In education research 'complexity' is often viewed cognitively as a mental attribute and so the complexity of knowledge practices themselves remains underexplored. Legitimation Code Theory conceptualizes such complexity as 'semantic density', which describes how meanings are condensed and interrelated within knowledge practices. This concept is becoming widely enacted in education as a means of identifying and teaching highly-valued practices. As yet, how 'semantic density' could be enacted to analyse the discourse of actors remains uncertain. This paper is the first of two articles that introduce a means of enacting the concept in analysis of English discourse. Together they offer a 'translation device' that explores discourse for signs of the complexity of the knowledge being expressed. This first paper introduces tools for exploring how the wording used by actors realizes different strengths of 'epistemic-semantic density', where meanings are empirical descriptions or formal definitions. It provides typologies for identifying different kinds of wording and describes how these types manifest different degrees of complexity. Two contrasting examples, from a secondary school History classroom and a scientific research article, are analysed to illustrate the insights into complexity offered by these tools. In the second paper we build on these ideas with tools for analysing how words are combined to generate different degrees of increasing complexity, to enable a fuller understanding of knowledge-building.

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LSF y TCL sobre educación y conocimiento Número especial ONOMÁZEIN-Número Especial LSF y TCL sobre educación y conocimiento:-226 Y. J. Doran The role of mathematics in physics: Building knowledge and describing the empirical world 210 This paper considers why mathematics is used in physics. It traces the use of mathematics in physics through primary school, junior high school and senior high school in NSW, Australia, considering its role from the point of view of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory. To understand the development of mathematics, two genres that play differing roles in the discipline of physics are introduced: 'derivation' and 'quantification'. Through an analysis using the concepts of semantic density and semantic gravity from Legitimation Code Theory, these genres are shown to aid physics in developing new knowledge and linking its theory to the empirical world. This paper contributes to the growing body of research considering forms of knowledge in academic disciplines and the role of non-linguistic semiotic resources in organizing this knowledge.

This article considers the role of images in physics. Utilizing the Systemic Functional Linguistic dimension of field it shows that diagrams that present large classification and composition taxonomies as well as long sequences of activities can be overlaid upon graphs that show arrays of ordered data. Through an analysis using the concepts of semantic density and semantic gravity from Legitimation Code Theory, it is argued that this allows images to present large degrees of meaning in a single snapshot whilst also linking abstracted theory to specific instances of data. That is, the analysis shows that images play a significant role in developing technical physics knowledge through abstractions away from the empirical world. This article contributes to the growing body of research focusing on the structuring of knowledge and the non-linguistic semiotic resources used to organize it.

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