Introducing Systemic Functional Linguistics: Theory, Description and Application

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), covering key concepts and contributions to the field and instructing beginners to apply SFL to different areas.

Authored by contributors with extensive experience of teaching SFL, this book is composed of 14 chapters covering theories, descriptions, and applications of SFL. It encompasses the following topics:

• SFL theory and the organizing principles;
• descriptions of various lexicogrammatical and semantic systems;
• grammatical metaphor;
• register studies;
• different areas of SFL application, including translation studies, multimodal discourse analysis, and educational linguistics.

Suitable to be used as teaching materials, the chapters are carefully organized into sections of learning outcomes, key terms, exercises, and suggested readings. By introducing the theory and applications of SFL in accessible terms and requiring no prior knowledge, this practical book is a key reading for students new to the area.

Hui Yu is a Professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Beijing Normal University, China. She has published extensively in areas including genre analysis (Essentials to Genre Analysis, 2018), Systemic Functional Grammar, academic writing, and knowledge structure (research grant by Ministry of Education: A comparative study of knowledge structure across different educational discourses).

Chenguang Chang is a Professor of Linguistics in the School of International Studies, Sun Yat-sen Univesity, China. His recent publications include Linguistic Sustainability (co-edited with Yu Changsen, 2020) and Critical Discourse and Corpus Approaches to Systemic Functional Grammar (co-edited with Josef Schmied and Matthias Hofmann, 2021).

Bo Wang is a researcher in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. He is the co-author of Lao She’s Teahouse and Its Two English Translations (Routledge, 2020), Systemic Functional Translation Studies (2021), Introducing M.A.K. Halliday (Routledge, 2022), and Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics (2022).

Yuanyi Ma is currently a researcher in the Faculty of Education, Vancouver Island University, Canada. She is the co-author of Translating Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Key Themes and New Directions in Systemic Functional Translation Studies (Routledge, 2022) and Theorizing and Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics: Developments by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen (Routledge, 2024).