ABSTRACT
No single volume, even one as thick as the current book, can possibly provide a comprehensive survey of the entirety of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). With that in mind, our hope is that this brief chapter, in combination with the other chapters found in this book, will function as a resource enabling deeper exploration into particular areas of SFL theory and practice. The obvious starting point for a scholar interested in learning more about SFL is its seminal text, Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. This work, first published in 1985 and then republished in three further editions in 1994, 2004 and 2014, remains the foundational text for SFL. Over the thirty years since its first publication, IFG (as it is sometimes known) has been much expanded to the point at which the third and fourth editions have become reference works to be consulted rather than texts to be consumed from cover to cover. As a result, a number of invaluable texts have been written that introduce neophytes to the theory and especially to its grammar. In many cases, they provide a step-by-step guide in how to conduct text analyses.
