Exploring British Sign Language via Systemic Functional Linguistics: A Metafunctional Approach (Bloomsbury Studies in Systemic Functional Linguistics) - Hardcover

Luke A. Rudge

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350148946 ISBN 13: 9781350148949

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Synopsis

One of many natural sign languages in use around the world, through the simultaneous use of embodied articulators British Sign Language (BSL) operates as a fully-fledged semiotic system in the visual-spatial modality. Filling a gap in current research in the field of sign language linguistic, this book investigates visual-spatial communications from a functional perspective.

Presenting a description and analysis of BSL from the perspective of Hallidayean Systemic Functional Linguistics, Luke Rudge explores how BSL users make meaning from three different yet interrelated perspectives:

- How exchanges of information are managed at a social level (the interpersonal metafunction);
- How experience is encoded in the language (the experiential metafunction)
- How communications are organised into coherent parts and wholes (the textual metafunction).

Examining these perspectives both separately and in unison, Exploring British Sign Language via Systemic Functional Linguistics places them within the context of current observations in sign linguistics, providing a complementary viewpoint on how visual-spatial communications may be understood as social semiosis.

About this title

About the Author

Luke Rudge is Senior Lecturer of Languages and Linguistics at the University of the West of England, UK.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350148946
• ISBN 13: 9781350148949
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176