Systemic-functional modelling of language and context

Adriana Silvina Pagano
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Abstract

This article aims to outline Halliday’s systemic-functional architecture, focusing on the model of context developed by systemicists, including updates made in the last decades. The article first presents the assumptions upon which the theory rests, subsequently introducing the dimensions of language organization proposed within the hallidayan framework, namely the global dimensions of stratification, instantiation and metafunction, and the local dimensions of structure and system. Theoretical and descriptive concepts are briefly presented together with the terms used in the theory to name them, and examples are provided to illustrate systemic-functional text analysis. The phenomenon of grammatical metaphor posited by the theory is explained within the systemic-functional architecture and related to the contextual variables that configure registers and text-types. The article concludes with a synthesis of the main features that account for the appliable nature of the theory, bearing on the adoption of a systemic and a functional perspective to explain language in use.

Full-text of the article is available for this locale: Português (Brasil).

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