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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]
[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".
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).
Halliday argues that, unlike system in the sense in which it was used by Firth was a conception only found in Firth’s linguistic theory. [4] In this use of the term “system”, grammatical, or other features of language, are considered best understood when described as sets of options.
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"):
Halliday follows Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) in seeing linguistics as the study of both instances of language and the linguistic system. Halliday argues that linguists must take both into account: "For a linguist, to describe language without accounting for text is sterile; to describe text without relating it to the system is vacuous". [5]
Repetition uses the same word, or synonyms, antonyms, etc. For example, "Which dress are you going to wear?" – "I will wear my green frock," uses the synonyms "dress" and "frock" for lexical cohesion. Collocation uses related words that typically go together or tend to repeat the same meaning. An example is the phrase "once upon a time".