Blurb:

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a synopsis of the systemic functional grammar particularly as it has been applied to the task of describing modern English. With that in place, the rest of the chapters in this book will describe Old English in much the same order as the elements of the synopsis. The account given here is essentially that of Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), supplemented in places by Thompson (2004), with specific references to their treatment where appropriate. Since this will be just a synopsis of the theory, the later chapters will both repeat and expand the description of the model to the degree needed for each topic.