ABSTRACT
Halliday (1978) describes three “metafunctions,” general types of social action that speakers accomplish. The “ideational” function communicates ideas. The
“interpersonal” function establishes relationships. And the “textual” function creates coherence across segments of discursive interaction. Any stretch of discourse always accomplishes all three metafunctions. The metafunctions are also interdependent, with each one being accomplished in part through contributions from the others. Different approaches to discourse analysis focus on different metafunctions, however. Some study how signs communicate information, while others study how elements of discourse cohere into textual wholes. In this book we focus on the interpersonal metafunction-how participants establish relationships with others, how they position themselves interactionally, perform social actions and evaluate both others and the social world. Because participants accomplish the interpersonal functions of discourse in part through ideational and textual mechanisms, we provide some strategies for analyzing these metafunctions. For example, we show how the denotational content of narrated events (established through the ideational metafunction) serves as a resource for social action in the narrating event, and we show how indexical signs cohere into configurations (through the textual metafunction) that make robust interpretations of social action possible. But we study the ideational and textual metafunctions only for their contributions to the interpersonal functions of discourse, because our approach to discourse analysis aims to uncover the social actions accomplished through language use.
