This study examines the use ofuhandum— referred to jointly as UHM — in 14 conversations totaling c. 62,350 words from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. UHM was much less frequent than in British English with 7.5 vs. 14.5 instances per million words in the British National Corpus. However, as in British English the frequency of UHM was closely correlated to extra-linguistic context. Conversations in non-private environments (such as offices and classrooms) had higher frequencies than those taking place in private spaces, mostly homes. Time required for planning, especially when difficult subjects were discussed, appeared to be an important explanatory factor. It is clear that UHM cannot be dismissed as mere hesitation or disfluency; it functions as a pragmatic marker on a par withwell,you know, andI mean, sharing some of the functions of these in discourse. Although the role of sociolinguistic factors was less clear, the tendencies for older speakers and educated speakers to use UHM more frequently than younger and less educated ones paralleled British usage, but contrary to British usage, there were no gender differences.

The role of discourse frequency in the development of two English connectives is explored, in the context of recent work emphasizing the role of syntagmatic relations in language change and suggesting that it is constructions, rather than lexical items, which grammaticalize. The development of sub-constructions within factandat leastare traced in a quantitative study based on corpora of formal and informal historical English. Each case involves an adverbial undergoing functional split as the clausal structure in which it is used becomes aligned with different discourse (sub-)constructions.In factbecomes both contrastive and elaborative;at leastbecomes evaluative and reformulative. It is shown how the adverbial expression in each case becomes compressed and more abstract, so that its informational weight is reduced, and how the English principle of end focus pushes it increasingly towards clause-initial position, resulting in alignment with the connective construction.

The Lexical Function Degrad is a device used in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) to select the appropriate verb for expressing ‘to become permanently worse or bad’ in combination with different nouns. For example, in English one says that fruit rots, milk goes off, shoes wear out, flowers wilt, and iron rusts; thus, the verbs rot, go off, wear out, etc. can all be considered “values” of Degrad. Comparing these verbs with their translation equivalents in Spanish shows that verbs in the two languages have somewhat different collocational possibilities. Are such collocational differences arbitrary or do they result from subtle meaning differences between the translation equivalents? In this study we undertake a contrastive semantic analysis of a selection of words in the Degrad domain, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of semantic explication. We conclude that collocational preferences are indeed semantically motivated, but at the same time we recognize that Degrad is a valuable lexicological tool for verb classification, as well as for coordinating translation equivalents across languages at an approximate level. The paper aims to encourage productive engagement between two well developed approaches to lexical semantics, while at the same time demonstrating the explanatory power of the detailed “micro semantic” analysis enabled by the NSM methodology.

The overall aim of this article is to explain why researchers working in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics would benefit from dialogue with people working in psycholinguistics, and with each other. After a brief introduction, the positions on cognition taken in the Sydney and Cardiff models of Systemic Functional Linguistics are reviewed and critiqued. I then assess the extent to which Cognitive Linguistics has honoured the ‘cognitive commitment’ which it claims to make. The following section examines compatibilities between Systemic Functional and Cognitive Linguistic approaches, first outlining existing work which combines Hallidayan and cognitive perspectives, then discussing other potential areas of contact between the two, and finally examining the Cardiff model in relation to Cognitive Linguistics. The final section presents a collaborative view, suggesting that the ultimate aim of functionally-oriented (including cognitive) linguistics should be to attempt to answer the question ‘How does the natural language user work?’, and pointing out that collaboration between proponents of different linguistic models, and between linguists and researchers in other disciplines which study language, is crucial to this enterprise. Suggestions are made for ways in which dialogue across the areas of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and psycholinguistics could contribute to such a project.

In this article, we examine locational constructions (including existentials, locatives, and possessives) in a number of languages. Morpho-syntactically, locationals resemble or are related to one another in word order, in case marking, and in the choice of verbs. In semantics, the relatedness lies in the definiteness effect, in the locative feature, and in the mutually defining relationship between the semantic elements within each construction. As is recognized by Heine (1997), Stassen (2001) and others, the existential is one of the major sources from which possessives are derived. Basically, possessive constructions are existentials whose locative elements are prototypically human. We argue that locational constructions are relational processes and that they can be integrated into a systemic network with respect to two semantic features, i.e., the definiteness of the existent element and the humanness of the locative element. This systemic relationship between locationals has implications for the description and comparison of languages within the Systemic Functional Grammar framework, particularly where locationals are concerned.

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This article analyses the function that code-switching plays in selected testimonies given at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission which followed the country’s transition to democracy in 1994. In a number of testimonies, victims of human rights abuse under Apartheid code-switched into Afrikaans when recalling particularly offensive uses of language by the police. Within the code-switching literature, it is well recognised that a speaker’s choice of code, particularly for quoted speech, is a strategy for performing different kinds of local identities which index a range of social meanings and relationships (Álvarez-Cáccamo 1996, Koven 2001). Thus code-switching may serve a complex evaluative function although the meanings it generates are very context-dependent. In order to explore this role in the testimonies in this paper, I use the appraisal theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin &amp; White 2005). I argue that on a number of occasions, code-switching into a particular variety of Afrikaans is used by testifiers as a strategy to invoke negative judgement: it has the effect of associating the police with a particular racist ideology and positioning them for our sanction. Further, it works together with other engagement resources to insert a recognisable historical voice into the text, thereby expanding the heteroglossic nature of the discourse while simultaneously allowing the speakers to signal their rejection of that voice and the ideologies it represents. In the current SFL literature, however, code-switching has not been noted as an appraisal resource. In the light of the examples from the TRC testimonies, I argue that, in multilingual contexts, code-switching has the potential to invoke complex evaluative meanings and should be included in the appraisal framework as an evaluative resource.