One of many natural sign languages in use around the world, British Sign Language (BSL) operates as a fully-fledged semiotic system in the visual-spatial modality, through the simultaneous use of embodied articulators. Filling a gap in current research, this book investigates visual-spatial communications from a functional perspective.
Presenting a description and analysis of BSL from the perspective of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, Luke A. Rudge explores how BSL users make meaning from three different yet interrelated perspectives:
- How exchanges of information are managed at a social level (the interpersonal metafunction)
- How experience is encoded in the language (the experiential metafunction)
- How communications are organised into coherent parts and wholes (the textual metafunction)
Examining these perspectives both separately and together, Exploring British Sign Language via Systemic Functional Linguistics places them within the context of current observations in sign linguistics, providing a complementary viewpoint on how visual-spatial communications may be understood as social semiosis.

A truly impressive contribution to an unfortunately neglected field of study, this volume provides insight into British Sign Language (BSL) from the perspective of functional linguistics. It represents the first major publication to offer a functional description of BSL within Systemic Functional Linguistics. Not only does it provide an important foundation for future work on BSL but also an opening on broader linguistic typological issues and extensions to existing linguistic theory. This is a very important volume for all interested in sign languages and perhaps even more so for anyone working with modes of expression very broadly, including embodied communication.

An important and timely analysis of signed languages, especially with respect to multi-channel simultaneity. The systemic functional grammar framework used in this volume offers a coherent alternative to formal approaches in sign linguistics and complements recent neo-Peircean approaches to the semiotics of multi-modality in all languages, signed or spoken.

Luke A. Rudge is a Visiting Fellow of the Bristol Centre for Linguistics at the University of the West of England, UK.