In this talk, I present preliminary findings from a research project examining the language development of a child in a multilingual environment. Focusing on the child’s sign-making involving vocalisations between 7.5 and 10.5 months of age, I address several theoretical and methodological questions that emerged during the early stages of the project. This work has been developed in close collaboration with Dr Lilian Ariztimuño.

First, although Halliday’s (1975) model of protolanguage, particularly its account of microfunctions, has been highly influential and informed later case studies (Painter, 1984; Torr, 1987), alternative interpretations of children’s early meaning-making are possible. These include privileging the child’s intersubjective reality (Halliday, 1978/2004) and foregrounding affect (Painter, 2003). This study identifies the ‘content’ of the child’s meaning-making by describing her social experiences, integrating both intersubjective and affective perspectives. This approach has proved more productive than applying categorical distinctions between microfunctions to the data.

Second, although protolanguage sign-making is inherently multimodal (Ngo et al., 2022), its paralinguistic resources have not been studied systematically. In this study, instances of sign-making are analysed as ensembles of semiotic resources, including body movements, facial expressions, and vocalisations. Resources from each mode, together with their rhythmic organisation, are analysed systematically. Body movements are described in terms of muscle engagement, intentional direction, motion, and speed (Ngo et al., 2022). Facial expressions include movements of the eyebrows, eyes, cheeks, and mouth (Feng & O’Halloran, 2012; Ngo et al., 2022). Vocalisations are analysed prosodically, recognising three emerging ranks of meaning-making: a sonority wave based on articulation of posture and contact, a melody unit based on pitch movement (particularly the voice qualities as described in Ariztimuño, 2024, 2025), and an intermediate rank based on rhythm. This framework recognises that the child’s meaning-making involves the co-selection of resources across semiotic modes, links physical milestones with language development, and identifies the emerging role of vocalisations within the child’s sign-making repertoire.

Finally, I consider how the relationship between the child’s multisemiotic ensembles and social experiences can be conceptualised by treating experiential exploration and emotional states as simultaneous and equally important. I argue that although metafunctions, in the adult sense, have not yet developed, different strands of meaning nevertheless operate simultaneously from the earliest stages of multimodal sign-making.

While the family home as the key site of heritage language practice has been extensively researched, little is known about how rapidly changing environmental and social factors come together to influence language choices and shape family language practices (Curdt-Christiansen & Huang 2020; Lanza 2021). We align with the notion that language practices can be seen as ‘de facto grassroots language policy’ (Roberts 2023: 314) and respond to calls in the field to attempt to fully embrace the complexity of family language policy (Roberts 2023). Our project is designed to use novel methods to explore how new spaces of interaction, including public and digital spaces, impact family communication patterns and what opportunities they offer for ensuring that young Australians (i) learn their parental language (ii) continue to use it and (iii) see the value of these languages in Australia and beyond.

This presentation to ASFLA concentrates on heritage language use in public spaces. In the early stages of this project, we aim to first identify how heritage languages are used by children (7-14 years) outside the family home. We are recruiting families across diverse heritage language backgrounds, and use a survey, interview, and language diary (completed by the child) to ascertain if – and how – this takes place. Building on research in linguistic landscapes (e.g. Hatoss 2023) and spatial discourse analysis (e.g. Ravelli and McMurtrie 2016), we also aim to identify the affordances of public spaces which might encourage or inhibit the use of heritage languages.

The project responds to the ontological shifts in the field which recognise the reduced boundaries between private and public spaces (Lanza 2021) and uses the latest notions of ‘translocal’ and transnational spaces of language planning (Hatoss et al. 2024). Our focus on urban spaces brings to the fore questions about how societal attitudes towards migrants and their languages shape language choices and further contest monolingual ideologies in Australia (Hatoss 2023). We hope to connect these findings to the learning opportunities that might arise in public spaces for enhancing heritage languages and literacies, and thereby contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of family language practices beyond the home.

References

Curdt-Christiansen, X. L., & Huang, J. (2020). Factors influencing family language policy. In A. Schalley & S. Eisenchlas (Eds.), Handbook of Home Language Maintenance (pp. 174-193). Mouton de Gruyter.

Hatoss, A. (2023). Everyday multilingualism: Linguistic landscapes as practice and pedagogy. Routledge.

Hatoss, A., Nordstrom, J., & Lamb, T. (2024). Planning and teaching heritage languages in the translocal and digital space. Current Issues in Language Planning, 25 (5), 475-487.

Lanza, E. (2021). The family as a space: multilingual repertoires, language practices and lived experiences. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 42(8), 763-771.

Ravelli, L., & McMurtrie, R. (2016). Multimodality in the built environment: Spatial discourse analysis. Routledge

Roberts, T. (2023). Family language policy in Swedish-English families: Rhizomatic conceptualisations. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 312-340.

Appliable by design: SFL as a framework for institutional practice

SFL defines itself as an appliable theory of language, one in which the relationship between linguistic description and social intervention is not incidental, but constitutive. Yet appliability is most often framed as something linguists extend outward: to learners, to classrooms, to communities in need of access and equity. Less often do we examine what happens when SFL is turned inward, when the theory is applied to the institutions we inhabit and the practices we design within them.

This talk argues that SFL equips academics with a principled and portable framework for institutional action, one that makes visible the linguistic work already embedded in teaching, supervision, research leadership, and community engagement, and positions that work as theorised scholarly practice rather than institutional service. This is the work Positive Discourse Analysis was designed to do: not exposing semiosis in the service of power alone, but documenting and enacting it in the service of solidarity and change. From this orientation, I explore what it means to use SFL as a framework for institutional practice, diagnosing semiotic barriers to participation and redesigning the conditions under which voice, identity, and legitimacy are made available to those on the margins of institutional life: doctoral candidates navigating unfamiliar research cultures in a language other than their own, language learners locked out of disciplinary knowledge, and communities whose discourses enact solidarity and resist the deficit narratives imposed upon them.

This argument is developed through three sites of practice. The first examines how grammatical metaphor, as both a research focus and a pedagogical intervention, illustrates the realisation of linguistic description as enabling practice, from the Grammatical Metaphor Word List to AI-assisted identification tools. The second explores supervisor-candidate co-authorship and the thesis-by-publication as forms of genre apprenticeship: practices through which doctoral candidates are enculturated into the registers, stances, and authorial identities of their disciplinary communities. The third examines co-designed research with neurodivergent communities as a space where lived expertise and linguistic analysis converge, working toward institutions that accommodate rather than pathologise neurodivergent experience. What these interventions share is a commitment to expanding access to valued meaning-making resources, and to redesigning the conditions under which that access is granted or withheld. I propose that such work, though typically labelled as service or leadership, constitutes a theoretically grounded and coherent research program in its own right: one in which appliability is not an aspiration, but a daily enactment, concerned with how meaning circulates, how identities are legitimated, and how institutions can be redesigned to expand participation across the social and linguistic boundaries that so often determine who gets to speak, and who is heard.

The talk closes by posing a question that SFL is uniquely positioned to ask: if language is the primary resource through which knowledge is built, identities are formed, and institutions are reproduced, what does it mean to wield that resource with full theoretical awareness, in every context we inhabit?

I will begin by investigating to which degree meaning and function have been conflated in Halliday’s work, to then define function and meaning as two distinct, but always co-present dimensions of discourse and practice. I will argue that, in contemporary multimodal communication, functionality becomes increasingly homogeneous across many different contexts, while meaning becomes increasingly fragmented and diverse, yet continues to underpin the values that constitute people’s identities. This account will be set against a broader evocation of the rise of functionalism in modernity, and its retreat from prominence in postmodern theory and practice.