Systemic functional grammar
Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a form of grammatical description originated by Michael Halliday.
[1] It is part of a social semiotic approach to language called systemic functional linguistics.
"[3] Halliday describes his grammar as built on the work of Saussure, Louis Hjelmslev,[4] Malinowski, J.R. Firth, and the Prague school linguists.
[6] From his studies in China, he lists Luo Changpei and Wang Li as two scholars from whom he gained "new and exciting insights into language".
From Wang Li he learnt "many things, including research methods in dialectology, the semantic basis of grammar, and the history of linguistics in China".
[6] Some interrelated key terms underpin Halliday's approach to grammar, which forms part of his account of how language works.
The experiential function refers to the grammatical resources involved in construing the flux of experience through the unit of the clause.
The ideational metafunction reflects the contextual value of field, that is, the nature of the social process in which the language is implicated.
Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar (in the third edition, with revisions by Christian Matthiessen)[15] sets out the description of these grammatical systems.
Relative social status asks whether they are equal in terms of power and knowledge on a subject, for example, the relationship between a mother and child would be considered unequal.
Spontaneity is determined through a focus on lexical density, grammatical complexity, coordination (how clauses are linked together) and the use of nominal groups.
Michael Halliday (1973) outlined seven functions of language with regard to the grammar used by children:[25] Halliday's theory sets out to explain how spoken and written texts construe meanings and how the resources of language are organised in open systems and functionally bound to meanings.
It is a radically different theory of language from others which explore less abstract strata as autonomous systems, the most notable being Noam Chomsky's.
For example, it does not try to address Chomsky's thesis that there is a "finite rule system which generates all and only the grammatical sentences in a language".
[citation needed] Halliday's theory encourages a more open approach to the definition of language as a resource; rather than focus on grammaticality as such, a systemic functional grammatical treatment focuses instead on the relative frequencies of choices made in uses of language and assumes that these relative frequencies reflect the probability that particular paths through the available resources will be chosen rather than others.
