A Very Brief Introduction to Systemic Functional Grammar/Linguistics

When you're approaching any analysis of language, it’s usually necessary and useful to have a theoretical framework in mind. There are myriad theories of language, but one of the most important to contemporary linguistics is M.A.K. Halliday and Christian Matthiessen’s theory of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), which has contributed to the development of the linguistic subfield Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Halliday and Matthiessen’s seminal work Introduction to Systemic Functional Grammar, first published in 1985 and now in its 4th edition, is notoriously dense and difficult to understand. This obscurity has prompted countless academics to attempt to explain SFG/L in their own (sometimes even more complex) words, in books, online college course resources, blog posts, and other formats. These sources are helpful and tend to reflect the subject accurately and concisely, but in this post I’m going to take a stab at illustrating (hopefully in less confusing terms) just a few aspects of it that are relevant to my project.

I’ll start with the name, which can seem a bit intimidating at first. The “systemic” part of SFG/L refers to the perspective that language is “a network of systems.” As the word “network” suggests, these systems are interconnected, and they each represent a set of choices for meaning making. Choice is probably the word that best captures the overall approach to language in SFG/L because, instead of treating actual instances of language use as variations on the rules of an a priori structure, SFG/L considers them as realizations of a system’s semiotic potential. This is where the “functional” part of the theory’s name comes in: describing a speaker/writer’s linguistic choices necessitates a view of language as a phenomenon performing a social function, rather than the traditional perspective that linguistic structures can be described in a vacuum, without considering context.

As Moses Ayoola explains, SFG “takes the resource perspective rather than the rule perspective,” merging structural linguistics with sociolinguistics and providing a useful framework for describing symbolic/linguistic interactions in society. SFG/L divides the semantic function of language into three distinct but simultaneous metafunctions (Ideational/Experiential, Interpersonal, Textual), each of which corresponds to a grammatical system (Process Type, Mood, Theme, respectively).

 

System Categories Organized by SFG Metafunction (Source)

Although the three metafunctions can be considered together - they are, after all, simultaneous and descriptive of language’s role in society - the Interpersonal metafunction is commonly used in isolation as an analytical framework in contemporary sociolinguistics because of its primary focus on describing certain highly relevant aspects of the ways in which information is exchanged among people and groups. Therefore, I have chosen to approach my own research on informal gender discourse using an Interpersonal metafunctional lens. Doing this allows me to describe the types of speech functions being utilized by the Twitter community, as well as the mood and modal commitment (certainty, enthusiasm, etc.) being reflected in their discussions on issues related to gender. In other words, this theoretical framework gives me the tools to understand and describe how the linguistic choices writers are making function within a certain context.

Hierarchy of Mood in SFG (Source)