1. Ideational Function:
* Focus: Representing reality and conveying information.
* How it works: Language allows us to create mental models of the world, categorize experiences, and express thoughts and ideas. It involves:
* Experiential function: Describing events, actions, states, and participants.
* Logical function: Establishing relationships between ideas and concepts (e.g., cause and effect, contrast, comparison).
2. Interpersonal Function:
* Focus: Establishing and maintaining social relationships.
* How it works: Language allows us to interact with others, negotiate meanings, and build social bonds. This involves:
* Mood function: Expressing the speaker's attitude or intention (e.g., commands, questions, statements).
* Modality function: Indicating the speaker's degree of certainty or commitment (e.g., "I might go" vs. "I will go").
* Personal function: Expressing emotions and personal opinions.
3. Textual Function:
* Focus: Creating and organizing coherent and meaningful texts.
* How it works: Language allows us to connect ideas and sentences into larger units of meaning. This involves:
* Theme and Rheme: Establishing a point of departure (theme) and developing the information (rheme).
* Cohesion: Linking sentences and paragraphs through grammatical and lexical devices (e.g., pronouns, conjunctions, repetition).
* Information structure: Organizing information to create a clear and understandable flow.
In summary: Halliday emphasizes that language is not simply a tool for communication but a complex system that serves multiple functions simultaneously. It allows us to:
* Understand and represent the world around us.
* Build and maintain social relationships.
* Create meaningful and coherent texts.
These functions are interconnected and constantly working together to create the language we use in everyday life.