Programme
Just below, you find the link to the up-to-date conference programme.
The conference programme can be found here. Anticipate that smaller changes to the programme will be made right up to, and even during, the conference. The version held at the above link will be updated whenever changes are made, so will be up-to-date. We will not print physical copies to hand out, and we advise you to save the URL, rather than downloading an electronic copy of the programme.
The Book of Abstracts for the conference programme can be found here.
ESFLC34
These are the plenary speakers and their presentations.
Charlotte Taylor
Professor of Discourse and Persuasion, University of Sussex
"On fellow travellers: Corpus, discourse, and migration"
In this paper, I take on the role of a ‘fellow traveller’ to the SFL community at ESFLC34 in my methodological identity as a corpus and discourse analyst - and I talk about the last ten years' of my work on the way our fellow travellers, those who move, voluntarily or otherwise, across national borders, are framed in mainstream public discourse, and how they choose to frame their own experiences and journeys. What we know about negative attitudes to migrants is that they are higher in the areas with lowest migrant populations in the UK (e.g. Crawley et al. 2019) - illustrating very precisely the power of language in ecosocial systems where absent actors are made salient by political and media sources. This also plays out a national level as British people significantly over-estimate the number of migrants in the UK (Lessard-Phillips & Sigona 2025), a misunderstanding that is shaped and maintained by the dominant public discourses. In this paper, I start by showing the remarkable level of stasis in public, mainstream representations of migration and people who move. In previous work, I have attempted to look across cultures, both geographical and historical, for alternative narratives - and mostly failed. The same familiar tropes recur, and while they may be challenged, they are rarely replaced. Therefore, in the second phase, I move onto the somewhat less well-trodden path of how people may frame themselves. In analysing the self-representation of refugees in the 1000 Dreams corpus (Del Fante 2025), I want to draw out what alternative narratives are available for use. In the analysis, I combine (critical) discourse studies and corpus linguistics to investigate the role of lexical metaphor, transitivity and affect in framing migration. In so doing, I hope to also set out a map of where corpus & discourse scholars and systemic functional linguists may meet.
John A. Bateman
Professor of Linguistics and English at Bremen University
"The ‘othering’ of non-verbal semiotic modes: critical reassessments of where the boundaries lie and some consequences for linguistic description"
Although it is commonplace for SFL to consider its domain of application to be far ‘broader’ than language as traditionally defined (i.e., within linguistics), it is equally commonplace for SFL discussions to employ phrasing such as “language and other semiotic modes” as if the divisions and boundaries were clear or of little consequence. In contrast, current results from neurocognition, interaction studies, multimodal semiotics, and more show considerable converging evidence that such boundaries, particularly those assumed between the verbal and the non-verbal, need reassessment. In this talk I offer a brief overview of some of this work, relating accounts to the current state of proposals concerning multimodality and how to treat it. Of particular concern, however, will be potential consequences of these developments for the tasks of linguistic description: i.e., just what does a linguistic description, at any stratum, need to capture and what it can (and perhaps should) safely leave to ‘other’ semiotic systems. Drawing on examples including gesture, body posture, sequences of static pictorial content, dance, formal notations, and diagrams, I will suggest that some forms of expression thought of as ‘multimodal’ may not actually be multimodal at all, but simply be single modes engaging with far more complex materialities than has hitherto been done justice to. Conversely, some forms of expression treated similarly to language, may be sufficiently different to demand treatments quite distinct to those found in language descriptions. These points will be illustrated with closer reference to current proposals for the SFL description of context as well as to the relation of descriptions to materiality.
Annabelle Lukin
Professor of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney
"Is theory necessary in the climate crisis?"
Linguistics is a fragmented discipline. It has a plethora of subdisciplines (e.g. psycho-; socio-; cognitive-; eco-; critical discourse analysis) where we find largely irreconcilable or contradictory debates and proposals about the nature of language and the key challenges of our discipline. Each subfield has its own professional association, its own conferences, its own journals. We have disagreed on what language is, how it evolved, how it should be studied, its internal organization and its externalities, its relations with ‘reality’.
As our academic practices continue to contribute to dangerous climate pollution (Bjørkdahl & Duharte, 2022), it is timely to ask ourselves does linguistic theory matter in the climate crisis? This question was recently asked by Steffensen, Döring and Cowley (Steffensen et al., 2024). Sparked by Greta Thunberg’s statement ‘I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is’, they wondered whether discussions of theory still matter. The conclude in favour of more theoretical reflections: they propose ‘abandon[ing] the baggage of twentieth-century linguistic theory’ (at least, their reading of this ‘baggage’), in favour of their particular reframing of ecolinguistic theory, where ‘languages and languaging are seen as ecological phenomena’ (p26).
Yet some of the most important language analysis on climate has proceeded with little help from our discipline. For example, the work by climate scientist Geoffrey Supran and historian Naomi Oreskes (Supran & Oreskes, 2021a; Supran et al., 2023; Supran & Oreskes, 2021b), on the discourses of denial and delay by American oil giants has produced litigable evidence on how ExxonMobil misled the public on the dangers of burning fossil fuels (Milman, 2023). Further, two major new multi-disciplinary publications, Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment (with contributions from over 100 academics), and The Routledge Handbook on Climate Crisis Communications (edited by a sociologist and a climate scientist) explore problems of climate communication and disinformation without any input from academics from linguistics. The work closest to our field in these two volumes is conducted by scholars in journalism/media, communication, psychology, and environmental education (see e.g. Aronczyk et al., 2025; Stecula et al., 2025; Russill & Alrasheed, 2025; Nero & Lejano, 2025; Nero & Lejano, 2025).
Moreover, climate activism – for example, Australia’s Rising Tide movement that has organized in successive years the largest climate mobilizations in Australia’s history (viz the People’s Blockade of the world’s largest coal port, 2023, 2024, 2025), and has a strong and clear media strategy – proceeds without the need for linguistic theory or analysis.
All of this non-linguistic work is predicated on the growing power of language and meaning (Halliday, 2003a; Lukin, 2024). My presentation will reflect on these examples of direct analysis, intervention and mobilization around climate, and will consider how and why they bypass our discipline. My paper will consider what we can learn from this non-linguistic academic work on language and this activism. In doing so, I reflect on one of Halliday’s most obscure but insightful claims, a part of what I have called his ‘reality triptych’ (Lukin, In press): that in the relations of language to reality, as well as being part of reality and a construer of reality, language is a metaphor for reality (Halliday, 2003b).
Other invited talks at ESFLC34
Workshop on How To Do System Networks
Jim Martin (Professor of Linguistics, The University of Sydney) and John Bateman (Professor of Linguistics and English, Bremen University)
This workshop offers a preliminary guide to designing system networks, a central component within Systemic Functional Linguistic theory as far as modelling meaning potential is concerned.
Jim will begin the session with a focus on some of the key theoretical underpinnings, conventions, and analytical significance of system networks in language description. John will follow up on some of the challenges that get added in when working multimodally.
Jim and John will try and involve face-to-face participants in some hands-on practice, so have a pencil, eraser and some scraps of paper to draw on handy.
Time will be limited, but participants can follow up with the new edition of the axial relations book, revised by Pin Wang and Jim for Bloomsbury. Therein chapters begin with English examples and follow up with Tagalog and Chinese.
A Practical Guide to System Networks: Modelling Paradigmatic Relations for Language Description in Systemic Functional Linguistics (J R Martin and Pin Wang). London: Bloomsbury. 2026.
For pursuing the discussion of multimodality, participants can follow up with the chapter on “The materialities of semiosis” in the new textbook prepared by John and Janina Wildfeuer and Tuomo Hiippala:
Multimodality – A Hands-On Guide (J A Bateman, J Wildfeuer and T. Hiippala). Berlin: de Gruyter. 2026.
A Panel on Positive Discourse Analysis with Professor Jim Martin and Professor Tom Bartlett
Positive Discourse Analysis research has become a vibrant area of scholarly work since its inception in Jim Martin's work around two and a half decades ago. A large number of empirical works adopting a PDA approach have been undertaken in the intervening years, responding to a range of challenges experienced in modern societies - in topics which fall under the remit of the eco-social environment (e.g. education, health, the environment, etc.). Scholars working in this area have also engaged in theoretical and methodological debate regarding purpose, reach and praxis of PDA. In this panel, Professors Jim Martin and Tom Bartlett will reflect on the development of PDA research, and discuss the present status and future outlook of the approach in applied linguistics research.
Jim R Martin
Professor of Linguistics at The University of Sydney
Positive discourse analysis (PDA): retrospect and prospect
The paper 'Positive Discourse Analysis: solidarity and change' has its origins in a presentation I delivered at a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) conference I was invited to in Birmingham in 1999 and was eventually published in 2004. At the time I was hoping to encourage critical discourse analysts to shift their focus "from deconstructive activity to productive activity" (Kress's 1996) – suggesting that this would involve a change as far as the discourses analysed were concerned and that a complementary of deconstructive and constructive activity was necessary if analysts were to act "upon the world in order to transform it" (Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard 1996). And I offered some discourse analyses of texts which I considered to have made a world a better place.
As part of my contribution to this panel I should perhaps clarify that I was not proposing a new theory. PDA, like CDA, is an orientation to discourse analysis, and has drawn on many different theories of communication across disciplines. The theory I myself use is Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFS), which in my practice is inspired by Halliday's notion of linguistics as an ideologically committed form of social action. The main site in which I have tried to change the world is education – through the evolving literacy programs of the 'Sydney School.' It is hard.
The enduring criticisms of the nudge I tried to give CDA would appear to be i. that analysing texts is not enough (taking into account their social context is crucial); and ii. that celebrating world changing discourse is not enough (getting instrumentally involved in social change is essential). I agree with the gist of these critiques. For me they pose the challenge of (i) how to develop a richer SFS model of context and (ii) how to embed SFS more effectively in a process of change. I've perhaps learned some things over the years that I can share.
Tom Bartlett
Professor of Functional and Applied Linguistics at The University of Glasgow
From positivity to immanence: Applying linguistics for social change
In response to a perceived overemphasis on deconstruction and the negative side of criticality within the field of Critical Discourse Analysis, Kress (1996) proposed a move towards the Design of alternative and more progressive discourses, while Martin (2004) pointed to the need of positive models in order to facilitate such a transition.
Building on these core ideas, in my own work I have primarily stressed the need to contextualise any study of what the analyst sees as positive change in order to understand the conditions of possibility that gave rise to existing discourses and to better understand the potential for alternative discourses – and hence practices - to gain traction (Bartlett 2012).
In a handbook contribution on Positive Discourse Analysis (Bartlett 2017), I provided an overview of work self-identifying as in some way PDA and suggested how essential elements of each approach, along with core CDA work, could be incorporated within a general framework for PDA. This included identifying a problem with my earlier work in not working sufficiently with local communities within a participatory action research framework.
Building on this idea, I have most recently been preoccupied with the need to move from external critique (including its positive elements) to immanent critique (Herzog 2016), arising from a discourse community’s existing norms, values and practices. Alongside this shift in emphasis in the application of linguistics (see also Bartlett and Montesano Montessori 2021), I have been working with Gerard O’Grady (O’Grady and Bartlett 2023) to develop an SFL-based account of how social and linguistic systems co-adapt.
In my contribution to the panel I will briefly expand on this trajectory before exploring how SFL-derived theories of language and the sociological concept of immanent critique can be put to work together within specific contexts.