1. Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (M.A.K.

Halliday)
Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG)

A. Introduction to Systemic Functional Grammar

Systemic Functional Grammar, is an approach to language developed mainly
Michael Halliday in the UK and later in Australia.
While American-style linguistics involved in the modelling of the world’s
languages, SFG was developed to address the needs of language
teaching/learning.
Central: language use must be seen as taking place in social contexts. Language is
not good or bad, it is appropriate or inappropriate to the context of use.
Language function (what it is used for) is often more important than language
structure (how it is composed)
Linguistic Theory and Description
Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG)
Systemic functional Grammar is also "functional" because it considers
language to have involved under the pressure of the particular functions that the
language system has to serve. Functions are therefore taken to have left their mark
on the structure and organization of language at all levels.
According to this approach ‘Functional’: focus on what things do rather than how
the things are composed (structural)
Structure-informed Analysis
- A handful of rice
head of NP
Function-informed Analysis
- A handful of rice
quantifier
Systemic separates Choices and Structure: Speech consists of what choices we
can make and show to what extent these choices are contextually conditioned
According to Halliday, structure is an output device, the mechanism for
expressing the choices that have been made’
-‘Systemic’: separating choices and structure
S
NP VP
det NP
 For example:
The cat sat

Det noun verb

B. Language and its Context
Halliday models “context of situation”, those aspects of the context relevant to the
unfolding language event, in terms of three stands :
- Field : what is being talked about
- Tenor : the people involved in the communication and the relationships
between them.
- Mode : what part the language is playing in the interaction (is it
accompanying action or all of the action), what form does it take (spoken
or written ).

1. Ideational Metafunction (FIELD)

Field : what the text is about :
- Typical fields : science, education, war, medicine, sports.
Can be more specific :
- science : biology, microbiology: virology: plant viruses.
- education : language education : English Language education: secondary
level English Education.
Additionally, can be placed on a cline of :
- Specialised vs non-specialised: is the vocabulary specific to the field,or
does it use vocabulary common to other fields ?
- Specialised vocabulary may be used in other fields but have different
meaning in the current field :
* “ constituent ’’ (politics ) : member of a political unit.
* “constituent ’’ ( linguistics ) : a syntactic unit.

2. Interpersonal Metafunction (TENOR)

Tenor : relationship between participants.
Includes:
- Power relations :
Unequal : father / daughter,doctor/patient,teacher/stuedent.
Equal : friend/friend , student/student.
- Formality: formal/informal.
Informal : I handed my essay in kinda late cause my kids got sick.
Formal : the reason for the late submission of my essay was the illness of my
children.
- Closeness : distant/neutral/close.

3. Textual Metafunction (MODE)

- Directionality: uni-directional channel or bi-directional (uni-directional
allows only monologue, while a bi-directional channel allows dialogue)
- Media: +/-visual contact (e.g, -visual for a telephone conversation); use of
multimedia (blackboard, powerpoint, etc.)
- Preparation: spontaneous vs. prepared; rushed vs. time for reflection;
Example:
“ a receipe in a cook book “
- Field : cooking ( ingredients and process of preparing food )
- Tenor : expert writer to a learner, learner is beneficiary of the advice.
- Mode : writen, prepared. Text ofen read as part of process of cooking.

2. NOAM CHOMSKY And GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

A. What is Generative Grammar?

In linguistics, generative grammar is a grammar (or set of rules) that
indicates the structure and interpretation of sentences which native speakers of
a language accept as belonging to the language.
"A generative grammar say, English is an attempt at providing a fully
explicit and mechanical statement of the rules governing the construction of
English sentences. That is, the rules of the grammar must tell us exactly what can
be counted as a grammatical sentence of English while excluding everything that
is not a sentence of English.
Three models of Generative Grammars
1. Finite state Grammar (most basic and inadequate)
2. Phrase Structure Grammar
3. Transformational Generative Grammar (Extension of Phrase Structure
Grammar)
 1. Finite state grammar
If the grammar is to consist of a finite set of rules operating upon a finite
vocabulary and is to be capable of generating an infinite set of sentences, it means
that some of the rules must be applicable more than once in generating the same
sentences.
2. Phrase Sturucture Grammar
Some Limitations with Phrase Structure Grammar
- The rules are mostly context free.
- The rules explain intra-sentence constituent elements (syntax) but not
inter-sentence relations (Syntactic)
- Ambiguous sentences cannot be explained.
These problems were solved with transformational generative grammar
Rules for determining Phrase Structure Grammar
- Generate a lot of sentences from a small number of rules.
- The structure of a phrase will consist of one or more constituents in a
certain order.
- Constituent:
 Some words seem to belong together:
{The crazy man} {is jumping off the bridge}
 Groups of words that belong together are called constituents
 The component that determines the properties of the constituent is
the head, and the constituent can be referred to as a phrase: e.g.
noun phrase
Explanation:
V Det N

Run a marathon

Eat the Food

Read the Book

V Prep Det N
go to the Store
talk with a Teacher
“Verb phrases have a V, (sometimes) an NP, and (sometimes) a PP”
VP -> V (NP) (PP)
Phrase Structure Rules & tree diagrams
NP → (Det) N
PP → P NP
The Boy The boy in the yard

det noun det noun PP

P NP
the boy
det noun

the boy in the yard

3. Transformational Generative Grammar

1. Surface structure
2. Deep structure
Example 1:
Thanks
Terima kasih Surface structure
Syukron
Deep Structure : that each of words has same meaning, “saying thanks”
Example 2 :
1 surface structure have 2 deep structure
John saw the man with telescop
3. The Similarities and Differences both Theories
a. The Similarities
1. Both theories believe that language have structure
2. Both theories believe that language is syntagmatic
3. The discussion both theory is about grammar, how the word classified into
their part. For example in Halliday’s theory mentioned it as process,
participant and sircumstance, while chomsky mentioned it as VP, NP or
PP
b. The Differences
1. Difference between Halliday’s and Chomsky’s linguistic Theories is the
framing of language as structure versus system. Here’s how Halliday puts
it in his Introduction to Functional Grammar: “Structure is the
syntagmatic ordering in language: pattern or regularities, in what goes
together with what. System, by contrast, is ordering on the other axis:
patterns in what could go instead of what... Any set of alternatives,
together with its condition of entry, constitutes as a system in the technical
sense.
2. SFG is grammatical description developed by Halliday. SFG is concerned
with how people use language and how language is structured for use.
That is to say, SFG is based on a view of how language function as a
system of human communication, but not as a rules
3. GG is the most fully developed and influential version of linguistics
trough form, while SFG is the study of language trough meaning.
4. Look at the example 1:
a. The book my friend has given to me.
b. That man I asked to be executed.
c. This job he can do well.
d. She has been given several awards by the committee.
In his explication of Functional Grammar, Halliday analyses
‘displacement’ within Thematic Structures. As noted earlier, the two
functions Theme and Rheme are associated with that aspect of the
meaning of the clause which organizes it as a message. The Theme is the
starting point for the message; it is “what the message is concerned with:
the point of departure for what the speaker is going to say”
It follows that when describing sentences with displaced
constituents such as (b) above, proponents of Chomsky’s generative
grammar would argue that the observed displacements in such sentences
could be accounted for within the Syntax itself by recourse to a
transformational ‘movement’ other than PS rules and Lexical Insertion
rules as the latter alone cannot explain the absence of the NP object from
the object position of the verb and its location in the initial position. They
may rather generate an intransitive VP structure, which is actually
ungrammatical, instead of the required transitive structure. Hence a need
for a transformational ‘movement’. Therefore, to explain the observed
discrepancy between the function (object) and the (initial) location of the
NP in (b), the Movement Transformation is called for which assumes that
the NP, actually, originates in the object position of the verb, generated by
PS rules and LIR, and is then displaced (topicalized) to the sentence initial
position through the application of the transformation which displaces the
NP “this job” from the object position of the verb to the initial position of
the sentence. But what enables language users to correctly locate the
original position of the displaced category and produce, for example, “(b)
That man, I wanna execute”, but not “(b) *That man, I wanna be
executed”. This is exactly where SFG lags behind and GG provides the
answer by way of reference to the trace convention and the language
users’ tacit knowledge of such a convention: a phonetically unrealized
(empty) category, i.e. a copy, is left behind in the position from which the
displaced category (that man) once moved. This empty category which
intervenes between want and to blocks their cliticization and hence forbids
the production of the erroneous form
example 2
a. John kicked the ball into the net.
b. I saw Marry yesterday.
c. She told me a story.
GG will describe all the above sentences in the same way as containing
an NP subject, a VP and the related NP object(s), with the lexical items
projected into syntax with respect to these categories and their associated
functions.
SFG’s approach to the description of such fine differences is more
promising: As noted earlier, within SFG meanings of three distinct types
are mapped onto one another in order to create meaning. They are then
realized in different stretches of lexico-grammar such as groups, clauses,
and texts. In its ideational meta-function (corresponding to the syntactic
realization of the sentences in UG), a clause comprises a combination of
processes and the relevant participants and the circumstances associated
with each process (different transitivity systems). The process types for a,
b, and c are physical, mental, and verbal respectively. In a ‘John’ is the
Actor, ‘the ball’ is the Goal, and ‘into the net’ is the locational
circumstance. In b, ‘I’ is the senser, and ‘Marry’ is the phenomenon. In c,
‘she’ is the sayer, ‘me’ the receiver, and ‘a story’ the verbiage.
This way of describing the sentences is descriptively more adequate
than the one provided by UG which, given the above merits for UG,
provides ample evidence in favor of a compromise to transcend the
differences and thus to compensate for each theory’s inadequacies.