The fallacy persists in discourse analysis research to explore lexicogrammatical phenomena detached from any adjacent plane of the meaning potential. In an attempt to dispel this and toss out some preconceived notions about what a modern SFG vantage point should involve, this study homes in on one aspect of SFG within prose fiction in particular, which is very revealing in terms of how separate system networks are actually in synergistic simultaneity, and how SFG allows one , phenomenally well, to bring such synergies out, getting to the heart of the fact that language pervasively operates on multiple planes of textuality simultaneously. Thus, building upon Halliday’s 2004 work, the quest is if it is interpersonally significant when the Residue is split into two parts; more importantly, if it is also laced with some lexicogrammatical quality on the textual plane, in light of the fairly well-entrenched assumption that there is always Theme at work when the Residue is split. Halliday is the only scholar to touch upon the topic of Discontinuous Residue and its relationship to Marked Theme in the culmination of his groundbreaking career, i.e. his 2004 work. Having driven home the proposal to make into a watchword the ubiquity of interlocking macro-semantic system networks, some pedagogical and research implications and suggestions flowing from this are brought up. Manuscript profile

Emerging within Systemic Linguistics, Appraisal/Evaluation is a framework for analyzing the language of evaluation, providing techniques for the systematic analysis of evaluation and stance as they operate in whole texts and in groupings of texts. There are three systems in the Appraisal framework: Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. This study sets out to analyze the use of the system of Engagement within a sample of English Literature (prose fiction) and the News (news articles). Engagement is a medium through which the speaker or the writer engages dialogistically with others (i.e., the addressees, within the process of evaluation). A corpus of 20,000 words was selected from each genre, involving five cornerstones of short fiction and a collection of news articles from CNN, Reuters, BBC, Daily Mail and Yahoo News. The study sheds light on the fact that both genres are strikingly close in using the four subsystems of Engagement, and both are inclined towards dialogic expansion, albeit for different generic reasons, with dialogic contraction taking a backbench. Appraisal as a whole is a promising model to explore texts in different genres, paving the way for richer more illuminating analyses of the interpersonal semantics operating in them. Manuscript profile

From a Systemic Functional perspective, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) as is taken to be a chief driving force in the discourse of different genres, an important adult language machinery for ideational meanings to be semantically cross-mapped and realized through a different form in the stratum of the lexico-grammar, in order to convey changed meanings and tinker with the discursive flow and development of text in real time, mainly through nominalization of adjectives and verbs. Using a number of established works of the English novel as data, this study draws upon the author’s previous model for the categories of GM used in modern prose fiction, with the main focus placed on one of the six categories, Prepositional GM (PGM). PGM figures with a very high frequency in fiction and occurs when a GM is preceded by a preposition. This study finds that the language of prose fiction in English deploys some of these PGMsin either of two different meaning sof the adverbial, varying according to context. Again, as seen to be the hallmark of GM by many, GM is found to open up vast ideational meaning potentials in the semantics stratum, from which the lexico-grammar makes choices according to context and intended meaning. As argued elsewhere in the literature and here, and as backed up by the author’s own experience of the advanced teaching of writing and reading, broadened understanding of GM is a critically important component to writing instruction and its effectiveness, as seen in the large-scale horizons and agendas for effective teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Iran and beyond. Manuscript profile