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The House of Asterion is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that retells the classical myth of the Cretan Minotaur from an alternate perspective. The House of Asterion features the Minotaur, aka Asterion, who waits for “redemption” in his labyrinth. Many literary critics have suggested that the Borgesian labyrinth is a metaphor for human existence and the universe itself. Others have correctly interpreted Asterion’s ironic death at the hands of Theseus as his eagerly awaited redemption. Borges’ subversion of the reader’s expectations becomes the departure point for a systemic functional stylistic analysis of the story in one of its English translations, revealing how deeper-level meanings in the text are construed through its lexico- grammatical structure. A systemic functional stylistic reading suggests that on a higher level of reality, Asterion’s redemption is not only the freedom that death affords, but also a transformation that transcends his fictional universe. Asterion’s twofold redemption is brought about not only by the archetypal hero Theseus but also by the reader, who through the process of reading enables Asterion’s emancipation from the labyrinth.

A critical approach to media discourse analysis sheds light on the way that individuals and institutions maintain certain ideologies in spite of the apparent neutrality of journalistic discourse. In media interviews, the interviewer can use pragmatic techniques to elicit agreement and maintain the question-answer format. This paper explores how metapragmatic acts (MPAs) and extended question sequences (EQSs) affect the interviewee’s responses in two television interviews concerning political issues in China. The aim of this paper is not to comment on the ideologies implicit in the discourse, but rather to exemplify the ways in which the aforementioned pragmatic techniques play a role in the media interview. Throughout this analysis, attention is paid to the interviewer’s questions and how the given responses are affected. I conclude that EQSs are more effective than MPAs, and that both are used by the interviewer to repair tacit political opinions.

Peter Carey's short story American dreams (Carey 1994 [1974]) presents a recalibration of consciousness as a small Australian town gradually becomes Americanised. The text foregrounds epistemological concerns by demonstrating a clear tendency toward delayed understanding. For this reason, I argue that the story is an instance of modernist fiction: a label not previously applied to Carey's stories. In contrast with popular modernist techniques such as free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, the techniques presented in the text appear to be covert, which may at least partially explain why the story has managed to avoid being labelled modernist by literary critics until now. Using analytical tools grounded in systemic functional grammar and appraisal categories, I demonstrate how linguistic analysis can lay bare the covert modernist techniques at work in the story, indicating that such an approach can be a useful complement to nonlinguistic literary criticism.

This thesis is an investigation into the style of one of Australia’s greatest contemporary literary exports: Peter Carey. Carey is an acclaimed writer of fiction and is best known as an award-winning novelist, but before his first novel was published in the 1970s, he achieved international recognition as a writer of short stories. The stories were received well by critics, but were largely overshadowed by his subsequent novels. Although a considerable amount of critical attention has been paid to his stories over the years, there still remains much to say about their style and meaning: namely the ways in which their imaginative, anti-realist devices articulate fictional truth. Taking as my point of departure the insights and opinions of traditional literary critics, I argue that Carey’s short stories, as seen through the lens of social-semiotic stylistics, articulate a special form of truth which provokes the reader to imagine new possibilities. This questioning of reality is shown to be a central preoccupation in his stories by using a variety of linguistic methods to make explicit their verbal texture.

Peter Carey’s ‘The last days of a famous mime’ is a short story that presents interpretative challenges. It hangs together as a text, but this coherence is minimal and has an important rhetorical effect that draws attention to the story’s literary meaning. This effect becomes the departure point for a linguistic analysis of the text, which aims to guide an interpretation of the story by focusing on the ways in which textual meanings are construed. Drawing on the systemic functional model of language, the text is analysed from the angles of cohesive harmony and theme. The analysis highlights a low degree of coherence as a central meaning, both at the level of discourse and within the fictional world. This finding leads to the interpretation of the text as a statement on the importance of social and emotional validation.

A critical approach to media discourse analysis sheds light on the way that individuals and institutions maintain certain ideologies in spite of the apparent neutrality of journalistic discourse. In media interviews, the interviewer can use pragmatic techniques to elicit agreement and maintain the question-answer format. This paper explores how metapragmatic acts (MPAs) and extended question sequences (EQSs) affect the interviewee’s responses in two television interviews concerning political issues in China. The aim of this paper is not to comment on the ideologies implicit in the discourse, but rather to exemplify the ways in which the aforementioned pragmatic techniques play a role in the media interview. Throughout this analysis, attention is paid to the interviewer’s questions and how the given responses are affected. I conclude that EQSs are more effective than MPAs, and that both are used by the interviewer to repair tacit political opinions.

Starting in 1948, Australia's Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) has continued to deliver language education to migrants for the purposes of settlement and attaining employment. Both in Australia and internationally, the AMEP and its related developments in English language education have had a profound impact on the teaching and learning of English as an Additional Language (EAL), particularly in terms of their contributions to the field of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), which became the theoretical underpinning of the AMEP curriculum in the early 1990s. However, it would seem that a quarter of a century later, SFG is missing in action. This paper traces SFG's presence in the AMEP through its inception in the Certificate in Spoken and Written English (CSWE) through various evolutions of the AMEP, and speculates on the implications of SFG's apparent absence in the AMEP today.