A survey of studies in systemic functional language description and typology

Abstract

Systemic functional theory embodies a multilingual perspective to language from its earliest formulation. However, it was not until the last two decades that descriptions of languages other than English, particularly in the light of language typology, garnered much interest among scholars working with systemic theory. The objective of the present study is to survey the growing literature in this field. The survey consists of two main parts. The first part discusses theoretical developments in relation to language description and typology. The second part presents a meta-analysis of empirical studies in the field. The meta-analysis examines the historical progress in systemic typology and description of non-Anglo languages, the coverage of descriptions in terms of areal and genetic language families, mode of publication and, finally, methodological procedures employed by the studies. Challenges arising from these analytical decisions are also examined. The motivation for the study is to provide a state of the art review of the field in order to guide new descriptions and draw implications for further research in functional language typology, in general, and systemic typology, in particular.