretical references for linguists seeking to refine grammatical metaphor theory, as well as practical guidance for language teachers and curriculum developers aiming to foster learners' academic literacy. Moreover, the proposed future directions are intended to inspire researchers to explore cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary dimensions, ultimately facilitating a more inclusive and methodologically robust field of grammatical metaphor studies.

Early marriage remains prevalent in several regions of Indonesia, particularly in Jember, which records the highest rate in East Java despite the legal age restrictions. This phenomenon is deeply rooted in family ideology, especially the mother’s role as a central figure shaping children’s perceptions. This study aims to reveal the mindset of mothers and adolescents through a syntactic analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), focusing on the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. Using a qualitative method, data were obtained from utterances collected through observations and elicitation interviews conducted in Madura language with responses in Indonesian. The data were analyzed using referential comparison and free interpretation methods. Findings indicate that mothers’ speech reproduces cultural, moral, and religious values concerning women’s roles, while adolescents’ language reflects conformity to those norms. Linguistic relations between them sustain early marriage as part of the established social value system, reflecting patriarchal ideology and power embedded in rural Javanese and Madurase culture. By using SFL theory, this research has succeeded in revealing that language structure is not neutral, but rather reflects the collective mindset of society which views early marriage as a moral and social obligation, not as a violation of individual rights.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary by Folman and Polonsky (2018) as a case of intersemiotic translation, analysing how Anne’s written reflections are transformed into a visually compelling multimodal narrative. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the study explores how verbal meaning is translated across semiotic modes through key visual strategies, including cinematic imagery, anthropomorphic animal symbolism, Munch- and Klimt-inspired artworks, and spatial composition depicting socio-temporal contrasts. The analysis applies SFL’s ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions to demonstrate how meaning is constructed and organised across modes. By introducing analytical concepts such as visual rhythm, visual proxemics, visual emotional polarity, and visual socio-temporal fracture, the paper reveals how the adaptation externalises Anne’s psychological experiences of confinement and imaginative freedom, resilience and despair, personal identity and social disparity. Drawing on frameworks from Martin and White (2005) and Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), the study demonstrates that the graphic adaptation mobilises the distinct affordances of the visual mode to render emotional intensity and historical trauma accessible for contemporary audiences. This paper contributes to translation studies, Holocaust literature, and multimodal discourse analysis by positioning multimodality as a historically grounded response to representational challenges in Holocaust testimony.

This study investigates stance-taking in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) pandemic declaration speech delivered on March 11, 2020, and its officially translated Arabic version, with the aim of exploring how stance is employed and re-conveyed across languages. The study seeks to identify the most frequent stance types in the English speech, examine how these stance markers are rendered in Arabic translation, and evaluate the communicative functions of stance-taking in both texts. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the study combines qualitative and quantitative analysis within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Value-laden lexical items were manually extracted from both the English and Arabic texts, classified under ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions, and then further coded for epistemic, attitudinal, and stylistic stance functions. Results reveal that the English text is dominated by attitudinal stances, reflecting the speaker’s efforts to engage the audience emotionally and persuade them to adopt recommended health behaviours. In contrast, the Arabic translation shows a more balanced distribution of stance types, with higher frequencies of attitudinal and stylistic stances, suggesting a shift toward information delivery and cohesive structuring. The findings have significant implications for translation studies, public health communication, and discourse analysis.

Language is much more than a neutral channel of information flow, it is an active, constitutive process that creates social realities, forms identities and continues or challenges systems of power. The theoretical data and empirical aspects of language as social construction/representation tool are reviewed in this research article. The article presents the theoretical background of the analysis of linguistic practices as a means of generating meaning, performing social differentiation, and naturalising the dominant ideological formations, drawing on the early works by Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and modern scholars of critical discourse analysis. The literature review combines the major theoretical frameworks, such as social constructionism, theory of the speech acts, critical discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics, as well as major empirical research on the topic of gender, race, and political discourse. The implications of the discussion to education, media, policy, and social justice advocacy are taken into account. The paper ends with the conclusion that the constructive power of language cannot be understood without being critically aware because, perhaps, it can also be transformed.

ABSTRACT Modal adjunct is the element that does not possess the potential to be Subject in clauses in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The criteria for delimiting its forms are not yet consistent, and their global characteristics also remain under-explored. This study explores the lexicogrammatical evolution and evolving paths of English modal adjuncts from a diachronic perspective based on the Corpus of Historical American English. The findings indicate that modal adjuncts of Probability, Usuality, and Inclination exhibit gradual and steady evolutionary trends, while those of Obligation vary significantly. According to the rankscale, modal adjuncts of Probability and Usuality follow an evolving pathway from group to clause to clause complex, though the former demonstrate a leap from group directly to clause complex. In contrast, modal adjuncts of Obligation evolve between adjacent ranks from word to group or from clause to clause complex, while those of Inclination display no systematic pathway. The evolution of modal adjuncts is argued to follow the principle of ‘interpersonal first’, subjected to a self-adapting system. This study is conducive to construing the modal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics, uncovering the evolving picture of modality system in American English, and providing diachronically detailed evidences for the English modal recognition.

This study, grounded in theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Ecolinguistics, analyzes the ecological discourse of high school English teachers in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms, thereby exploring the realization mechanisms of ecological educational contents in their classroom discourse. Through corpus extraction and annotation from authentic classroom teaching videos, combined with the integration of teaching moves, ecological contents, and transitivity process types, the study identifies the characteristics of teachers’ ecological discourse usage across different teaching moves and their corresponding lexicogrammatical realizations. The findings reveal that teachers’ classroom ecological discourse is predominantly concentrated in the main-body pedagogical moves, with a focus on knowledge-oriented and behaviour-related contents, a preference for action-type transitivity processes, and a lack of realizational resources for emotional engagement and interpersonal interaction. Based on these insights, the study proposes pedagogical recommendations to optimize the integration of ecological education in high school English teaching.

This article proposes the concept of Disposition for multimodal video game analysis, focusing on the Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG) genre. We conceptualize games as artifacts that orchestrate multiple semiotic modes while simultaneously depending on player volition to activate their semiotic resources. The study is grounded in Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday; Matthiessen, 2014) and its application in multimodal studies (Bateman; Wildfeuer; Hiippala, 2017), to which we incorporate some perspectives from Game Studies (Fernández-Vara, 2015; Jørgensen, 2013; Sicart, 2008). This integrated framework provides methods and categories for demonstrating the productivity of the Disposition concept in video game analysis. To illustrate this approach, we analyzed the Battle Disposition in the Action-JRPG Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (Flight-Plan, 2003), one of the six defining Dispositions in JRPGs.Keywords: systemic-functional linguistics; multimodality; game studies; Japanese role-playing games.

This study provides a rigorous sociolinguistic examination of the constitutive role of language in the ongoing socio-political conflict in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions, positing digital activism as a primary site of discursive struggle. While scholarship has addressed historical-political dimensions, a significant gap persists in the empirical analysis of the micro-linguistic strategies through which vernacular practices enact ideological resistance and counter-hegemonic mobilisation (Blommaert, 2005; Kroskrity, 2000). Employing an integrated mixed-methods framework that synergizes Corpus Linguistics with Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker, Gabrielatos, KhosraviNik, Krzy?anowski, McEnery, & Wodak, 2008), this research analyses a specialised digital corpus of approximately 1,200 text-based items from social media, activist communiqués, and transcribed audio (2020–2025)—the Anglophone Digital Activism Corpus (ADAC). Quantitative keyword and collocation analyses identify statistically significant patterns, while subsequent qualitative analysis, guided by Systemic Functional Linguistics’ transitivity model (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and social actor representation (van Leeuwen, 2008), performs close readings. The findings reveal a deliberate linguistic architecture characterised by three core mechanisms: the consistent grammatical positioning of collective Anglophone actors as active agents in material processes; the strategic deployment of code-mixing and lexical innovation, using Cameroonian Pidgin English and Camfranglais to create an exclusive, authentic discursive space (Gumperz, 1982); and the use of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) such as EDUCATION IS SOVEREIGNTY to reframe political grievances into mobilising narratives. This paper argues that digital activism in this context is fundamentally a sociolinguistic project, contributing an empirical model for analysing the interface of grammar, digital communication, and political conflict, affirming that the struggle for power is intrinsically a struggle over representation and linguistic resource mobilisation (Bourdieu, 1991).