Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics

Book excerpt: This volume addresses the increasingly typical nature of text and discourse: 'hybridity'. In an SFL perspective, this means that the cultural and situational contexts that tend to activate meanings and wordings must also be seen as being 'hybrid', or as Hasan (2000) has more fittingly put it, 'permeable': "It is not simply that predetermined qualities of genres are being mixed, combined, hybridized: the fact of the matter is that by these devices people extend, elaborate and reclassify their discursive contexts. Derrida's celebrated claim that one cannot not mix genres should really be rephrased as contexts of life cannot but be permeable; the rest follows by the dialectic of language and discursive situation." This is indeed the main message, and mission, of the book, which focuses on hybridity/permeability within the social and cultural contexts in which discourse occurs and of discourse types (covering a wide range of genres, registers, text-types, etc.), but also hybridity within the stratum of lexicogrammar itself. The volume also addresses the implications of hybridity for education and the professions.