Systemic functional linguistics and clinical linguistics

Clinical linguistics has been described as '[t]he application of linguistic theories, methods and descriptive findings to the analysis of medical conditions or settings involving a disorder (or pathology) of language' (Crystal 2008: 80). This chapter first briefly describes the ways in which systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has been applied to various types of communication disorder, before going on to present a comparative critique of the contribution that SFL has made to understanding the nature of these disorders. The chapter then presents a critical comparative appraisal of current and potential application of SFL to intervention for communication disorders, and describes how the study of clinical conditions has challenged and informed the SFL approach.\nThe application of SFL to speech