Friday 15 July 2016

Different Degrees Of Awareness Of Different Linguistic (Meta)Functions

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 569): 
In addition to the different degrees of awareness of different grammatical units, such as words and clauses, people are also not equally aware of the different kinds of functions in which the resources of language are organised. In particular, in constructing and reasoning about more conscious models, people are readily aware of those linguistic resources whose function it is to interpret and represent experience, those of the ideational metafunction; but they are less aware of those of the other two metafunctions, the interpersonal and the textual — no doubt because these do not embody representations of experience but reflect our engagement with the world in different ways.