Structure and Function – A Guide to Three Major Structural-Functional Theories

These two volumes offer a detailed description and comparison of three major structural-functional theories: Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar, illustrated and tested throughout with corpus-derived examples from English and other languages.

Part 1 discusses the characteristics of functional theories and isolates a set of ‘structural-functional grammars’, among which FG, RRG and SFG are central. An overview of each theory in relation to the simplex clause is followed by a more critical comparison. Other chapters deal with phrasal units, the representation of situations, and the treatment of tense, aspect, modality and polarity, across the three theories.

Part 2 deals with the areas of illocution, information structuring, complex sentences, discourse/text/context, language learning, and applications (stylistics, computational linguistics, translation, language pathology). The final chapter assesses the extent to which each theory attains the goals it sets for itself, and outlines a programme for the development of an integrated approach.