Text Analysis of Prospect 1 Based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar

The present study is conducted to analyze Prospect 1 (7th grade) according to functional approach. So, different processes will be categorized and compared based on the experiential metafunction introduced in systemic functional grammar (Halliday and Matthissen, 2014). The research follows a descriptive-analytic method. The text of the book (instructions, conversations, and lessons) is classified into six process types including material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal and existential. Then, the usage pattern of each will be demonstrated. For a better comparison the book is divided into four parts (each consisting of two lessons, exercises and the review). The results show that among 509 processes in the book, relational (36 %) is the most frequent one. The percentage frequencies of other processes are as follows: material (27%), behavioral (19%), verbal (14%), mental (4%), and existential (less than 1%). In the last two parts of the book, the percentage frequency of the relational process decreases. On the contrary, that of material process increases. The use of behavioral process is decreased to the end of the book while mental process reaches its highest occurrence in the last part of the book. In general, 60 different verbs (types) have been used in the book: material (35 verbs), mental (7 verbs), relational (4 verbs), behavioral (6 verbs), verbal (7 verbs), and existential (1 verb)