… It also gives some context to SFL’s insistence on bidirectionality of realisation, and lexis as delicate grammar, as well as its rejection of form/meaning dualisms.
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To be clear, 'dualism' means the division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided. Clearly, SFL does not reject the conceptual division of form and meaning as opposed or contrasted aspects, not least because it models grammatical form as a rank scale.
SFL models grammatical form in terms of its function in realising meaning. The form-meaning relation ("dualism") is a Token-Value relation. This way of modelling is made possible by the 'natural' relation between form and meaning. Halliday (1985: xvii, xviii):
The relation between the meaning and the wording is not, however, an arbitrary one: the form of the grammar relates naturally to the meanings that are being encoded. A functional grammar is designed to bring this out; it is a study of wording, but one that interprets the wording by reference to what it means. …
What this means is that both the general kinds of grammatical pattern that have evolved in language, and the specific manifestations of each kind, bear a natural relation to the meanings they have evolved to express. … the distinction into word classes of verb and noun reflects the analysis of experience into goings-on, expressed as verbs, and participants in the goings-on, expressed as nouns; and so on.
