Teacher Discussion Forums

hello! everyone,
i'm new here. i've read some books on grammatical metaphor recently. and i'm really interested in it. and now i wonder whether we can construct a model for the grammatical metaphor (i mean, just as what we do in genre analysis, we find the generic features and present the moves of certain genre which can be quite useful for reading and writing.) by this model we can solve the problem that in some translation software, translation is done word by word, and can't show the correct sentence meaning.

Is there anyone who is kind enough to tell me a forum to discuss systemic-functional linquistics? thanks!

I'd imagine that quite a lot has been or could be revealed (about grammatical metaphor) from e.g. examining corpus concordances for e.g. nominalizations. It seems a widespread phenomenon...the reason for this (by way of explaining what GM is for those who don't know) is that making a phrasing more "congruent" - 'closer to the state of affairs in the external world' - would result in an irritating long-windedness (to say nothing of the differing construal): compare 'The north emerges from every statistical comparison as poorer than the south' with 'Whenever people compare statistics about the north and south, they find that...' (from Geoff Thompson's Introducing Functional Grammar, Second Edition).

A link in Thompson's book:
http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/nlp/
('Mick's Homepage' at above link is also in T's book)

Don't know if you'll be able to find any very accessible/open or active discussion forums from those pages, though.

thank you very much!