And he had three what he called metafunctions,
three principal functions of language,
all of which happened all the time together in language.
The first is what he called field, or an ideational mega function.
Which is I'm talking about something.
I'm talking about cats, or dogs, or something in the world.
Or I'm a doctor and I'm talking doctor talk.
Or I'm a student and I'm writing a narrative or something.
So that if you like is field.
I'm doing something which has a reference to something in the world.
The second thing in the Haldane system is that
I'm always doing it with a tenor, the second word is tenor.
Always there's interpersonal function.
So, the interpersonal function might be look, I'm talking to you,
we're in a conversation.
But the interpersonal function models have me, I'm talking very objectively and
I'm writing it, I'm not even using the first person, right?
So in a sense that's also interpersonal because it's a way of framing my
relationship to a reader around the way in which I build into personal relationships.
So, tenor is the second thing that's happening in language.
And the third thing is the thing that equals mode, which is a textual function.
Which is texts have a kind of coherence.
They have a kind of a structure.
They have a kind of a form.
And every single act of meaning, be it speaking or writing, always simultaneously
we have field going on, we have tenor going on, we have mode going on.
So what then form these functions Haladay builds an extensive and
elaborate grammar describing the way in which language works.
