The systemic functional theory of Halliday is based on three levels of semantics, known as ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The present descriptive-analytical research aimed to study the clauses of ayahs of Surah Al-Humazah from the point of view of textual metafunction. The findings showed that the frequent use of marked theme has highlighted and better conveyed the message to the audience and this usage fits the discourse space of the surah in question. Furthermore, new information in this surah has the highest frequency because the surah makes use of curse, warning, and threatening of the accumulators of property and wealth ("who amasses wealth and counts it") as well as faultfinders ("Woe to every backbiter, slanderer"). Grammatical and lexical coherence and linking, which are in a logical exchange with each other, has made the text integrated, helping the readers to better understand the Qur'anic text.

This paper is an attempt to describe the speech of six year-old children within the Systemic Functional Grammar framework (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) based on the textual metafunction theory. This kind of study is of importance since despite the significance of studying the Persian language, specifically spoken Persian in children's speech area, the number of such studies is limited. The data of the present research includes more than 4200 simple and compound clauses. This spoken data for children was extracted from a research conducted between 1380-1384 entitled as "The Study of Iranian Children's Core Vocabulary" and was obtained from twenty new-entrants-to-primary-school Persian children in Tehran (including randomly selected ten girls and ten boys). Every story was illustrated by three or four colored and communicative pictures. The main results of this research show that: a) The simple clauses made 90 percent of the children's speech, and compound clauses made only 10 percent of them.b)The occurrence rate of marked experiential theme in the speech of children was 18 percent.c)Subject pronoun deletion was a dominant, unmarked intent and its rate is about 55 percent.d)In the spoken language of children, the rate of using compound/multiple themes is 30 percent.e)The below hierarchy was observed in sequences of compound/multiple themes in spoken language of Persian children: textual-experiential (98%)>interpersonal-experiential (1.5%)> textual-interpersonal-experiential (0.5%) f)The textual themes have been used in 98% of the compound/multiple themes.g)The most frequent textual themes were /ba'ad/ and its varieties and after that /digar/ and its varieties.h)The most frequent textual themes in the subordinate clauses were /ke/ and after that /ta/ which was used in a lower frequency.i)In the speech of children, the occurrence of interpersonal themes was only two percent amongst compound/multiple themes.

Taking a linguistic perceptive on the Holy Qur'an has opened new horizons in Qur'anic studies. Michael Halliday's theory is an approach within functionalist linguistics that has currently drawn many linguists' attention. Halliday believes that different components of speech have three ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions, hence his attempt at regulating three corresponding semantic layers. The present research aims to analyze the discourse of Surah Al-Falaq and Surah Al-Nas at the level of textual metafunction based on Halliday's functionalist theory. Therefore, through studying the thematic and informative structures of Surah al-Falaq and Surah Al-Nas and extracting the elements and techniques used for creating cohesion, we found that the two surahs are, in terms of discourse, on the basis of conversation and question and answer, and the use of Halliday's discourse-based components, i. e. textual metafunction, does not vary across them, but in their textual cohesion a variety of devices are effective. In addition, the two surahs differ in terms of the degree of the utilization of these cohesive (grammatical, lexical, and semantic) devices. The first and the most important cohesive device in the texts of both surahs are verbal and lexical elements, and repetition, taking different forms, is the most frequently-used device.

Using linguistic patterns in studying the style of different texts can help Persian stylistics to get out of repeating traditional methods and getting in a new way. A way which make this field more dynamic and more applied. For this purpose, in the present article we have tried to use Hallidayan functional grammar, specially textual metafunction, in order to study the style of the tales of Tafsire Soureye Yousof. To do this we analyzed 16 tales of the book and found that although at first glance the prose of the tales is simple (morsal) because of using unmarked and simple themes more than marked and multiple ones, and using reference more than other cohesive devices, but relative use of long sentences, marked and multiple themes, and also low frequency of ellipsis and substitution in order to create Rhyme and balance, shows that the tales have somewhat rhymed prose.

Autism, first introduced by Bleuler (1940) and later developed by Kanner (1940), is a neurodevelopmental disorder that poses challenges in communication for autistic individuals, hindering their social interactions and activities. Autism encompasses cognitive and linguistic difficulties, with genetics believed to be a contributing factor. Symptoms often become evident between 18 to 36 months of age. Autistic individuals commonly struggle with verbal and non-verbal communication, social interaction, and other activities. Communication difficulties are a core characteristic of autism, with approximately 50% of autistic individuals being unable to use language for communication. A notable trait is the avoidance of the pronoun "I, " and the repetition of words and phrases, known as 'echolalia. ' There is a wide spectrum of language development among autistic individuals, ranging from those who never speak to those who exhibit slow comprehension despite fluent speech. This spectrum includes both mild and severe forms of autism, with some severely affected individuals being non-verbal or having echolalia. Milder cases learn language but tend to use words and expressions based on their own perspectives, making simple conversations challenging. The speech performance of autistic individuals has been a subject of controversy in psychology, as their appearance is often similar to non-autistic individuals, making it difficult for families to recognize and accept their children's challenges. This lack of recognition can lead to frustration for parents, who may not receive the verbal and practical affection they need.

Abstract      Halliday emphasizes on ideational, interpersonal and textural metafunctions in systematic functional linguistics, which can be useful for analyzing sentences of literary texts and understanding special styles of poets or writers. Shahnameh has the potential of being studied in different fields like linguistics, thus the writer analyzes styles of the stories of Iraj and Rostam and Shaghad, based on Halliday’s theory. This paper is an attempt to study the problem of different processes, interpersonal metafunctions, and textural cohesion in stories of Iraj and Rostam and Shaghad. The results of this study show that among all the used processes, material process has the highest frequency in both stories, which indicate concrete events and actions used in the scenes.  In non-structural part of textual metafunction, grammatical and lexical cohesions cause text connections and coordination. In grammatical cohesion, conjunctions and in lexical cohesion reiteration, repetition element has the highest frequency in both stories. Past form of the verbs are used and subjects are often obvious and indicative mood which emphasizes on truthfulness of propositions and certainty of the text has the most frequency in these stories. Investigating and adapting all three semantic layers of Halliday’s theory in the stories of Iraj and Rostam and Shaghad emphasizes on the unified, integrated, coherent structure of both texts.

In recent years, a major shift has been observed in English language textbooks in all grades, especially in secondary school in Iran. It seems that the inappropriateness of the previous syllabus has led the material developers to make content and structural changes in the new books; therefore, it is expected that in the writing of new books, different scientific views be taken into consideration and aligned with the scientific theories of the day. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the secondary school’ s English language textbooks in Iran based on the textual metafunction of Halliday’ s Systematic Functional Grammar (SFG) and to specify the frequency and type of textual themes in the texts of the new books. For this purpose, 301 clauses in reading parts of the secondary school’ s English language textbooks were analyzed. The results of the analysis showed that the authors of these books are familiar with these concepts; that is, these components have been taken into account in many cases in terms of the choice of reading texts in terms of type and number of themes and the number of simple and compound clauses; but, in some cases, they have not paid careful attention to the distribution of the components, especially in the lesson to lessons distribution, considering their respective educational bases. It is hoped that the weaknesses identified in this study be considered in the new editions of the aforementioned books.

In Functional Grammar, theme is a structure that plays a key role in message processing and it refers to the subject matter to which the message relates. Due to having such role, this linguistic concept is considered in the analysis of educational texts by those interested in this field. In the present study, drawing upon textual metafunction of Functional Theory, finding possible similarities and differences in the theme selection of universities’ ESP textbooks in Humanities and Engineering disciplines by Iranian(SAMT) and non-Iranian authors is of significant interest. The method of this research is descriptive-analytical and the statistical population is 32 readable texts from the sources. The results showed that there is no significant difference in the use of themes in the corpus, among authors, and between dicsiplines; so that, 100% experimental themes, simple themes more than multiple themes (76% vs. 24%) and textual themes more than interpersonal themes (22. 5% vs. 2%) have been used by all authors. It seems that the main reason for this similarity is related to the genre similarity of writings. Based on the findings, the following results can be inferred: Theme is meaningful in the English language and is taken into account in the writing of academic textbooks, especially in ESP; the remarkable similarity and the writing framework alignment of different authors with Halliday’ s systemic functional theory suggests the usefulness of this view in the evaluation of scientific books; the authors' attention to the effectiveness of the textual metafunction as an efficient resource in the construction, development, and coherence of texts, as well as its efficiency in academic textbooks division to different genres is elaborated; finally, in the light of these findings, it can be said that choosing a textbook based on the criteria that the author is Iranian or not, is not desirable.

1. Introduction Achieving successful communication in language involves the writer's organization of meaning as messages in clauses and texts, and the reader's identification of them to interpret the messages of the texts appropriately. Therefore, one of the concerns of readers has always been how to uncover the textual and discoursal meanings of texts, especially literary texts. Fortunately, since the 1970s, functionalism has had a significant influence on analyzing literary texts, and since 1994, it has been used as an approach to analyzing texts. Based on the textual metafunction in functional grammar, thematic systems organize meanings in clauses and texts. Thematic structures are responsible for organizing meanings in clauses, and thematic patterns are responsible for organizing meanings in texts so that they not only create cohesion and coherence but also convey the intended messages.  Accordingly, this study aims to analyze the texts of short stories based on the thematic progression factor in textual metafunction to identify the progression patterns and the discoursal factors that influence them. To do this, the present paper relies on Halliday and Matthiessen's functional grammar (2014), Shieh and Lin’s seven thematic progression patterns (2011), and a descriptive-analytic method. Correspondingly, the research question of this study is how thematic systems contribute to coherence and the conveyance of messages in six Persian short stories. Based on this question, the related research hypothesis is that thematic systems, by using thematic patterns in the story texts, achieve coherence and facilitate the conveyance of messages, thereby representing textual and discoursal meanings. There is some literature on progression patterns and a significant body of research on theme analysis. For example, Marfuaty and Wahyudi (2015), in their investigation of thematic progression patterns in the opinion section of the Jakarta Post, concluded that the most frequent pattern and theme were linear pattern and topical theme. Rahnemoon et al. (2019) investigated the themes of 643 clauses of English news texts and their Persian translation, finding that there were no significant differences between the progression patterns in English and Persian, except for the simple linear pattern. Larasati et al. (2022) used thematic structure and progression patterns to investigate Boris Johnson's speech and showed that the most dominant topical theme and pattern were circumstantial adjuncts and the constant pattern, respectively. These studies demonstrate the presence of different kinds of themes in clauses and thematic patterns in texts. However, the above studies are mostly structure-based rather than discourse-based. Nevertheless, the present study offers several advantages compared to previous research. In addition to using seven thematic patterns instead of two, three, or four, this research is discourse-based and investigates the discourse factors influencing the use of these patterns in the six short story texts. Materials and methods The corpus of this study consists of six contemporary Persian short stories frwritten by famous Persian authors, including “A City Like Paradise” (Daneshvar, 2015), “Three Drops of Blood” (Hedayat, 2002), “ Cooking Samanu” (Ale Ahmad, 2004), “My China Doll” (Golshiri, 2015), “Mirror” (Dolatabadi, 2005), and “Two Days” (Vafi, 2018) spanning the period from 1932 to 2012. The research was conducted using a descriptive-analytic method. The corpus consisted of 3736 clauses. Using a data analysis sheet based on Halliday and Matthiessen’s functional grammar (2014) for thematic systems and Shieh and Lin's seven thematic progression patterns (2011), the clauses were analyzed to identify, sort, and tally the patterns, determine their frequencies, and calculate the percentage of each variable. The results were presented in a table and discussed to address the research question and test the related hypothesis.   Results and discussion The findings revealed that the authors predominantly used the constant pattern, which appeared in 83.25% of the cases, as the primary thematic progression pattern in the six short stories. This shows that the writers frequently repeated themes to maintain continuity, preserve the topic, and enhance coherence in the texts. Moreover, they employed the uncommon zig-zag pattern in 7.25% of the cases as a secondary major pattern and writing style to expand the topic. Furthermore, they used less common patterns, such as the derived hypertheme, juxtaposition, and multiple patterns, in 9.5% of the cases as special strategies to direct, change, or introduce a new topic within the stories. However, the crossing and concentrative patterns were not used, suggesting that the writers tend to avoid a complex writing style.   Conclusion The results showed that the constant pattern was extensively used as the predominant thematic progression pattern and primary writing style to maintain topic continuity and textual coherence as a key strategy for conveying the intended messages. Nevertheless, when there were good discoursal reasons such as directing, extending, reducing, changing, or introducing a topic, authors primarily employed the uncommon linear pattern as a secondary pattern and writing style. In specific cases, they also used less common patterns, such as the derived hypertheme and juxtaposition patterns, while the multiple pattern was rarely used. These strategies helped to organize the topical themes within the texts, ensuring coherence and message conveyance. The authors deliberately avoided the crossing and concentrative patterns, likely to avoid a complex writing style that could reduce accessibility for readers. Furthermore, by identifying the thematic patterns in the short stories, it was possible not only to achieve the writer's perspective on the subject matter and the direction of the texts but also to extract the intended discoursal meanings and overall messages. It is recommended that further research compare thematic patterns in fiction and non-fiction to determine whether certain thematic structures are associated with certain genres.

The main purpose of present article is studying Tehran billboards based on Halliday’ s functionalism regarding social semiotics. Communicative and functional roles are the main roles of language in functional approaches. Advertising billboards are tools trying to communicate and transfer messages to audience. They try to communicate with the audience and convey meaning and message through a variety of multi-layered texts. Each billboard image is sometimes a text that contains different elements such as color, shape, line, and speech, and there are always different linguistic and extralinguistic factors involved in conveying commercial messages. In this paper, an attempt is made to represent the three experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions in the image and speech of advertising billboards from the perspective of Halliday’ s functional approach and to determine how to convey meaning through semiotic mechanisms. Therefore, in order to accomplish the objectives of the paper (representing the metafunctions in images and speeches of billboards), the topics of social semiotics, semiotics of images, metaphor, action and tension processes of discourse are also discussed to explain how to convey meaning through verbal and visual signs. The main assumption is that advertisers have been able to convey and express meaning through words and images by using theoretical mechanisms and metafunctions of Halliday’ s functional grammar and its connection with the field of special discourse. Therefore, in order to conduct the research, during a simple random sampling with a free subject, billboards in Tehran were photographed and then the research data were analyzed by analytical research methodology. Billboards containing visual and textual texts have been analaysed in accordance with theoretical mechanism of systematic grammer in terms of ideational, interpersonal, textual metafunctions and semiotics to achieve semiosis methods. Findings confirmed the desirable performance of this functional theory in the field of advetising billboards. Results of this study indicates that Halliday functional approach with its sociological semiotic features is an ideal model for achieving and gaining means of expressing meaning and can well be the basis of classifying, analyzing and explaining words as well as image. In these billboards textual texts have informative function and visual texts have expressives function. The current article shows that interpretation of meaning is done in different methods in multi-layer texts of billboards and the manifestation and embodiment of mentioned metafunctions are indicative of the fact that each advertising billboard is in fact a unitary and integrated text and the coherence resulted from aggregation of verbal and visual layers, provides a suitable basis for the semiosis of the various concepts and transmission of it to the audience.