This study compares power dynamics in two culturally and generically distinct medical television series: the Egyptian comedy Balto (2023) and the American drama The Resident (2018). Drawing on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly the Mood system, six scenes (three from each series) are analysed to show how declarative, interrogative, and imperative clauses construct hierarchy, authority, and resistance. The analysis reveals that in Balto, power is framed through humour and exaggeration, with interns positioned by softened or ironic speech, while senior doctors assert dominance in playful yet critical ways. In The Resident, authority is enforced through direct commands and evaluative questions that blur mentorship with intimidation. These contrasts demonstrate how genre and cultural context shape linguistic realizations of institutional power, highlighting Mood as a key resource for negotiating authority across divergent settings.
Grammatical metaphor, a significant theoretical innovation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), extends meaning realization from the lexical to the grammatical stratum, providing a powerful framework for analyzing abstraction and technicality in academic and scientific discourse. Adopting a methodology of combining systematic retrieval with thematic analysis, this article reviews 293 primary studies on grammatical metaphor within SFL since Halliday initial proposal. We first trace Halliday's three-stage theoretical development of grammatical metaphor. Subsequently, our thematic synthesis reveals predominant sub-themes within two major streams: theoretical development (encompassing semantic and characteristic discussion, interdisciplinary dialogues with Cognitive Linguistics and educational sociology, and typological debates) and practical application (covering language teaching, textual analysis, and translation studies). Based on the synthesis, we propose four key directions for future research: expanding the linguistic scope, broadening the population of second language learners, establishing identification criteria for grammatical metaphor in non-English languages, and delineating demetaphorization. The findings of this review offer valuable theoretical references for linguists seeking to refine grammatical metaphor theory, as well as practical guidance for language teachers and curriculum developers aiming to foster learners' academic literacy. Moreover, the proposed future directions are intended to inspire researchers to explore cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary dimensions, ultimately facilitating a more inclusive and methodologically robust field of grammatical metaphor studies.
Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) is intractable because of multiple tumors involving the nervous system and is clinically diverse and genotype-dependent. Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) for NF2-associated schwannomas remains controversial. We aimed to investigate the association between radiosurgical outcomes and mutation types in NF2-associated schwannomas. This single-institute retrospective study included consecutive NF2 patients with intracranial schwannomas treated with SRS. The patients' types of germline mutations ("Truncating," "Large deletion," "Splice site," "Missense," and "Mosaic") and Halliday's genetic severity scores were examined, and the associations with progression-free rate (PFR) and overall survival (OS) were analyzed. The study enrolled 14 patients with NF2 with 22 associated intracranial schwannomas (median follow-up, 102 months).　The PFRs in the entire cohort were 95% at 5 years and 90% at 10-20 years. The PFRs tended to be worse in patients with truncating mutation exons 2-13 than in those with other mutation types (91% at 5 years and 82% at 10-20 years vs. 100% at 10-20 years, P = 0.140). The OSs were 89% for patients aged 40 years and 74% for those aged 60 years in the entire cohort and significantly lower in genetic severity group 3 than in the other groups (100% vs. 50% for those aged 35 years; P = 0.016). SRS achieved excellent PFR for NF2-associated intracranial schwannomas in the mild (group 2A) and moderate (group 2B) groups. SRS necessitates careful consideration for the severe group (group 3), especially in cases with NF2 truncating mutation exons 2-13.
Critical discourse analysis aims to explore the dialectical relationship between discourse and ideology. Based on psycholinguistic research, this paper analyzes the Chinese and American media's news reports and comments on the COVID-19. It aims to expose the hidden psychological messages and ideologies behind the words. The corpus in this paper is mainly from the official media of China Daily and Time from December 2019 to January 2021 in China and the United States. This paper uses Wang Zhenhua's Appraisal Theory and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as tools to make a comparative analysis of the corpus. At the textual level, languages are classified and lexical choices are analyzed followed by the analysis of the reporter's ideology after reviewing the motivation of the reporters of two countries. On the level of social responsibility expression and discourse, the paper analyzes the news reports, which are characterized by the combination of the reporter's views on the news. In the aspect of social practice, the social and cultural factors and background of news reports are analyzed. China calls for strengthening cooperation and exchanges with other countries to jointly fight the epidemic. The Chinese government has actively shared its experience and made corresponding contributions to international economic recovery. However, the US government shirks its responsibility by claiming that the effective implementation of Chinese methods and experience in China does not mean that it can achieve corresponding results in Europe and the US. At the same time, the United States provides medical supplies to other countries. This study hopes to help awaken readers' critical thinking and increase their awareness of the anti-control of mass discourse. At the same time, it is hoped that readers can view the epidemic from a more scientific perspective, understand the facts and reject the unwarranted panic. It will also help reshape Chinese and American discourse.
With the advent of the information age, language is no longer the only way to construct meaning. Besides language, a variety of social symbols, such as gestures, images, music, three-dimensional animation, and so on, are more and more involved in the social practice of meaning construction. Traditional single-modal sentiment analysis methods have a single expression form and cannot fully utilize multiple modal information, resulting in low sentiment classification accuracy. Deep learning technology can automatically mine emotional states in images, texts, and videos and can effectively combine multiple modal information. In the book Image Reading, the first systematic and comprehensive visual grammatical analysis framework is proposed and the expression of image meaning is discussed from the perspectives of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and composition meaning, compared with the three pure theoretical functions in Halliday's systemic functional grammar. In the past, people often discussed films from the macro perspectives of literary criticism, film criticism, psychology, aesthetics, and so on, and multimodal analysis theory provides film researchers with a set of methods to analyze images, music, and words at the same time. In view of the above considerations, Mu Wen adopts the perspective of social semiotics, based on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and Gan He's "visual grammar," and builds a multimodal interaction model as a tool to analyze film discourse by referring to evaluation theory.
Ancient Chinese poetry and prose (ACPP) are the essence of traditional Chinese culture and also literary gems of the world. Despite the long tradition of previous Chinese Presidents using ACPP in their political addresses, the translation work on the three volumes of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China with much ACPP still poses a daunting challenge to the translation of literary texts in non-literary texts. As experiential meaning is inherent in all kinds of texts, literature, and non-literature, this study, drawing on the sights of Halliday's experiential mode of meaning and register theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), explored how the ACPP's experiential meaning was rendered in the political texts, and factors motivating transitivity patterns and shift tendencies. Statistics showed that the translations tend to reproduce the experiential meaning such that it involves more representations of the flow of events and the creation of relationships among entities, focusing more on construing the experience of the physical world rather than personal emotions, feelings, or cognition. Besides, the target text is also inclined to simplify the experiential meaning by compressing and omitting unnecessary transitivity processes and the participant and circumstance nominalization. This research found that the factors responsible for such tendencies include the features of political texts, language differences, the distribution of process types, the delicacy of the transitivity system, and register variations of fields of activity. With these findings, the study is expected to contribute to the SFL approach of studying literary translation in non-literary texts through the prism of experiential meaning and offer guidance in the translation of political literature with ACPP.
The data for this article are from a primary health care project on HIV and depression, in which the prevalence, nature, clinical management, and self-management of depression among homosexually active men attending high-HIV-caseload general practice clinics were investigated. One of the qualitative arms consisted of in-depth interviews with general practitioners (GPs) with high caseloads of gay men. The approach to discourse analysis was informed by Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. GPs constructed three discourses of depression: engaging with psychiatric discourse, engaging with the patient's world, and engaging with social structures. When GPs drew on the discourse of psychiatry, this discourse was positioned as only one possible construction of depression. This discourse was also contextualized in the social lives of gay men, and it was explicitly challenged and rejected. Engaging with their patients' social world was considered vital for recognizing depression in gay men. Finally, the GPs' construction of depression was inextricably linked to social disadvantage and marginalization. Depression is highly heterogeneous and constructed in terms of social relationships rather than as an independent entity that resides in the individual. There is a synergy between GPs' constructions of depression and men's experiences of depression, which differs from conventional medical views, and which enables GPs to be highly effective in dealing with the mental health issues of their gay patients.
The language used by National Health Service (NHS) "commissioning" managers when discussing their roles and responsibilities can be seen as a manifestation of "identity work", defined as a process of identifying. This paper aims to offer a novel approach to analysing "identity work" by triangulation of multiple analytical methods, combining analysis of the content of text with analysis of its form. Fairclough's discourse analytic methodology is used as a framework. Following Fairclough, the authors use analytical methods associated with Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. While analysis of the content of interviews provides some information about NHS Commissioners' perceptions of their roles and responsibilities, analysis of the form of discourse that they use provides a more detailed and nuanced view. Overall, the authors found that commissioning managers have a higher level of certainty about what commissioning is not rather than what commissioning is; GP managers have a high level of certainty of their identity as a GP rather than as a manager; and both GP managers and non-GP managers oscillate between multiple identities depending on the different situations they are in. This paper offers a novel approach to triangulation, based not on the usual comparison of multiple data sources, but rather based on the application of multiple analytical methods to a single source of data. This paper also shows the latent uncertainty about the nature of commissioning enterprise in the English NHS.
Cell-mediated immunity (CMI) to myelin components has been implicated in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) pathogenesis: two targets were suggested, Myelin Basic Protein with controversial results and, more recently, gangliosides. In order to investigate their possible involvement, we have performed Leukocyte Migration inhibition (LMI) tests in the presence of human brain gangliosides. Thirty nine MS patients (twenty four being "definite", according to McDonald and Halliday's classification), twenty nine patients with Other Neurological Diseases (OND), thirty six patients with Inflammatory diseases (ID) and forty healthy controls were tested. MS patients were divided into two groups, depending on the clinical stage of the disease. The mean migration inhibition percentage of the MS-attack group was found to be significantly different from the four others (p less than 0.01) (24.4 +/- 16.2 versus 10.9 +/- 8.5 in MS without attack, 4.4 +/- 12.9 in OND, 3.9 +/- 13.9 in ID and 11.1 +/- 12.1 in healthy subjects). LMI to gangliosides is therefore significantly increased during the attack stage in MS. These results support the notion of a Delayed Type Hypersensitivity to these glycolipids during the active stage of the disease.
Further to Alan Halliday's letter (January 7), in my experience as a matron in outpatients the emphasis has already shifted towards a more caring environment.
Seventy texts, which had been produced spontaneously but in standardized contexts by (non-acute) schizophrenic patients and by non-schizophrenic subjects, were analysed linguistically in order to investigate the various strategies that speakers may use to join different sentences together to form a unified structure by semantic and lexicogrammatical ties. For this purpose we used Halliday's and Hasan's classification of so-called "cohesive ties". This theoretical framework makes it possible to describe the inner coherence of linguistic texts in a quantitative way. In the "schizophrenic texts" the sentences contained significantly fewer such cohesive ties than in those texts produced by normal speakers. An additional longitudinal analysis revealed an increase in the number of cohesive ties per sentence, when the same schizophrenic speakers were asked to produce a second text (in a similar context) after participating in a 3-month psychotherapy programme. The central goal of psychotherapy was to improve the patients' cognitive ability to face and cope with social stress situations. The results of several textual and statistical procedures are discussed, mainly under the aspect of cognitive dysfunctions during periods of non-acute schizophrenia.
The present study investigates flexibility of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development, and its relationship with patterns attested in the input. The data is taken from a case study of a monolingual English-speaking boy aged 2 ; 5-2 ; 9 and his mother while engaged in daily activities in the home. Data were coded according to Halliday's (1975) functional system. The findings suggest that early multiword verb use is functionally restricted and closely tied to verb use in the input.
Several disulfide benzamides have been shown to possess wide-spectrum antiretroviral activity in cell culture at low micromolar to submicromolar concentrations, inhibiting human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 1 (HIV-1) clinical and drug-resistant strains along with HIV-2 and simian immunodeficiency virus [Rice, W. G., Supko, J. G., Malspeis, L., Buckheit, R. W., Jr., Clanton, D., Bu, M., Graham, L., Schaeffer, C. A., Turpin, J. A., Domagala, J., Gogliotti, R., Bader, J. P., Halliday, S. M., Coren, L., Sowder, R. C., II, Arthur, L. O. & Henderson, L. E. (1995) Science 270, 1194-1197]. Rice and coworkers have proposed that the compounds act by "attacking" the two zinc fingers of HIV nucleocapsid protein. Shown here is evidence that low micromolar concentrations of the anti-HIV disulfide benzamides eject zinc from HIV nucleocapsid protein (NCp7) in vitro, as monitored by the zinc-specific fluorescent probe N-(6-methoxy-8-quinoyl)-p-toluenesulfonamide (TSQ). Structurally similar disulfide benzamides that do not inhibit HIV-1 in culture do not eject zinc, nor do analogs of the antiviral compounds with the disulfide replaced with a methylene sulfide. The kinetics of NCp7 zinc ejection by disulfide benzamides were found to be nonsaturable and biexponential, with the rate of ejection from the C-terminal zinc finger 7-fold faster than that from the N-terminal. The antiviral compounds were found to inhibit the zinc-dependent binding of NCp7 to HIV psi RNA, as studied by gel-shift assays, and the data correlated well with the zinc ejection data. Anti-HIV disulfide benzamides specifically eject NCp7 zinc and abolish the protein's ability to bind psi RNA in vitro, providing evidence for a possible antiretroviral mechanism of action of these compounds. Congeners of this class are under advanced preclinical evaluation as a potential chemotherapy for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
Reasoning or inference-scaling models are the new generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of complex problem solving. To investigate their problem-solving capability in physics, we evaluated model o4-mini by OpenAI on solving traditional, end-of-chapter problems from Halliday and Resnick's "Fundamentals of Physics," spanning core topics in the undergraduate physics curriculum. Performance was analyzed across modality and problem difficulty. The model solved the problems with overall accuracy of about 90%, but performance depended strongly on representation: accuracy was much higher on text-only problems (96%) than on problems requiring coordinated interpretation of text and images (79%). Accuracy also declined significantly as the problem difficulty increased from low to medium to high. These results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can solve much of the standard introductory physics problems, but that their performance remains uneven and constrained by problem modality and problem difficulty.
Machine-Facing English (MFE) is an emergent register shaped by the adaptation of everyday language to the expanding presence of AI interlocutors. Drawing on register theory (Halliday 1985, 2006), enregisterment (Agha 2003), audience design (Bell 1984), and interactional pragmatics (Giles & Ogay 2007), this study traces how sustained human-AI interaction normalizes syntactic rigidity, pragmatic simplification, and hyper-explicit phrasing - features that enhance machine parseability at the expense of natural fluency. Our analysis is grounded in qualitative observations from bilingual (Korean/English) voice- and text-based product testing sessions, with reflexive drafting conducted using Natural Language Declarative Prompting (NLD-P) under human curation. Thematic analysis identifies five recurrent traits - redundant clarity, directive syntax, controlled vocabulary, flattened prosody, and single-intent structuring - that improve execution accuracy but compress expressive range. MFE's evolution highlights a persistent tension between communicative efficiency and linguistic richness, raising design challenges for conversational interfaces and pedagogical considerations for multiling
We propose a parametrization of autoregressive unit roots ARMA models (ARUMA) with partial autocorrelation coefficients to specify the autoregressive and integrated part of the model. We obtain the algebraic properties of the partial autocorrelations in the context of unit roots. The main result is that if a partial autocorrelation sequence contains some values equal to 1 or -1, then it can be split at these values into sub-sequences each of which represents the partial autocorrelations of a factor of the overall polynomial on the left-hand side of the model. A separate paper will discuss the details of the estimation procedure and its properties. An implementation is provided by Boshnakov and Halliday (2022) R package sarima, https://cran.r-project.org/package=sarima (function sarima).
In this contribution to Peter Suranyi Festschrift, we study the Halliday-Suranyi perturbation method for calculating the energy eigenvalues of the quartic anharmonic oscillator.
A quantum problem once described as impossible for classical computers has now been solved using relatively modest hardware。 Researchers used tensor networks to compress the overwhelming wave function created by hundreds of entangled qubits, allowing some calculations to run on a laptop。 Their results matched both theoretical predictions and simula