Systemic functional linguistics

Functions are taken to have left their mark on the structure and organisation of language at all levels, which is achieved via metafunctions.

Metafunction is uniquely defined in SFL as the "organisation of the functional framework around systems", i.e., choices.

Across his career he has probed the nature of language as a social semiotic system; that is, as a resource for meaning across the many and constantly changing contexts of human interaction.

In 2003, he published a paper setting out the accumulated principles of his theory, which arose as he engaged with many different language-related problems.

These principles, he wrote, "emerged as the by-product of those engagements as I struggled with particular problems",[3]: 1  as various as literary analysis and machine translation.

His theory and descriptions are based on these principles, on the basis that they are required to explain the complexity of human language.

"valeur") and of signs as terms in a system "showed up paradigmatic organization as the most abstract dimension of meaning".

[9] At that time, Halliday defined grammar as "that level of linguistic form at which operate closed systems".

In systems thinking, any delineated object of study is defined by its relations to other units postulated by the theory.

Such directionality is always only a property of particular implementations of the general notion and may be made for performance reasons in, for example, computational modelling.