Theory-informed language descriptions: A systematic review of systemic-functional grammatical descriptions from 2004 to 2024

In debates around “theoretical” and “atheoretical” descriptions, it is often left implicit what the relationship between theory and description is, as reflected in the common use of the term “descriptive theories”. The distinction, however, is made explicit in one of the frameworks that is often left out in such debates—Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Such an explicit distinction characterises SFL's commitment to describing each language in its own terms, a concern shared with other descriptive linguistic approaches. This paper introduces the key SFL theoretical dimensions—system, rank, metafunction, stratification, and instantiation—and demonstrates how these dimensions can be applied systematically to review SFL grammatical descriptions. In doing so, the theory has enabled us to identify regions of meaning that have attracted SFL scholars over the past twenty years (e.g., the particular systems, ranks, and metafunctions). The theory has also made it possible for us to examine published descriptions in terms of approaches to grammar and the handling of data. The study thus highlights the advantages of an explicit distinction between theory and description.