Professor in linguistics and media communication, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. Associate professor in English linguistics in the Universitiy of Venice 1994-2005. Ph. D., University of Sydney, 1985; supervised by Prof. M. A. K. Halliday. Previous teaching positions held at Lingnan University, Murdoch University, University of Sydney, Universities of Bologna, Padua, and Verona. Research interests: functional grammar and semantics, discourse analysis, semiotics, educational linguistics, language development, social theory, situated cognition, multimodal/multimedia text analysis and information technology. Involved in various international research projects on (i) interpersonal grammar; (ii) multimodal discourse analysis and multimodal corpora in an IT environment; (iii) ape language research. Books published: Social Semiotics as Praxis (Minnesota, 1991), Re-reading Saussure (Routledge, 1997), Discussing Conversation Analysis: The work of Emanuel A. Schegloff (ed., Benjamins, 2003), Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz (ed., Benjamins, 2003), Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Body: An ecosocial semiotic theory (Continuum, 2004), Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-other dynamics as a complex system (Continuum, 2004), Multimodal Transcription and Multimodal Text Analysis (with Anthony Baldry) (Equinox, 2006) plus articles, book chapters.