Louise Ravelli

Louise Jane Ravelli (born 29 July 1963) is an Australian linguist. She is a professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research expertise includes multimodal communication, museum communication, discourse analysis, and systemic functional grammar, using the frameworks of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Social Semiotics, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis.

Ravelli has authored a number of books in linguistics, multimodality, and museum studies, including Multimodality in the Built Environment: Spatial Discourse Analysis (with Robert McMurtrie, 2016), and Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks (2006).

Ravelli serves as an editor for the journal Visual Communication.

Contributions to linguistics Ravelli has contributed to academic writing, museum communication, and multimodality, especially spatial discourse analysis. She also contributed to early research on grammatical metaphor, for example her 1988 book chapter, Grammatical metaphor: An initial analysis in the book Pragmatics, Discourse and Text: Some systemically-inspired approaches.

Her work on academic writing includes research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant titled Writing in the Academy: The practice-based thesis as an evolving genre (2008-2012, with Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield).

Awards and distinctions

University of Birmingham/Collins COBUILD Scholarship for Postgraduate Research (1986–1987)

Key publications

Ravelli, L. (2006). Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. London and New York: Routledge. Ravelli, L. (1988). Grammatical metaphor: an initial analysis, in E. Steiner; R. Veltman R (Eds). Pragmatics, Discourse and Text: Some systemically-inspired approaches, London: Pinter, pp. 133 – 147. VandenBergen, A; Taverniers, M; Ravelli, L. (Eds). (2003). Grammatical metaphor: views from systemic functional linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ravelli, L. (1999). Getting started with functional analysis of texts, in L. Unsworth (Ed). Researching language in schools and communities. London: Cassell, pp. 27–64. Ravelli, L. (2003). Renewal of connection: integrating theory and practice in an understanding of grammatical metaphor. In AM Simon-Vandenbergen, M. Taverniers, and L. Ravelli (Eds) Grammatical metaphor: views from systemic functional linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 37–64.