Sistemical Functional Grammar (Halliday)

Language is a social phenomenon group of social meanings.

When people use language, their acts produce-construct meaning.

Meaning is built up through grammatical choices linguistics forms used in context

Each piece of language express more than one meaning:

-Language as a representation of the world.

-Language as interaction.

-Language as message.

The grammatical choices made by the speakers are constrained by the social context where language is used.

In SFG, context consist of 3 different elements:

-Field: the social activity being developed

-Tenor: participants with their roles and power relations

-Mode: the way language is used in that situation.

The combination of these three elements defines a register. A register is the immediate context (or situational context) where a sample of language is used.

Following Halliday (e.g. 1978), a natural relation is posited between the organization of language and the organization

of social context, built up around the notion of kinds of meaning.(…)Following Martin (1992), field is concerned with systems of activity, including descriptions of the participants, process, and circumstances these activities involve. ( …). Tenor is concerned with social relations, as these are enacted through the dimensions of power and solidarity. (…). Mode is concerned with semiotic distance, as this is affected by the various channels of communication through which we undertake activity(field) and simultaneously enact social relations (tenor).

The elements that go further above field, tenor and mode are prt of what SFL calls genre: they have to do with social regulations and culture.

The three elements building a register are enacted in language through 3 matafunctions. All three functions are projected upon each one of the clauses

FIELD Experiential function: the clause as a representation of the worl

TENOR Interpersonal function: the clause as a kind of social interaction

MODE Textual Function: the clause as a message

SFG prefers to work in terms of clauses instead of sentences. A clause is the smaller unit of language where all 3 metafunctions can be found and analysed.

A clause consist of a finite verb (process), its complements (participants) and its adjuncts (satellites, circumstances).

EXPERIENTIAL FUNCTION:

The experiential component serves to express our experience of the world that is around us and inside us.

Experiential meaning: expressing the CONTENT (the process and other phenomena of the external world as well as thoughts and feelings).

Clause represents experience.

INTERPERSONAL FUNCTION

Interpersonal meaning: Expressing relations among participants in the situation and the speaker’s own intrusion into it.

Clause as an exchange (of meaning).

The key elements for interpersonal meaning are:

-The subject

-The verb (finite)

-Mood and modality

TEXTUAL FUNCTION:

Clause represents a message. How clause is organized matters.

It is the function of creating text, or relating itself to the context – to the situation and to the preceding text.

The Textual function is the linguistic resource that lets Speakers create text.

Theme is a key element, on which the message is hinged.

Theme is defined as « the point of departure of the message … that which locates and orients the clause within its context ». (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:64)

Theme corresponds to the first element having a role in transitivity:a participant, a process, or a circumstance.

Most commonly, the Theme will conflate with the Subject and will have a Participant role in the transitivity.

Theme is said to be marked when it is not the Subject of the clause (ie Circumstance).