ABSTRACT
The Systemic Functional approach sees meaning in terms of three strands or metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The ideational metafunction can be divided into a “representational” function and a “logical” function. The ideational metafunction deals with the actions, events and states which occur in the world, the entities, or participants, which are involved in those processes and the circumstances in which they take place. The interpersonal metafunction concerns the relationships established between the speaker and his addressee, or between the speaker and his message. The textual metafunction concerns the way in which the message is put together. The relationship between a process and its participants and circumstances is known as “transitivity”, and this constitutes a major part of the ideational metafunction. Most introductions to Systemic Functional Linguistics group these together as a single participant type, usually calling it the “actor”.
