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This paper aims to elaborate Halliday's observation of "text as wording" alongside the already accepted view of "text as meaning" and, accordingly, to address two interrelated issues: (i) how morphemic options work for such grammatical units as words, groups / phrases, clauses, clause complexes and even text; and (ii) how they simultaneously create text wording apart from text meaning, the two being in complementarity, with wording as the main concern. The author first illustrates the grammatical and contextual functions morphemes serve for making text process as well as those units below. Next, it carries out a case study of a sample text to observe two aspects of the present issue: (i) the selections of relevant morphemic tense options, with a few lexical items, to construct their wording textures of discourse; and (ii) the underlying accumulations of identical categories into their expanding temporality domains on the one hand and the integrations and contractions into a meaning unit of the whole text on the other, both processes being visualised as two cones in opposite directions, with the two butts joint to form a spindle, a 3-dimensional model of text as "socio-semantic unit", a project to be further run.

This article makes a preliminary attempt to account for the stroke systems of Chinese characters in simplified regular script. The framework utilized is the three meta-functions in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The description observes the cases from the perspectives of the experiential, appraisal (aesthetic), and thematic semiosis of strokes and their constitutional segments to figure out the relevant systems: the line system and the point system. This process witnesses comparisons to seek, in brief though, the traces and origins of stroke development along evolution, and hence the straightening of lines and squaring of character formation. This is the first step towards a rank model of Chinese writing, the whole project of which will highlight a way to study other writing systems in the semiotic respect.

Systemic Functional Linguistics has experienced over 40 years of application to literary discourse analysis and gained considerable achievements, with particular reference to the ideational and interpersonal areas. Contrary to that situation is the textual area, which, except for cohesion, is much less explored in thematization and information. This paper aims to fill this gap. Taking the short narrative text Gehenna I investigate thematic and information creating patterns for their aesthetic effects. There exist types of unfolding routines in literary texts that are oriented towards stylistic goals. The observations manifest once again the power of SFL in its appliability.

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