A Study of Humanities Textbooks within the Framework of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar from the Viewpoint of Interpersonal Metafunction

In his systemic-functional grammar, Halliday believes that language is primarily aimed at conveying meaning; so speakers form the text in order to communicate what they mean. This implies that in interaction, exchanging of sounds, words or sentences is not intended; what matters is the exchange of meaning. The present article investigates the humanities textbooks published by SAMT within the framework of Halliday’s functional grammar, particularly. The method adopted here is descriptive–analytic. The result obtained from the interpersonal perspective suggests that writers, making frequent use of positive predicative sentences, merely present and bombard information in the form of monologues; the relationship between the reader and the writer consequently breaks off, and writers fails to achieve their end, to wit, communicating concepts to the reader, and reach a dead-end point.