Working with Functional Grammar by Christian Matthiessen
This workbook is designed to teach and practice a wide range of grammatical analyses provided by M.A.K. Halliday in his Introduction to Functional Grammar. Halliday's work opened up the possibility of using grammar to explore how a text means what it does; this workbook seeks to help students understand Halliday's ideas and to apply them in the analysis of English texts. The book contains summaries of Halliday's main points, clarifications of problems in analysis and graded exercises and texts to build students' skills in grammatical analysis. A troubleshooting section is included in each chapter which addresses the practical difficulties that may arise when applying grammatical analysis to a variety of texts. Useful for anyone who has an interest in the linguistic analysis of text and who wishes to use the insights of Halliday's grammar, this book can be used alone to support a course in functional grammar or in conjunction with Introduction to Functional Grammar. While assuming no prior knowledge of functional grammar, it caters not only for the novice but for readers with varying degrees of linguistic expertise and familiarity with Halliday's work.