Systemic functional grammar

The Systemic Functional Grammar is a grammatical model developed by Michael Halliday. It is a functional orientation, so he understands that the form of natural language is ultimately given by being a communicative tool.

This theory considers language as a system of available options, of which each phrase or phrase is a set of resulting options (structure). Hence the "systemic" of its name: the objective of the theory is to reconstruct the system of options available from the statements already emitted by the speakers of a language (that is, the structure).

This model has been used by Richard Hudson to develop Word Grammar.

Units of Grammar

The system is updated through texts (both written and oral). These are the unit through which the analysis and description of the system is carried out. A text is a semantic unit built from the system of options that is characterized by being coherent, cohesive and having a meaning.

Each text is supposed to be coherent to the communicative context in which it is presented. This rescues the idea that the linguistic statements of a certain individual are conditioned by the social context in which they are made. This adaptation of the text to the communicative context is called registration.

The registry has three aspects:

• Field: determined by the social context in which the text arises. (A school class, conversation with friends, etc.)
• Tenor: determined by the formality of communicative exchange and by the relationship that its participants maintain.
• Mode: determined by the resources required for the informative transmission: vocabulary, style, form and means of expression, etc.

These three aspects of the registry are reflected in units smaller than the text called clauses. A clause is a predicative structure on which the functions of the language are projected. From a formal perspective, the structure formed by a verb, its arguments and its circumstantial attachments can be considered a clause.

Language metafunctions

The production of texts is conditioned to the properties of the field, the tenor and the mode, and to the way in which these aspects are related to the primary functions of the language:

• Ideational target: Through this the speakers interpret and organize their experience of the real world, establish logical relationships and form their vision of the world.

• Interpersonal Metafunction: This establishes and maintains social relations, communicative roles, social groups, and consolidates the identity of the speakers.

• Textual impact: This function allows speakers to create texts appropriately and relevantly, which are the basic unit of any communicative process of transmission of meaning.

As already said, these functions are projected into the clause. This is accomplished through three systems: the transitivity system, the mood system, and the textual system.

The model

Functional lexical grammar rescues the structuralist idea of linguistic levels or strata. But, as for the language system, unlike other semiotic systems, it has a tri-state structure, where the content plane is subdivided into two levels.

• The first stratum is semantic and is determined by the three functions of language.
• The second stratum is lexico-gramtical. It realizes the meanings given at the top level in phenological, morphological and syntactic units.
  • The structure of the Léxico-gramtical stratum is organized in sublevels.
  • Clause - voluntary Group / Complex Frase
  • Groups / Frase - voluntary Complex word
  • Words - 2005 Complex morphema
  • Morphemas
• The third stratum is the phenographological, corresponding to the plane of the expression of the language system.

Language strata or levels

The structure of the language is directly related to its functions. The text is a unit that belongs to semantics –which is manifested through the text– but that is structured by means of lexical-grammatical resources that in turn are articulated with phonemes.

Contributions of systemic-functional grammar to teaching

Users configure the use of language according to the context.

Based on the founding text of textual grammar, Cohesion in English (1976) by Halliday and Hasan, other theoretical approaches -communicational, discursive, cultural, semiotic- make the field of studies more complex. textual offering tools that function as guidelines for language teaching and proposals for comprehension and production procedures.

Martín Menéndez Salvio argues that this theory makes it possible to work with texts and value them as constitutive elements of culture. He also develops some concepts to approach language such as the formal codification of meanings.

If we say that meanings are formally realized, the form/meaning dichotomy is resolved in the materiality of texts as semantic-pragmatic units of produced, negotiated, and exchanged meanings.

Meanings must be understood from two concepts:

• The importance of the speaker as a social actor.
• The importance of the socio-historical-cultural context in which exchanges take place.

In other words, systemic-functional grammar provides theoretical and methodological elements to teach language from the use that speakers make in certain contexts, which allows including forms of dialectal varieties.