Systemic functional linguistics

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics that considers language as a social semiotic system. It was developed by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of a system from his teacher, J. R. Firth. Whereas Firth thought systems referred to possibilities subordinated to structure, Halliday, in a sense, "liberated" the dimension of choice from structure and made it the central organising dimension of this theory. In other words, where 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. For Halliday, a central theoretical principle is then that any act of communication involves choices. Language is a system, and the choices available in any language variety are mapped using the representation tool of the "system network".