Man has always wanted to understand the nature of language, and perhaps this is also
what linguists and grammarians aim at. As mentioned by Thomas Bloor and Meriel Bloor,
(1995) they “have struggled to understand more about how human language is structured and
to explain how communication takes place”. Grammar, among other branches of linguistics,
therefore, can be seen as the most useful tool to satisfy this desire of man.
Among the many trends of grammar that have contributed to the achievements in
discovering the nature of language, there is a very new version of the field – systemic
functional grammar, which was developed by celebrities in linguisticsstudy such as M.A.K.
Halliday, R. Hassan, D. Morley, Th. Bloor etc. Compared with traditional grammar, which
focuses on written language and deals with rules of correct usage,functional grammar deals
with both spoken and written language and focuses on the functions of language. Itis closer to
our language in daily life, and thus can help us to see and understand human language more
deeply and comprehensively. It can be said without exaggeration that functional grammar is
‘an effective tool of analysis, which solves the issues left out by traditional grammar’.
In Vietnam functional grammar has received considerable attention and been studied by many
grammarians, among which there are
(1991) with

!”

#, and many other postgraduates at Vietnam National University
– Hanoi with invaluable studies on different topics in this new trend of grammar. In fact, they
all have contributed a lot to the study of this field and inspired me to choose functional
grammar as the theoretical framework for my MA thesis.