grammatical theory. By far the most popular of these over the last two
decades has been systemic-functional grammar (SFG). Developecl by the
linguist Michael Halliday, SFG attempts to provide an accnunt or the
grammar of the language as it is used in actual social situations, and
places meaning, or what Halliday terms 'function', at the centre of its
theoretical model. Systemic-functional grammarians study the
communicadve and rhetorical purposes of language, And consicler the
grammacical resources that a language makes available to the speaker or
writer in a given communicative context. A basic tenet of SFG is that any
text. whether written or spoken, conveys three kinds of meaning. First, it
conveys ideas (chis is its field). Second, it sets up some sort of relationship
with the reader or listener (this is its tenor) and third, it is delivered in a
particular form, such as a letter or a talk (this is its mode).
Because it brings meaning to the forefront of grammatical description,
SFG has been used extensively by researchers and teachers involved in
language and literacy education, most notably in Australia, where it
formed the theorecical basis for a major project rhat aimed to improve
literacy standards in socially disadvancaged schools. Crucially, the
experience of applying SFG framework in this 'Disadvantaged Schools
Project' Ied the researchers involved in it to develop a new branch of
systemic-functional linguistics called appraisal theory, as they noticed
that SFG lacked a detailed framework for modelling the Ìextcal and
grammatical resources for expressing evaluative meanings in texts,
Another approach whose increasing popularity owes much to applied
linguistics is cognitive grammar. Like SFG, cognitive grammar has
meaning (i. e. semantics) at its core and argues chat it is inseparable from
syntax. Unlike SFG, which sees language as a social phenomenon,
cognitive grammar is primarily interested in psychological processes that
occur within the minds of individual speakers as they interact with the
physical world around them. According to cognitive grammarians, there
is no autonomous, special-purpose language acquisition device chat is
responsible for language acquisition and language processing. They argue
that
a single set of cognitive processes operates
across
all areas of
language, and that these processes are involved in other types of
knowledge and learning besides language. The centrality of meaning is
thu a fundamental claim or cognitive grammarians. When new wordsand phrases enter a language, they tend to do so as 'content' words,
which means that they have concrete, lexical meanings. Over time,
through the process of grammaticalisation, some of these wards and