ABSTRACT
Language is a fascinating phenomenon. People use it constantly, every day, to communicate, and it would be difficult to conceive of human existence without it. Linguistics, the academic discipline that does attempt to think about language, and ask questions about its nature, is peculiar. In other disciplines, people use language to talk about other things. In linguistics, we use language to talk about language itself. Systemic Functional Linguistics is functional in two slightly different senses. First it is interested in the way a language functions internally; that is, how the different elements that go to make up the language work together to create meaning. The term "systemic" is derived from "system", but here system refers to the network of choices that are available to the speaker of a language. The lexicogrammar is perhaps the most central, immediate, visible part of the language. But it exists as a means of realizing or encoding meanings.
