A note about the origin of this notion, “function.”^§AS0.2 We started to develop this idea as a consequence of our engagement with the “systemic-functional” approach to linguistics developed by M.A.K. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, and their colleagues.

We first met Michael Halliday when we were working in Sydney and he was head of the Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney. Mary had studied linguistics and semiotics at Macquarie University with Ruqaiya Hasan.

Inspired by their work, we have tried to extend its applicability, first in genre approaches to literacy.⁶² Then, developing the notion of “Multiliteracies”⁶³ with our colleagues and good friends in the New London Group, we attempted to apply notions of “system” and “function” to multimodal meanings and contrasting texts from different socio-cultural contexts – meanings that require us to go beyond writing or speech in their canonical forms and to range wider than the discipline of linguistics. Many others have begun to work on these agendas in the new field of “multimodality” over the past several decades. Notable among these and most influential on our thinking is our dear friend and colleague, Gunther Kress.⁶⁴

We stick faithfully with Halliday and Hasan’s notions of system and function, but we extend the range of their analysis in several ways. To the systems of speech and writing, we add analyses of systems of image, space, object, body, and sound – and most importantly, the inevitable processes of multimodality where speech and writing rarely happen by themselves. We also want to make the case that speech and writing never make much sense as a unified pair. They need to be seen as integrally connected into the inevitably multimodal, living experience of meaning-making, where speech is closely associated with sound and writing with image, and more so than ever in today’s digital communications environments.

When it comes to meaning functions, we also want to extend Halliday. He proposed three “metafunctions” for the analysis of speaking and writing: ideational, interpersonal, and textual.⁶⁵ Ideational meanings are constituted by the theme or the field of a meaning. Interpersonal meanings establish the tenor of the relationships between participants in a meaning. Textual meanings refer to the mode of construction and presentation of a meaning and the forms of its coherence.

We rename these metafunctions, revise their contents, and add two more. Our “reference” is more or less Halliday’s “ideational” metafunction, but we have moved considerations of time, place, cause, and effect to our “context” function. Our “agency” is more or less Halliday’s “interpersonal” metafunction, but we are just as interested in the impersonal and the broadly social. And our “structural” is more or less Halliday’s “textual,” but we want to recognize systems of meaning which move beyond “text” narrowly understood as writing or transcribed speech.

Then, we add two more functions: “context,” or the larger frame of reference of a meaning, as analyzed for speech in the traditional linguistic subdiscipline of pragmatics,⁶⁶ and “interest,” the analytical focus of critical discourse analysis⁶⁷ and many areas of social theory.⁶⁸

Following Halliday, we want to say that all functions are present in every moment of meaning. A functional analysis offers us a set of conceptual tools with which to examine meanings, and the meanings of meanings.

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⁶² Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds., 1993, The Powers of Literacy: Genre Approaches to Teaching Writing, London, UK: Falmer Press and Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

⁶³ New London Group, 1996, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” Harvard Educational Review 66(1):60–92; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds., 2000a, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, London, UK: Routledge; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2009b, “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning,” Pedagogies: An International Journal 4:164–95; Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2012a, “Multiliteracies in Education,” in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Wiley; Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Eveline Chan, and Leanne Dalley-Trim, 2016, Literacies (Edn 2), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

⁶⁴ Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London, UK: Routledge; Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, 2006, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, London, UK: Routledge.

⁶⁵ M.A.K. Halliday and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, 2014, Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (Edn 4), Milton Park, UK: Routledge.

⁶⁶ For instance: Stephen C. Levinson, 1983, Pragmatics, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Yan Huang, 2014, Pragmatics, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

⁶⁷ For instance: Norman Fairclough, 1995, Critical Discourse Analysis, London, UK: Longmans; James Paul Gee, 2005, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, New York, NY: Routledge.

⁶⁸ For instance: Jürgen Habermas, 1968 [1971], Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by J.J.Shapiro, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 43-44. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan’s "Systemic-Functional Grammar" §MS0.3a