“… language has evolved in the service of particular human needs … what is really significant is that this functional principle is carried over and built into the grammar, so that the internal organization of the grammar system is also functional in character.”

 "The term ‘text’ refers to any instance of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who knows the language; we can characterize text as language functioning in context.” 

"The text is a product in the sense that it is an output, something that can be recorded and studied, having a certain construction that can be represented in systematic terms. It is a process in the sense of a continuous process of semantic choice, a movement through the network of meaning potential, with each set of choices constituting the environment for a further set.

"It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts, and all texts, including those prose or verse, which fall within any definition of literature and are accessible to analysis by the existing methods of linguistics."

A discourse analysis that not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text.

[I]n fact, we can claim quite confidently that there can be no comprehensive scientific linguistics without parole, and no study of parole without context: a viable linguistics needs to incorporate both.

One of the strengths of SFL is its interest in text – both as evidence for building our models of language, and because many applications of SFL involve analyzing texts

It is of little use having an elegant theory of the system if it cannot account for how the system engenders text; equally, it adds little to expatiate on a text if one cannot relate it to the system that lies behind it.

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) terms, registers are envisaged as intermediate regions on the cline of instantiation between the system potential (the ‘whole’ lexicogrammar) at one end and the instance (a single text) at the other.

Right from the start, SFL has been designed to have the theoretical potential to be applied to solve problems in communities, ultimately to improve the human condition.

The strength of SFL work on discourse probably lies in its relatively well developed descriptions of genre and functional grammar, and the adaptabilityof SFL modeling across modalities (to image, music and action for example).

Translating a given text into frequencies of structural options is of little significance unless explanation is provided for such frequencies and this explanation can be provided only through mapping those choices to the contextual factors that have activated them.