The highlight of the linguistics conference calendar is the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress, or ISFC. This year the Congress was held at Boston College, Boston USA with multiple sessions running over five full days, as well as a Pre-Congress Institute for workshops.
Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) was represented in 23 different papers and colloquia from 39 different scholars. Five of these scholars are from the University of Sydney and include LCT Centre Deputy Director Professor James R Martin giving the final plenary session. LCT was shown to be relevant a wide range of subjects covered by linguists, such as education, law, and politeness in social media.
LCT was also represented at the Pre-Congress Institute, with a full workshop attendance of over 30 people of diverse backgrounds and ability. Professor Karl Maton, head of the LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building, also ran 12 individual supervisions with scholars and postgraduate students from around the world. LCT is well-represented in places such as China, South Africa, Australia and Scandinavia, but it relatively new to the USA. “It is the first time anything like this kind of sociology has emerged here,” writes Professor Maton. From this conference, we look forward to much more research from the USA.