Thursday 7 April 2016

Why 'Meta' function?

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 528): 
The concept of metafunction is “meta” in the sense that it refers not to functions of individual utterances — functions of the instance — but to functional components of the system of language. They are, of course, “functional” in origin — that is, they derive from the functions of language as manifested in instances of use;