This volume addresses the increasingly typical nature of text and discourse: 'hybridity'. In an SFL perspective, this means that the cultural and situational contexts that tend to activate meanings and wordings must also be seen as being 'hybrid', or as Hasan (2000) has more fittingly put it, 'permeable': "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." This is indeed the main message, and mission, of the book, which focuses on hybridity/permeability within the social and cultural contexts in which discourse occurs and of discourse types (covering a wide range of genres, registers, text-types, etc.), but also hybridity within the stratum of lexicogrammar itself. The volume also addresses the implications of hybridity for education and the professions.
Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Bologna, Italy, where she coordinates the English Language Studies Program. Paul Bayley is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna. He is coordinator of the BA programme in International Relations and Diplomatic Affairs and head of teaching and learning activities at the Bologna University Language Centre.

Paul Bayley

Donna R. Miller