2015 ASFLA conference
LINGUISTICS, LITERATURE & VERBAL ART:
INHERITANCES AND DEVELOPMENTS
The 2015 conference of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA) will be held in Brisbane in the week beginning Monday 28 September 2015.
The venue for the conference will be the St Lucia campus of The University of Queensland which is located on the Brisbane River.
Literature in general and stories in particular have played a significant role in the history of
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). For example, Michael Halliday’s (1971) reading of The
Inheritors by William Golding has been credited with turning many people on to SFL. And,
Halliday (1978) also used his analysis of James Thurber’s ‘The Lover and his Lass’ to exemplify the
sociosemantic nature of discourse.
This conference, therefore, puts story, literature and ‘verbal’ art front and centre. What role has
literature played in the development of SFL? What does SFL offer researchers and teachers in
understanding how stories and other types of literature work? How can it be used to improve our
ability to read and write literary texts? What developments are occurring (or required) to better
understand the workings of long-form and multimodal literary texts? What do ‘literature’ and
‘verbal art’ mean in 2015? How concerned should SFL even be with literature anymore?
However, we would also love to hear researchers’ own stories as they use SFL to explore a range of
texts in a wide variety of contexts.