Meaning matters: a short history of systemic functional linguistics

Abstract

This paper presents a brief history of systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL), taking Halliday's 1961 WORD paper, ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’, as point of departure. It outlines the key strands of thought which have informed the development of SFL, focusing on (i) why it is referred to as systemic, as functional and as systemic functional, (ii) how it developed this orientation with reference to phonology, lexicogrammar and discourse semantics and (iii) how it has extended this perspective to models of context (register and genre) and multimodality (taking into consideration modalities of communication beyond language). The paper ends with a brief note on recent developments and a comment on the dialectic of theory and practice through which SFL positions itself as an appliable linguistics.

Keywords:

• Systemic Functional Linguistics
• stratification
• metafunction
• axis
• context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Interestingly, Halliday does not use this reactance to distinguish ‘affectum’ from ‘effectum’ function structures in his description of English, although it is part of the motivation for his paradigmatic distinction between creative and dispositive types of material process (both involving a generalized Goal function); more delicate function structures reflecting this creative/dispositive opposition would of course be possible.

2. Unless we mean something like ‘kicked the goal post’.

3. The space enclosed by the curved lines in Figure 9 in the smallest circle (expression form) has no significance; it arises simply from an only partly successful attempt in the image to give more equal weight (i.e. area) to each metafunction as we move from one stratum to the next.

4. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 29) actually refer to a diagram of this kind as an outline of English semantics, with cohesion positioned alongside familiar transitivity, mood and theme systems. I take this simply as an attempt by Halliday to offer readers a way of interpreting his rich descriptions during a McCarthyist phase of linguistics when work outside of Chomsky's formalization of American structuralist immediate constituent analysis was proscribed. By the 1980s comparable function/rank matrices are regularly referred to as maps of grammatical, not semantic resources.

5. Halliday (1961), footnote 13, clarifies that the term context is preferred in the Figure 1 model because the term semantics is usually understood in terms of attempts to relate linguistic forms to concepts (to relate observables to unobservables in other words), whereas work on context focuses attention on the relation of linguistic form to abstractions from extralinguistic observables.