1 Introduction
There are many types of linguistic theory but, I feel, they all fall into three broad groups. Some linguistic approaches are formal in nature, and the obvious example of this is generative grammar and its various developments and offshoots, initiated by the work of Chomsky (1957, 1965). There are cognitive approaches, which would include the American West Coast cognitive school (Langacker 1982, 1987), as well as the French Théories de l’énonciation (Culioli 1990, 1999a, 1999b). Finally, there are functional theories, of which there are several varieties (Butler 2003a, 2003b; François 2018), such as Role and Reference Grammar (van Valin 2001), the Functional Grammar of Dik (1985), and, in France, Martinet’s Functional Linguistics (1985). But the functional approach which I have found most conducive to my own purposes is that initiated by Halliday in the 1960s and then known as Scale and Category Grammar, but which developed into what is now known as systemic functional ...