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Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". [2] For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". [3]
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, [1] that considers language as a social semiotic system.. It was devised by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from J. R. Firth, his teacher (Halliday, 1961).
[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 ...
Halliday argues that the textual function is distinct from both the experiential and interpersonal because its object is language itself. Through the textual function, language "creates a semiotic world of its own: a parallel universe, or 'virtual reality' in modern terms".
Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems.Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars.The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed in much broader terms that go beyond a mere extension of traditional grammar towards an entire text.
For Halliday, languages evolve as systems of "meaning potential" (Halliday, 1978:39) or as sets of resources which influence what the speaker can do with language, in a particular social context. For example, for Halliday, the grammar of the English language is a system organised for the following three purposes (areas or "metafunctions"):
According to Michael Halliday, instantiation is "the relation between an instance and the system that lies behind it". It is "based on memory and is a feature of all systemic behaviour". [2] The cline of instantiation has two poles.
By understanding these three variables, the kind of language likely to be used in a particular setting can be predicted — and, Michael Halliday suggests, this is exactly what we do, unconsciously, as language users. [1] In analysing the parts of a metaphor, "tenor" has another meaning, unrelated to the meaning above.