Note: This is the paperback edition of a previously announced book.

This is the first grammar of French to provide an overall account of the language from a systemic functional perspective. Alice Caffarel uses this approach to linguistics, pioneered by Michael Halliday, to provide a description of French grammar in terms of its meaning potential and realizations in structure. This grammar has been developed as a resource for discourse analysis (including the analysis of literary texts) and for understanding how French grammar makes meaning in different textual and contextual environments.

One of the key aspects of this description is that it provides various perspectives from which to explore grammar as a meaning-making potential, from the system end and the text end of the cline of instantiation. This multi-perspectival approach brings out both the resources specific to particular registers and the resources general to the language. In addition, it provides multiple pathways for exploring how meaning (both first-order and second-order) is both construed and constructed by lexicogrammatical patterns in texts.

This systemic functional approach to French therefore reveals a unique new perspective on one of the world's most widely used international languages. The book gives a comprehensive account of French grammar which is suitable for use by undergraduates, postgraduates and academics who wish to analyse texts of various registers, and researchers in systemic functional and French linguistics.

Author Dr Alice Caffarel is Senior Lecturer in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney.

Foreword by Professor M. A. K. Halliday (b. 1925). Professor M. A. K. Halliday was Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia, until his retirement and has taught as a Visiting Professor around the world. As a self-styled ‘generalist’ he has published in many branches of linguistics.

"[The] consistent interplay between theoretical and applied pursuits has always been a defining feature of systemic functional theory... This kind of mutual enrichment is clearly demonstrated in Alice Caffarel's work. The result is a description which penetrates to the heart of the language, revealing it at one and the same time as a specimen of the human semiotic and a unique resource for the continuous creation of meaning."

Review "In the volume’s foreword, Michael Halliday, the foremost SF linguist, claims that Caffarel’s work will interest three different groups of readers: (a) readers already familiar with SF but unfamiliar with French lexicogrammar, (b) readers already familiar with French but unfamiliar with SF, and (c) readers interested in a typological approach to linguistic metafunctions. In my opinion, the work is most appropriate for the first group of readers... this volume seems best suited for readers already familiar with discourse-oriented or usage-based grammar, either in terms of SF grammar or another framework, such as cognitive grammar or construction grammar." - Carl S. Blyth, MLJ Reviews, (Modern Language Journal), Vol. 92 No. 3, 2008