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This special issue of the International Journal of Language Studies comprises a selection of papers presented during the 41st International Systemic Functional Congress and X Latin-American Systemic Functional Congress, held in Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina, in April 2014. The theme of the conference was "Systemic Functional Linguistics and Language Education: Novel applications of well-established and evolving lines of enquiry to language education theory and practice". Some of the main fields of the congress were language education and language in education, child language development, language typology, register and genre theory, appraisal theory, discourse analysis, multimodality and multimodal literacy, language and knowledge, and SFL and other language theories. The papers presented in this special issue belong to the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics and (Critical) Discourse Analysis.

This article deals with the pedagogical discourse of human rights violations in primary and secondary History textbooks. Our aim is to explore the intermodal construction (visual-verbal) of the unit composed by 'image + caption' as a way of building evidentiality in the historical discourse. The theoretical and methodological approach is based on the sociosemiotic and critical perspective of intersubjectivity informed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), Painter, Martin and Unsworth (2013), Martin and White (2005) and Oteiza and Pinuer (2012). Preliminary findings show that visual modes, particularly photographs, as primary sources, constructed in an intermodal manner with the verbal mode in Chilean History textbooks, privilege a vision in which human rights violations are especially treated from a discourse of denunciation, commemoration and of victimization that is based on the evidence collected in the official reports of human rights violations committed during Pinochet's dictatorship (Rettig Report, 1991; Valech Reports 2004).

This study reports a critical discourse analysis of the representation of gender roles and queer sexuality in the film Brokeback Mountain (2005). Semiotic choices were analyzed in six film scenes in terms of categories from the Systemic-Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), the framework for the representation of social actors (van Leeuwen, 2008) and the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). The semiotic choices analyzed, such as types of processes used in the characters' speech, indicate that Ennis del Mar, who plays the role of the penetrator (top), embodies a hegemonic ideal of masculinity, whereas Jack, who plays the role of the penetrated (bottom), embodies certain aspects often associated to femininity. This binary relationship between the characters therefore produces a heteronormative view of male gay sexuality. In addition, the use of indirect references to gay sex, and personal and demonstrative pronouns produce an effect of "the unspeakable" regarding the main characters' homoerotic relationship in accordance to the context in which the narrative is framed - the conservative, homophobic North-American southern society in the 1960's. Brokeback Mountain thus represents the (still) taboo nature of male homosexual love and desire in many contemporary societies.

Several researchers in language studies have recently looked at multimodal aspects in order to account for the integration of different semiotic resources in meaning-making processes. As applied linguists, concerned with this integration, we look at how immigrant identities are verbally and visually represented in different media. For the verbal analysis we draw on systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis to analyse 'in-group'/'outgroup' representation as well as patterns of processes and participants. Our analysis of images is based on the grammar of visual design, more specifically on the representational, interactive and compositional functions. These aligned theoretical perspectives allow for the investigation of the linguistic instantiations in the analyzed texts as well as the visual resources, with a focus on a critical stance. Results suggest that there are still biased representations on specific immigrant identities, especially when these identities are portrayed in vulnerable situations.

Tonic prominence marks the information the speaker has decided to highlight or to make the focus of information. As it is, this decision concerns the speaker and it is, to a certain degree, more or less conscious and intentional. For Brazil et al. making a word prominent constitutes a meaningful selection. They assert that "prominence reflects the speaker's judgement that the word in question contains matter which, at this time and in this context, will be informing" (Brazil et al., 1980:41; emphasis original). In its unmarked form, the tonic syllable is most frequently located within the last lexical item in a tone unit, a fact which, according to Tench (1996) or Halliday (1967), is of immense relevance for the structure of the information unit. In discourses in which both the content and characters involved acquire political relevance, forms of (in)direct message take a particular interest. According to van Dijk (1997) (political) discourse is understood as a form of action which is frequently intentional, controlled and directed at a specific goal. Recognising discourse as a form of action allows us to associate it with purposes directly related to instances of power abuse. For present purposes, we will observe how the location of the tonic syllable (Tonicity) contributes to the formation of a manipulative and persuasive discourse (de-)emphasising appraised items as best fits the speaker's purpose. We will then study the function of the nuclear tone in a speech delivered by Obama while informing about Bin Laden's death. The speech has been divided into tone units and prominent syllables have been identified including the tonic ones. Results show that the allocation of tonic prominence bears a close connection with those items that are explicitly evaluative by making them either prominent or tonic prominent and by making them non-prominent when interactional conditions were purposefully set. Besides, it was found out that, in relation to evoked attitude, intonation contributed to further extend the prosodies of affect and judgement in opposing senses: towards the positive end of affect and judgement when referring to the US and towards the negative end when referring to al-Qaeda. That is, they do this mainly by setting up two streams of judgement in the following relation: ideational tokens are mainly used to deploy negative judgements of propriety and veracity (social sanction) to trigger negative affectual responses of insecurity and unhappiness respectively. In addition, they are also used to deploy positive judgements of tenacity or veracity to trigger positive affectual responses of security and satisfaction.

Genres are constituted by stages that fulfil different functions within the whole text and each stage has particular realizations at the lexico-grammatical and semantic strata in relation to that function. Genre studies describe these patterns with little or no reference to their realization at the level of phonology. On the other hand, phonological studies rarely refer to communicative functions in terms of linguistic genres. There are studies that refer to different choices in tonality and tonicity which affect stretches of discourse larger than the tone unit. Some of these studies relate intonation choices to the textual structure positing the notion of paratone. The aim of this paper is to enquire whether it is possible to find correlations between phonological realizations and specific generic functions in different stages of the discourse. It explores the relationship between prosodic and generic configurations in general interest interviews from a BBC programme. The corpus is analysed showing generic configurations and both auditory and instrumental analysis are used for the phonological study. The preliminary conclusions reached show that intonation choices tend to have a role in signalling textual and interpersonal meanings within generic structures together with, and independently from, lexico-grammatical choices.

This paper investigates how rape victims and perpetrators are portrayed in Pakistani news reporting, with the assumption that the linguistic choices which are significant to construct any discourses within a coherent framework reflect the underlying ideology of the journalists. From the perspective of gender and language, an issue worth exploring is how women's portrayal in the media construes gender inequality and sexual violence. A discourse analysis using transitivity, the cline of dynamism and naming analysis explores the patterning of roles that newspaper writers assign to the participants in a corpus of newspaper reports of rape in Pakistan. Clear differences in reporting between two newspapers are revealed, with one focusing more on the crime and the other on the participants.