This article offers a close reading of two texts produced at a time of crisis on a South African campus. The framework used is that of Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, which enables us to analyse how the modes of discourse create their own reading contexts, while influencing, and being influenced by, the context of situation. In addition, Halliday's concept of 'antilanguage' is used to show how the second text creates, through language, a new context for interaction and constructs an opposing world-view to that of the first text.
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