16 March 2016

Arianna Maiorani (Loughborough University, UK)

Working towards new horizons: FG interdisciplinary applications from visual dynamicity to movement meaning making processes

This seminar will cover a new area of interdisciplinary research that involves the use of my Functional Grammar of Movement and is being developed through an interdisciplinary research project with Healthcare Engineering and Computer Science.
My initial questions when working on the idea of a description of the semiotics of dance movement were principally related to the interpretation of specific choreographic creations. However, the research project in which I am currently involved promises to open much larger horizons for new directions of theoretical research as well as applications, thus once more highlighting the fantastic flexibility and adaptability of the Halliday’s Functional Grammar. The seminar will also address some of my previous research in relation to space as a semiotic dimension which informed the creation of the Functional Grammar of Dance, and it will present some future and very promising developments of the current research.

Arianna Maiorani is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of the Arts, English and Drama of Loughborough University. A specialist in SFL and Multimodality, she focuses on the study of contemporary forms of communication through the SFL framework. Her most recent publications include Multimodal Epistemologies (Routledge 2014) edited with Christine Christie and Meaning Making in Text (Palgrave 2015) edited with Sonja Starc and Carys Jones.