On the dysfunctional nature of systemic functional grammar. (Language Teaching & Learning).

Abstract

In the past decade, there has been a growing interest in North America in systemic functional grammar (SFG). Because it assumes that meaning is directly related to the structure of language, many researchers claim that SFG is more relevant to the concerns of all English language teachers than the more dominant formalist approaches to language description. The basic assumption of SFG -- that language structure is derivative of meaning -- is fundamentally flawed. As a consequence, the actual SFG descriptions of some basic structures of English are inaccurate. We conclude that SFG offers little assistance to language teachers who need to understand the ...