Preliminaries: Hybridity & Systemic Functional Linguistics

The chapter begins with a discussion of the notion of hybridity and SFL’s potential relationship to the concept. It then moves to the rationale for the volume and its ‘history’, so to speak, explaining how it was firstly a recent international conference in Naples at the end of 2009, dedicated to the theme of ‘Genre(s) on the Move: Hybridization and Discourse Change in Specialized Communication’, that can actually be said to have sowed the seeds of the projects that then bred this book. At that conference, Ruqaiya Hasan was cited by Sarangi, with the following beguiling words: 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. (Hasan 2000:44) It was indeed Sarangi’s quote from Hasan’s paper which ‘provoked’ the theme of the Bertinoro conference and the conference in turn spawned the extant volume, the contents of both of which, however, quickly moved beyond addressing solely the implications of our own promptings, i.e., beyond Hasan’s model of context and language as mutually permeable via instances of text. As we explain, one might deduce that the time for speaking exclusively and directly to the topic of ‘permeable contexts and hybrid discourses’ – even in SFL circles – had not yet come, is not quite ripe, and ‘that would be a perfectly reasonable conclusion’ (Robin Fawcett p.c.); nonetheless, it we feel this is not the whole story. We suggest one might also, less categorically and more positively perhaps, infer that the Classifier ‘hybrid’ in our conference title acted happily as a stimulant, a catalyst for articulating more extensive ideas for theorising and investigating concrete instances of hybridity in a wider SFL perspective. The metaphor of the dice with reference to hybridity is also discussed (see volume cover image) and the structure and contents of the volume briefly illuminated.