Genre, Register, and Grammatical Metafunctions in Text Analysis

In the last decades, there has been a new trend towards looking at language from a “functional” point of view, and the advent of looking at the “functional” side of grammar led to more awareness of language analysis and language interpretation. The traditional view of language as a set of rules has been extensively neglected by many linguists like Halliday, Martin, Christie, and others, and has been substituted by original practices and dynamic functions. However, the objectives of both grammar and discourse analysis can be explicitly characterised as to “ construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that makes it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English.” (Halliday 1994:xv). This reasearch is an attempt to answer these issues and provide a prattical analysis of some texts in terms of the metafunctions of grammar.