AN INTRODUCTION TO SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR
Traditional grammar
1. Traditional school grammar is a classificatory grammar:
 assigning words to classes such as noun, verb, adjective, preposition etc.
 parsing or identifying "parts of speech"
 may include more ‘exotic’ categories like gerunds and participles, and the names
of different kinds of clause - co-ordinating and subordinating, indicative and
imperative etc.
 Also sentence patterns – Subject, Predicate, Direct or Indirect Object,
Complement, etc.
 "parts of speech' are defined semantically – E.g. 'a noun is the name of a person,
place or thing', 'a verb is a doing word' etc.
2. Traditional grammar - an attempt to prescribe the standard language form:
 often used by dominant social groups in England and elsewhere
 concepts of "correctness" and "good grammar" are not from features internal to
the language itself
 teaching of traditional grammar involved children learning rules of grammar
 often contrasts with the way most people actually use language
3. Some examples of prescriptive rules:
 A preposition is something you should never end a sentence with.
 It is quite wrong to carelessly split infinitives.
 And you should never begin a sentence with a conjunction.
 But who (else) begins sentences with conjunctions?
Functional grammar
1. Functional grammar is more sociological in orientation:
 concerned with understanding how the ways in which language is used for
different purposes
 different social situations shape its structure
2. Key argument of functional grammar - to understand linguistic meaning we have to
appreciate the function of items in a structure.
3. Functional analysis of the clause shows how the grammar realizes experiential (or
referential) meaning (or ideational metafunction according to Halliday)
4. Experiential metafunction:
 the meaning concerned with constructing reality
 as configurations of people, places, things, qualities
 the different circumstances of these configurations
5. There are other kinds of meaning operating in these (and all) clauses. For example,
supposing we restructure the clause above as follows:
6. Now the experiential meanings here are the same as in the previous version. But notice
that the orientation or point of departure of the clause is different. In the first version the
point of departure is the time (By 1500) - you are going to find out something about
1500. In the second version the point of departure is "they" - in this clause you are going
to find out something about "they".
7. The above differences are concerned with the organization of communication and are
part of the textual meaning of the clause. They are realized grammatically by the
Theme/Rheme system.
8. In English, the Theme is the first element in the clause and this is what provides the
orientation or point of departure for the clause. By changing the Theme we do not change
the experiential meaning of the clause but we do change the textual meaning i.e. the
arrangement of information.
9. There is a third type of meaning constructed in all clauses. This is the interpersonal
meaning:
 the meaning that reflects the nature of the interpersonal relationship among those
who are using the language
 relates to the interpersonal roles that are operating, for example is the speaker a
giver or a demander of information?
 Interpersonal roles, and hence interpersonal meanings, can change independently
of the experiential or textual meanings.
 The grammatical systems that realize interpersonal meanings are those of Mood
and Modality.
How does functional grammar relate to a functional model of language?
Communication planes: Language and social context.
1. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) the oral and written
texts we engage with and produce have their particular linguistic form because of the
social purposes they fulfil.
2. The focus is not on texts as decontextualized units of language but rather on the mutual
relationships between texts and the social practices where they occur.
3. The form of human language co-evolves with the meanings which in turn co-evolve
with the community's contexts of social interaction (Hasan, 1992:24).
4. SFL treats language and social context as complementary levels of semiosis, related by
the concept of realisation.
5. The relationship between language and social context has been represented using the
image of co-tangential circles as in the figure below (Halliday and Martin, 1993:25).
Language as the realisation of social context
6. This representation is intended to establish the semiotic system of language as the
realisation of the more abstract semiotic system of social context.
Levels of social context
1. The interpretation of social context then includes two communication planes, genre
(context of culture) and register (context of situation) (Martin, 1992: 495).
2. The context of culture can be thought of as deriving from a vast complex network of
all of the genres which make up a particular culture.
3. Genres are:
 staged, goal oriented social processes in which people engage as members of the
culture
 genres include all of those routines from everyday experience such as purchase of
goods (food, clothing etc), medical consultation, eating in a restaurant etc to the
genres of particular forms of social life including church services, TV interviews,
getting arrested etc.
 also include genres which are valued in schooling – classroom lessons (and
lectures). groupwork, tutorials, etc.
 written genres - narratives, reports, explanations, procedures, expositions, etc.
4. Genres:
 have their own distinctive structures (or routinized stages) because of the social
purposes they fulfil in the culture
 occur in particular situation types
 characteristics of situation type influence the forms of language that realize the
genre
5. Context of situation (register) is the second aspect of social context that influences the
linguistic realization of the genre
6. The context of situation of a text has been theorised by Halliday (Halliday and Hasan,
1985:12) in terms of the contextual variables of Field, Tenor and Mode.
7. FIELD of discourse refers to:
 what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking place?
 what is the activity that the participants are engaged in (where language is an
essential component)?
8. TENOR of discourse refers to:
 who is taking part?
 the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles
 what kinds of role relationships are there among the participants, including
permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another


types of speech role that they are taking on in the dialogue
whole cluster of socially significant relationships in which they are involved
9. MODE of discourse refers to:
 what part the language is playing
 what the participants are expecting the language to do for them in that situation
 the symbolic organisation of the text, the status that it has, and its function in the
context
 the channel (is it spoken or written or some combination of the two?)
 the rhetorical mode i.e. what is being achieved by the text in terms of such
categories as persuasive, expository, didactic, etc. (Halliday and Hasan, 1985:12)
The notion of Field has been further elaborated by Martin (1992:292) defining Fields as
"sets of activity sequences oriented to some global institutional purpose" - and citing
examples such as linguistics, tennis, cooking, wine making, gardening etc. These
activities involve participants, processes and attendant circumstances and are temporally
and/or consequentially linked to form sequences (Martin, 1992:536-42).
Tenor is concerned with the semiotics of relationships, mediating these along the
dimensions of status, contact and affect (Martin, 1992:523-525). Status refers to the
relative position of the participants in the social hierarchy of a culture while contact refers
to their degree of institutional involvement with each other. Affect addresses Halliday's
(1978:33) notion of the "degree of emotional charge" in the relationship between
participants.
Mode is discussed by Hasan (Halliday and Hasan, 1985:58) under three sub-headings.
The first is the extent to which the language is constitutive of, or ancillary to the social
process in which it functions. The second is the extent to which the form of language
used incorporates (the possibility of) feedback from the addressee. This variation is
referred to as a continuum from spoken to written medium. Written medium is usually
associated with the constitutive role of language, while spoken medium is associated with
both constitutive and ancillary. Hasan's third sub-heading is channel - the modality
through which one comes in contact with the message, which is referred to as the phonic
channel and the graphic channel. It is possible for medium and channel to be congruent,
ie. spoken/phonic, written/graphic, but to the extent that one writes using the same
grammatical form as when one speaks, the channel may be graphic but the medium more
spoken. Similarly, it is possible to speak using the grammatical constructions more
typical of written text, so that the channel is phonic but the medium is written.
In Martin's (1992) account, text structure is generated at the level of genre and, as part of
the realisation process, generic choices pre-select Field, Mode and Tenor options
associated with particular elements of text structure. The interpretation of context then
includes two communication planes, genre (context of culture) and register (context of
situation), with register functioning as the expression form of genre, at the same time as
language functions as the expression form of register. Martin (1992:495) schematises this
three plane model as shown below:
Levels of language
Language bridges from the cultural meanings of social context (the social hierarchies and
role relationships, the institutional activities, and the related distribution of language use
within these) to sound or writing. It does this by moving from higher orders of abstraction
to lower ones. These orders of abstraction are organised into three levels or strata semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology (or graphology).
Semantics is the interface between language and context of situation (register). Semantics
is therefore concerned with the meanings that are involved with the three situational
variables Field, Tenor and Mode. Ideational meanings realise Field, interpersonal
meanings realise Tenor and textual meanings realise Mode. Lexicogrammar is a resource
for wording meanings, ie. realising them as configurations of lexical and grammatical
items. It follows then, that lexicogrammar is characterised by the same kind of
metafunctional diversification discussed above. This takes us back to our discussion in
section three where we showed that functional grammar included three separate analyses,
each describing the construction of one of three different kinds of meaning which all
operate simultaneously in each clause.
Ideational (experiential and logical) meanings construing Field are realised
lexicogrammatically by the system of Transitivity. This system interprets and represents
our experience of phenomena in the world and in our consciousness by modelling
experiential meanings in terms of participants, processes and circumstances. Resources
for chaining clauses into clause complexes, and for serialising time by means of tense,
address logical meanings.
Interpersonal meanings are realised lexicogrammatically by systems of Mood and
Modality and by the selection of attitudinal lexis. The Mood system is the central
resource establishing and maintaining an ongoing exchange between interactants by
assuming and assigning speech roles such as giving or demanding goods and services or
information. Thus the giving of information or goods and services is grammaticalised as
declaratives, questions are grammaticalised as interrogatives and commands as
imperatives. Modality is the resource concerned with the domain of the negotiation of the
proposition or proposal between the categorical extremes of positive or negative. The
negotiation may be in terms of probability, usuality, obligation or inclination.
Textual meanings are concerned with the ongoing orchestration of interpersonal and
ideational information as text in context. Lexicogrammatically textual meanings are
realised by systems of Theme and Information. Theme selections establish the orientation
or angle on the interpersonal and ideational concerns of the clause whereas Information
organises the informational status or relative newsworthiness of these concerns.
The metafunctions permeating register at the level of social context and also the
discourse semantic and lexicogrammatical levels of language, are simultaneous and
complementary systems. In the clause each metafunctional resource (Transitivity, Theme
and Mood) generates one layer of structuring, but the layers are simultaneous as shown
below:
Phonology is a resource for realising abstract wordings as sound and includes intonation,
rhythm and syllabic and phonemic articulation. Alternatively this level may be the
graphological system of a language. In general, the system of phonology is related in an
arbitrary or purely conventional manner to the lexicogrammar. In this course there will
not be time to study the system of phonology/graphology.
It is not viable to accept the functional model of language as described in English K-6
and reject functional grammar, because only functional grammar provides a description
of how the structure of English relates to the situational variables (Field, Tenor and
Mode) of the social context in which the language is functioning! Functional grammar is
uniquely productive as an educational resource for teaching how the grammatical form of
language is structured to achieve purposes in a variety of social contexts.