ESFLC34: Call for Papers: SFL and the Ecosocial Environment
For the 2026 European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference (ESFLC 2026), we invite papers that address and explore various aspects of ecosocial systems and the ecosocial environment. We also welcome papers from “fellow travellers” whose work engages with fields of interest to SFL and social semiotics.
Ecosocial environment or ecosocial system is a term used in Systemic Functional Linguistics and related fields to describe a social community and the various material ecosystems that enable, support, and constrain it (Lemke 1993, 1995; see also Halliday 2003, Thibault 2004). Ecosocial systems include humans and their interactions and practices, as well as other individuals and species with whom we have co-evolved; they can also include our buildings and tools, landforms and climate, education, politics, warfare, and so on (Lemke 1993, 1995). These systems are simultaneously both material and socio-semiotic.
Topics and areas of interest may include but are not restricted to:
- SFL theory and description
- Environmental communication and sustainability
- Ecolinguistics
- Multimodal semiotics and multimodal data sets
- Transmediality and multimodality
- Interaction and paraverbal semiotic systems
- Functional approaches to visual communication
- Multimodal genres and complex communicative artefacts
- Handling rich social media data
- Digital media and generative AI
- Education, educational linguistics, and multimodal literacy
- Literature studies, stylistics and verbal art
- Legitimation Code Theory
- Language typology and language description
- Applied linguistics and appliable linguistics
- Discourse studies
- Corpus linguistics
- Translation studies
- Law and forensic linguistics
- Comparative text analysis
- Healthcare communication
- Clinical linguistics
The language of the conference is English.
Proposals in the form of paper presentations, posters and colloquia are welcomed.
Abstracts for all presentation types must be a maximum of 350 words (excluding references). Abstracts should clearly indicate the aim of the contribution and its relevance to the theme of the 34th ESFLC, SFL generally or one of the listed above topics. They must also include information about theoretical background, about the methodology adopted and an indication on results. A list of references should also be included, because the proposed work should be situated within the existing research literature.
For colloquia, please indicate the name of all contributors.
Deadline: 31st January 2026
Abstracts should be submitted via Oxford Abstracts at the following link: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/80198/submitter