Systemic functional grammar

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Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a grammar model developed by Michael Halliday — the most well-known component of a broad social semiotic approach to language called systemic-functional linguistics, originally articulated by Halliday in the 1960s.

Systemic-functional grammar is concerned primarily with the choices that are made available to speakers of a language by their grammatical systems. These choices are assumed to be meaningful and relate speakers' intentions to the concrete forms of a language. Meanings are typically divided into three broad areas, called metafunctions: the ideational, grammar for representing the world; the interpersonal, grammar for enacting social relationships (asking, asserting, ordering); and the textual, grammar for binding linguistic elements together into broader texts (via pronominalizations, grammatical topicalization, thematization, expressing the newsworthiness of information, etc.).

Systemic-functional grammar is still unusual in its commitment to dealing with all of these areas of meaning equally and within the grammatical system itself.

The theory sets out to explain how wordings make meanings. This is significantly different from Noam Chomsky's proposed question on grammar, namely "what is the finite rule system which generates all and only the grammatical sentences in a language?". Another way to understand the difference in concerns between functional and generative grammars is through Chomsky's claim that "linguistics is a sub-branch of psychology.". Halliday investigates linguistics as it were a sub-branch of sociology. SFG therefore pays much more attention to pragmatics and discourse semantics, at the expense of an easily computible formalism.

Systemic functional grammar has been used to derive further grammatical accounts —for example, the model has been used by Richard Hudson to develop word grammar.

See also

• Systemic linguistics

Other significant Systemic functional grammarians:

• Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen
• James R. Martin
• Geoff Thompson (linguist)
• Kristin Davidse
• Ángela Downing
• Philip Locke

Linguists also involved with the early development of the approach:

• Sidney Greenbaum
• Randolph Quirk

External links

• For more information on all aspects of systemic-functional grammar and systemic-functional linguistics, see the SFL web site at: Systemic functional grammar
• For a large bibliography containing the vast majority of systemic functional writings, see the bibliography site at: [1]
• Word grammarde:Systemisch-funktionale Grammatik

es:Gramática sistémico funcional pt:Gramática sistêmica-funcional