THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS

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Name   : Abdul Aziz Jaelani

NPM   : 1041172106275

Class   : VII English Teaching Department at University of Singaperbangsa Karawang

THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS

Systemic functional linguistics was developed in the 1960s by British linguist M.A.K. Halliday (b. 1925), who had been influenced by the work of the Prague School and British linguist J.R. Firth (1890-1960).

While individual scholars naturally have different research emphases or application contexts, common to all systemic linguists is an interest in language as social semiotic (Halliday 1978)--how people use language with each other in accomplishing everyday social life. This interest leads systemic linguists to advance four main theoretical claims about language:

1. that language use is functional
2. that its function is to make meanings
3. that these meanings are influenced by the social and cultural context in which they are exchanged
4. that the process of using language is a semiotic process, a process of making meaning by choosing.

According to Halliday (1975), language has developed in response to three kinds of social-functional 'needs.' The first is to be able to construe experience in terms of what is going on around us and inside us. The second is to interact with the social world by negotiating social roles and attitudes. The third and final need is to be able to create messages with which we can package our meanings in terms of what is New or Given, and in terms of what the starting point for our message is, commonly referred to as the Theme. Halliday (1978) calls these language functions metafunctions, and refers to them as ideational, interpersonal and textual respectively.

                  Systemic functional linguistics is an approach to linguistics that considers language as a social semiotic system. It was developed by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from his teacher, J R Firth. Whereas Firth considered systems to refer to possibilities subordinated to structure, Halliday in a certain sense 'liberated' the dimension of choice from structure and made it the central organising dimension of this theory. In other words, whereas many approaches to linguistic description place structure and the syntagmatic axis in the foreground, Hallidean systemic-functional theory adopts the paradigmatic axis as its point of departure. The term 'systemic' accordingly foregrounds Saussure's 'paradigmatic axis' in understanding how language works.^[1] For Halliday a central theoretical principle is then that any act of communication involves choices. The choices available in any language variety are mapped using the representation tool of the 'system network'.

Systemic functional linguistics is also "functional" because it considers language to have evolved 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 organisation of language at all levels, which is said to be organised via metafunctions. The term metafunction is particular to systemic functional linguistics. The organisation of the functional framework around systems, i.e., choices, is a significant difference to other 'functional' approaches, such as, for example, Dik's functional grammar (FG or as now often termed, functional discourse grammar) or lexical functional grammar. Thus it is always important to use the full designation: systemic functional linguistics rather than just functional grammar or functional linguistics.

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(Halliday, M.A.K. 1994 Introduction to Functional Grammar, Second Edition, London: Edward Arnold.)

(Halliday, M.A.K, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Systemic_functional_linguistics&oldid=506957840")

(Nordquist ,Richard , About.com Guide)