Translation, ipso facto, is an understanding and a transferal of meaning from one language into another. Therefore, it may be fitting to conclude that a suitable semantic theory should underpin any attempt to that end. This paper advocates implementing Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL) which subscribes to a view of language as a "meaning-potential". In fact, Halliday and Matthies...

Interpersonal variability in understanding linguistic probabilities can adversely affect decision making. Using the fact that everyone judges canonical probability events similarly in a manner consistent with axiom systems that yield a probability measure, we developed and tested a method for comparing the meanings of probability phrases across individuals. An experiment demonstrated that despi...

thanks to the development of the concept of metadiscourse, it is now widely acknowledged that academic/scientific writing is not only concerned with communicating purely propositional meanings: what is communicated through academic/scientific communication is seen to be intertwined with the negotiation of social and interpersonal meanings. while a large number of so called metadiscoursal resour...

If we focus on ‘relevance’, the textual metafunction creates relevance by adding prominence through assigning relative value to parts of the clause (Matthiessen 1992). The Theme, for instance, functions to select meaning(s) from the clause (Hannay & Martínez Caro, 2008) and to assign them thematic prominence, which has consequences for the thematic development of the text (Fries, 1992) in contr...

Thanks to the development of the concept of metadiscourse, it is now widely acknowledged that academic/scientific writing is not only concerned with communicating purely propositional meanings: what is communicated through academic/scientific communication is seen to be intertwined with the negotiation of social and interpersonal meanings. While a large number of so called metadiscoursal resour...

Human’s non-verbal behavior may convey different meanings. They can reflect one’s emotional states, communicative intentions but also his social relations with someone else, i.e. his interpersonal attitude. In order to determine the non-verbal behavior that a virtual agent should display to convey particular interpersonal attitudes, we have collected a corpus of virtual agent’s non-verbal behav...