Rebekah K Wegener

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at University of Salzburg

For more than a decade, linguistics has moved increasingly away from evaluating language as an autonomous phenomenon, towards analysing it 'in use', and showing how its function within its social and interactional context plays an important role in shaping in its form. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from some of the most influential sc...

The aim of this chapter is to highlight and explain the principal ways in which context is situated within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and to explore the main themes and parameters which situate context within an integrated theory of language as a semiotic resource.

As explained in the introductory chapter to this volume, the main aim of this collection of contributions has been to open an empirically focussed discussion in ways that engage with theoretical constructs within the SFL framework and that extend the use of methodologies. The approach taken in this volume could be summarised as 'take nothing for gr...

With renewed prominence of Explainable AI (XAI), many areas are revisiting early work on Explainability. Within the broader field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has an advantage in the development of transparent and ethical systems because such work has long been an integral part of research, development and operations...

Sometimes people motivate you, sometimes they challenge you, sometimes they inspire you, and sometimes they do all three at once. Ruqaiya Hasan falls into the last category. It is impossible to capture the huge impact that her work has had and will continue to have on a wide range of people and areas of research. In this volume, we attempt to show...

Hasan describes context in the following way: ‘context of situation as construed by discourse is a tripartite entity, each component of which is always active in the production of a text’ (Hasan, 2004, p. 21). This description of context of situation as an entity may be due to a number of reasons. For instance, there is a language-driven semantic d...

Context is only one of several strata of meaning and we can not predict realisation at the lexical or grammatical level from context alone. Yet, there is a tendency to confuse contextual patterning with semantic patterning and allocate patterning to the contextual level that might better be dealt with on other levels. While much work has been done...

Halliday’s description of register as ‘a variety of language, corresponding to a variety of situation’, with situation interpreted ‘by means of a conceptual framework using the terms “field”, “tenor” and “mode”’ (Halliday, 1985/89: 29, 38) is revisited to reflect on the theoretical work the term ‘register’ does within the SFL paradigm. In doing so,...

Medical Emergency Teams (MET)/rapid response are replacing Cardiac Arrest teams in acute hospitals. There is a lack of knowledge about how Critical Care Nurses (CCNs), rostered on MET construct their responsibilities/roles. Assess MET nurse activities at different hospitals. The authors used visual ethnography; selecting Systemic Functional Grammar...

Location-aware social network services are set to be the next generation of social networking services. These services typically allow users to send and receive messages and icons. Iconic signs, which look like what they represent, may be said to have a commonly understood meaning attached to them. However, this is fluid, leaving them open to varia...

Truly smart systems need to interface with the behaviour of human and non human actors in their surroundings. Systems with such interfaces could prove beneficial in supporting those with non standard commu- nication practices, the elderly living alone, people with disabilities, and many others. While the benefits are clear, the means of achieving t...

An operational model of context is particularly important for the successful integration of new technical artefacts into complex processes. One of the challenges for ambient intelligence is to embed technical artefacts into human work processes in such a way that they support the sense making processes of human actors instead of placing new burdens...

One of the challenges for ambient intelligence is to embed technical artefacts into human work processes in such a way that they support the sense making processes of human actors instead of placing new burdens upon them. This successful integration requires an operational model of context. Such a model of context is particularly important for disa...