This book is intended as a Festschrift to honour the work of David Banks, Emeritus Professor of the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France. The founder and former President of the Association Française de Linguistique Systémique Fonctionnelle, David Banks has been extremely active in bringing together linguists from different theoretical backgrounds in the study of both English and French. The volume includes papers in the three main fields in which he has published: namely, scientific writing, language change and systemic functional linguistics (SFL).