The term “Complement” in the systemic functional grammar theory: A critical review

Abstract

Various kinds of text analyses which apply Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) have grown more than ever before for the last ten years. SFG offers a model of grammatical analysis which is directly related to the functional use of language. Despite the wide-range application of SFG for various kinds of text analyses, SFG theory poses a significant syntactic/grammatical problem which has not been touched much at the theoretical level. In fact, the analysis of functional grammar constitutes the heart of a text analysis. Any text analysis applying SFL has to deal with this formal syntactic analysis at the beginning of the analysis prior to coming to the interpretation of the content of the text. This paper highlights the syntactic and semantic problem, i.e. the label “Complement” which appears in Mood system. Refine-tuning theoretically-inadequate parts of SFG will certainly, on the one hand, improvethe reliability of the social and cultural interpretation of any text analysis applying SFG and, on the other hand, overcome any confusion in the syntactic analysis which to some extent affects the teaching of English syntactic operation and other languages like English as well.