Exploring the construction of meaning in language, this book shows how this theory can be applied to language studies 'intelligently', in order to arrive at a better understanding of how meaning is constructed in language. It uses systemic functional theory to examine a range of issues including corpus linguistics and multimodality.

Introduction, Jonathan Webster (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong); 1. Intelligent Language Applications - Christian Matthiessen (Macquarie University, Australia); 2. Topical Theme in Chinese, Fang Yan (Tsinghua University, China); 3. Realizational Systems, David Butt (Macquarie University, Australia); 4. Nominalization, Verbalization and Grammatical Metaphor - Zhu Yongsheng (Fudan University, China). 5. Explicitation, Erich Steiner (University of Saarland, Germany); 6. Multimodal Meaning - Hu Zhuanglin (Peking University, China); 7. Ontogenesis of Grammatics, Geoff Williams (University College, London, UK); 8. Code-switching and SFL, Huang Guowen (Sun Yat-sen University, China); 9. Understanding Semantic Theory, Ruqaiya Hasan; 10. Creativity and Linguistic Globalization, Edwin Thumboo (National University of Singapore, Singapore); 11. Linguistic Structure and SFL, John Bateman (University of Bremen, Germany); 12. Systemic Functional Grammar and Language Technology, Jon Patrick (University of Sydney, Australia).