Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) is an extension of Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Theory (SFT) which informs Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Halliday originally developed SFL for teaching Mandarin in his seminal paper Grammatical Categories in Modern Chinese (Halliday 1956/1976) (see Fawcett 2000) before extending the approach to the English language (e.g. Halliday 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Halliday (1985: 4) explains that linguistics is a “kind of semiotics” because language is viewed as “one among a number of systems of meaning that, taken all together, constitute human culture”. Therefore, SFT is a theory of meaning, which was first applied to language through SFL, and more recently through SF-MDA to other semiotic resources (e.g. O’Halloran 2008, see Knox 2009).