Five Principles of Constituency
This video introduces you to the principles of constituency in Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. Constitutency is about part-whole relations - bigger units of language are made out of smaller ones. When we need to analyse the smaller units, we have to have a way of breaking the bigger units into their constituent parts. The principles are described in Chapter 2 of An Introduction to Functional Grammar, by Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004.

Understanding the clause

The clause is a central grammatical unit through which we construe the world, enact our interpersonal relations, and manage the flow of discourse across a text. So what is it? This talk explores the unit of clause from Halliday's perspective.

Below the clause: groups and phrases

This talk looks at the groups and phrases that make up the structural elements of the clause. These units are multi-functional - that is, they play different roles, depending on whether we are looking at a clause in relation to the experiential function, the interpersonal function, or the textual function.

The embedded clause

This talk looks at how to identify a clause inside another clause - what Halliday calls an "embedded clause" or a "rank shifted clause".