Text Generation and Systemic-Functional Linguistics: Experiences from English and Japanese

This is an important book. On the surface, it is a survey and summary of work related to a major computational linguistics effort--the Penman project at the University of Southern California. Beneath the specific title and the apparently narrow subject matter, however, lies a general point about the field of computational linguistics: many important aspects of language are not addressed by the generative tradition that has dominated the field. This book aims to demonstrate that other types of linguistic description are available to serve as the basis for a computational linguistic treatment of these issues. As the second half of the book's title suggests, the research presented is based on M. A. K. Halliday's functional theory of grammar (see Winograd [1983, Chapter 6] for an excellent computationally oriented synopsis). Some confusion has surrounded Halliday's work and the notion of a functional grammar, as indicated by another recent review (Fraser 1991, pp. 104-106):