INTRODUCTION

Throughout this book, the focus has been on understanding the clause both functionally and structurally. Chapters 1 to 7 have progressively constructed this understanding by focusing on specific individual aspects in turn. Chapter 8 summarized all of this by presenting a set of guidelines for a multifunctional analysis of the clause. In this final chapter, we have come full circle. As pointed out in Chapter 1, one of the main objectives of analysing language in a functional perspective is to consider language in context and gain an understanding of how language is used. It is the text not the clause that is socially relevant. This chapter completes the picture by exploring how the analysis of the clause informs the analysis of text.

It may be clear by now that analysing all the clauses in a text is a considerable amount of work, but it is only the first step. According to Halliday (2010), there are two main questions we might have when analysing text. The first is ‘Why does the text mean what it does?’ and the second is ‘Why is the text valued as it is?’ The answer to the first question is that ‘it means what the linguist says it means’ (Halliday, 2010), by relating to the system and exploring how the text comes to mean what it does. In order to achieve this, as Halliday (1994: xvi) states, ‘there has to be a grammar at the base’. The answer to the second question is more difficult since ‘it requires an interpretation not only of the text itself but also of its context (context of situation, context of culture), and of the systematic relationship between context and text’ (Halliday 1994: xv). Halliday (2010) argues that there is not much point in trying to answer the second question without having already answered the first question. Therefore, irrespective of the goals one hopes to achieve in analysing text or discourse, a firm understanding of grammar is essential.