Functional Grammar

Functional grammar focuses on the way language is put together so that meaning is
communicated for particular purposes, and looks at a language as a system of meaning,
while traditional grammar is concerned with the ways words are organized within
sentences and looks at a language as a set of rules. Functional grammar is a linguistic
theory that states that all its components – affixes, words, sentences or phrases – carry
important semantic, syntactic and pragmatic frameworks in the broader understanding of
functionalities and linguistic processes of language.
Functional grammar does not view language as simply a set of rules; instead, it focuses
on the way language is put together so that meaning is communicated for a specific
purpose. It is concerned with how the various bits of language in a text work together to
fit varying ranges of cultural and social contexts
In linguistics, function words in a sentence (also called functors) are words that have
little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical
relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood
of the speaker.
Function word: a word (such as a preposition, auxiliary verb, or conjunction) that
expresses primarily a grammatical relationship. Function words and content words.
we refer to content words as an "open" class. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are
content parts of speech. Function words are words that exist to explain or create
grammatical or structural relationships into which the content words may fit.
Function words help us connect important information. Function words are important
for understanding, but they add little meaning beyond defining the relationship between
two words. Function words include auxiliary verbs, prepositions, articles, conjunctions,
and pronouns.
Content words
 Content words are words that have meaning. They can be compared to
grammatical words, which are structural. Nouns, main verbs, adjectives and
adverbs are usually content words. Auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles, and
prepositions are usually grammatical words:
Nouns: John, room, answer.
Adjectives: happy, new, large, gray.
Verbs: search, grow, hold, have.
Adverbs: really, completely, very, also, enoug
Lexical and functional words
 What are lexical and functional phrases? Lexical words all have clear meanings
that you could describe to someone. They're also all nouns, which is one type of
lexical word. Functional, or grammatical, words are the ones that it's hard to
 define their meaning, but they have some grammatical function in the sentence.

 Structure words are words belonging to the categories of articles, auxiliaries,

conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns.

 Functional grammar has emerged initially from the work of Halliday in the 1990s
and the key distinctions between what are known as Field, Tenor and Mode.
These three aspects make up what is called the Context of Situation (which is a
term that is rather better defined than what is usually meant by context).
Before we look at meaning, we'll define those very simply:

 Field: concerns what is being talked about and the goals of the text.
Is it, for example, intended to tell someone about how snow is formed in the
atmosphere or is it a letter to a friend describing a holiday and making
suggestions?
 Tenor: concerns the relationship between the speaker / writer and the hearer /
reader. Is that relationship one of equality or authority? Does the producer of
language need to be careful or can they express themselves casually?
 Mode: concerns what type of text is being produced.
Is this a letter, an essay, an email, a telephone message, a face-to-face
conversation or what? Within these three broad categories we can identify three
different types of meaning:
 Experiential meaning: concerns the way we use language to encode our
experience of the world and how we signal the Field of discourse in which the
text is set. For example,
Mary sent a letter to her mother.
which simply encodes a fact in language. In this case, it probably represents
something known to the speaker personally but it might be the result of hearsay or
what Mary has previously said. Experiential meanings can be personal or
vicarious.
You probably know, for example, that the speed of light is nearly 300,000
kilometres per hour but it unlikely that you have measured it personally.
 Interpersonal meaning
 concerns the Tenor of the discourse and how we communicate with each other to
get information, get things done, express our degrees of certainty and so on. For
example
Do you think Mary has sent a letter to her mother? or Mary might have sent a
letter to her mother concern in the first a request for a viewpoint and in the second
express the speaker's degree of certainty about the event.
In both these cases the tone is quite neutral so it is likely to be a communication to
an equal and quite informal. However, if that meaning was encoded as:
I wonder whether you are aware of Mary's ever sending a letter to her mother
the speaker / writer has chosen a different way to encode the meaning to provide
some polite distance between the speaker / writer and the hearer / reader.
Textual meaning: concerns coherence in written and spoken texts and is closely
connected to the Mode of the text in question. For example, if the response to the
 first questions is guess she might have done the hearer has to be aware
that she stands for Mary and that have done stands for sent a letter to her mother.
In other circumstances, the response might be: Yes, and I expect she'll be relieved
to get it and the hearer has to realise that she now stands for her mother and forms
the subject of what follows (it has, in functional terms, been raised from the
rheme of the first sentence to the theme of the next) and it stands for a letter.
In written communication, it is usually safe to assume that there is less shared
knowledge between writer and speaker (so things need to be made more explicit)
but that there is also pressure on the writer to link information together cohesively
to make the relationships clear.
It is of real important to understand that these three forms of meaning are usually
expressed simultaneously in the language we produce and that our choices of
structure are constrained if not fully determined by the types of meaning we wish
to communicate.

The first two kinds of meaning are realised through the systems of the language:
Semantics: systems of meaning Lexicogrammar: systems of structure.
The Mode is realised through choices of expression: phonology, gesture, graphology.
We may know about Field, Tenor and Mode as defining the shape of text and its content
but our learners often don't, of course. They will treat any text presented to them or
which they are required to produce, whether written or spoken, on its own terms without,
unless we are explicit, connecting them to the contexts of situation. In the guide to
reading skills, for example, a text's classroom purposes are defined in three ways
(following Johns and Davies, 1983):

1. Text As a Linguistic Object (TALO) This is use of a text to exemplify

grammatical or lexical information, or, if spoken, to exemplify pronunciation
features as well. It implies mining the text for information about meaning and
form in order to teach language systems
2. Text As a Vehicle for Information (TAVI) This use is to train learners to read or
listen to a text for information and implication so it is typically a kind of extended
comprehension exercise involving listening and reading between the lines as well
as understanding the speaker or writer's attitudes and implications. It is, in other
words an exercise in pragmatics.
3. Text As a Springboard for production (TASP) This is the use of text as a stimulus
for productive language practice. This often means providing a model text,
written or spoken, which is then analyzed for its salient features (using TALO).
Then, having delved into the language use, learners are asked to produce parallel
language in their freer practice stage of the lesson. It is an approach to language
skills teaching suited well to productive skills because the language the learners
are asked to produce is based on a real-life model that they have analyzed quite
carefully.

This often means that, unfortunately, a text becomes a test rather than an opportunity to
see language working in the endeavor to communicate: inform, ask, entertain, interact,
transact and so on. There is little wrong with any of these three uses of texts in terms of
methodology but, if we accept that that Context of Situation is a controlling factor in the
production of language, then we need to give our learners a way to assess what that it. In
other words, learners need explicitly to be made aware of what the factors are which
determine the appropriate way to understand and produce language.

Here's a simple way to make the teaching of skills more embedded in communicative
language teaching. It is not necessary to trouble learners with terms such as Field, Tenor
and Mode, of course, although they are legitimate bits of language to learn. It is a form of
questionnaire for the learners to think about before they are asked to understand or
produce a text .

These two concepts are often subsumed under the general heading of text type but that is
slightly too loose for our purposes. The concepts are fundamental to taking a functional
grammar approach to language so we'll define them here:

Register
refers to texts which share the same Context of Meaning and are, therefore,
describable as occupying the same register. Because they do, they will also
exhibit the same (or very similar) experiential, interpersonal and textual
meanings. We can, therefore, make predictions about the lexicogrammar of such
texts because, whether they are in the register of teacher-student talk, economic
papers, political interviews or whatever, they will have meanings in common.
Genre
is a cultural concept. When texts share the same purpose, they will often share
the same structural elements and they therefore can be said to belong to the same
genre.
The ones most often identified are: Recount (saying what happened), Narrative
(telling a story), Procedure (saying how to do something), Information report
(presenting information), Exposition (arguing a case) and Discussion (looking at
both sides of an issue).

So far, we have introduced some basic concepts of a functional approach to analyzing

text. What we need to do now is investigate how best we can describe language. Like
every other specialty, functional grammar and a functional approach to language
description requires its own metalanguage, i.e., the language we use to describe the
language we use.
What follows is an attempt to identify the most important concepts.
It is important at this stage to note that functional grammar does not dismiss the language
of more traditional grammars or attempt to replace the concepts with something wholly
new. It is better to consider functional grammar as drawing on and extending more
traditional concepts.
Functional grammar is not a replacement for what has been called, rather loosely here,
traditional grammar. Fundamental concepts such as lexeme, word classes, subjects,
verbs, objects, clauses and sentences and so on are common to both kinds of grammar.
Nor are the grammars mutually exclusive because many concerns of functional grammar
are identical to those of more traditional grammars. In fact, it is often difficult to see
whether an analysis is being conducted from a functional viewpoint or a formal one
because it is inevitable that considerations of meaning and intention will arise whatever
grammatical or structural form it is that one is attempting to analyze.

What is different is the focus and with that focus comes the need for a different way of
looking at things and, often, a different set of terms to apply to concepts.