Alice Caffarel

Alice Marie-Claude Caffarel-Cayron (born 30 June 1961) is a French-Australian linguist. She is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Caffarel is recognized for the development of a Systemic Functional Grammar of French which has been applied in the teaching of the French language, Discourse analysis and Stylistics at the University of Sydney. Caffarel is recognised as an expert in the field of French Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Caffarel was born in Bordeaux, France in 1961 and moved to Australia in 1983. She began her undergraduate studies in Linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1987 and graduated in 1991 with First Class Honours. Her thesis research on the semantics of French tense was published in 1992. She completed a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1996. Her PhD thesis was a prolegomena to a Systemic Functional grammar of French. She served as an associate lecturer at the University of Sydney in 1996, which was then was converted into a tenured full-time lecturing position in 1998. In 1996 and 1999 Caffarel co-organized the first and second Systemic Functional Typology/Topology Workshops with Professor J.R. Martin. Papers from these workshops were compiled into a volume (published December 2004) which she co-edited with J.R. Martin and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen (Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University). In 2003, Caffarel was awarded a Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Sydney. Since joining the French Studies Department in 1996, Caffarel has expanded the linguistic curriculum and taught a number of linguistic units on language development, language teaching methodology, functional grammar, discourse analysis, ideology in news, and stylistics. She became Chair of the French Studies Department at the University of Sydney in 2009 until mid-2011. In addition to her work in expanding the linguistic curriculum in the Department of French Studies, Caffarel has published a number of books and book chapters on French grammar.