Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics that considers language as a social semiotic system. It was developed by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of a system from his teacher, J. R. Firth. Whereas Firth thought systems referred to possibilities subordinated to structure, Halliday, in a sense, "liberated" the dimension of choice from structure and made it the central organising dimension of this theory. In other words, where many approaches to linguistic description place structure and the syntagmatic axis in the foreground, Hallidean systemic functional theory adopts the paradigmatic axis as its point of departure. The term systemic accordingly foregrounds Saussure's "paradigmatic axis" in understanding how language works. For Halliday, a central theoretica