At the turn of the 21st century, research into the textual functions of narratives increasingly subjected these genres to types of analysis that had traditionally been reserved for literary works.
According to Halliday (1985/1994), language is structured to fulfill three main functions which he calls metafunctions; these are ideational, interpersonal and textual functions.
Figure 1 represents these relations as sets of nested circles, in which tenor, field and mode are distinguished at the level of register, and realised intrinsically in the interpersonal, ideational and textual functions of language, but woven together at the level of genre.
Textual mapping is a popular function; a recent project, in Denmark, used artificial intelligence to comb through thirty thousand witchy folktales and geographically plot their elements.
The output provides a real numbered value of the similarity of the functional match between two proteins as opposed to just a textual protein function description provided in a typical annotation by BLAST.
The textual metafunction functions to create "relevance to context" (Halliday and Matthiesen, 2014, p.85).
For example, the textual meta-function is concerned with relevance and the creation of text and the main element of the clause is Theme, which is generally identified as the first element of the clause expressing experiential meaning.
In a later paper (Davies 2012: 237 238,240 245, 249 250) I have moved towards proposing a different 'entry', in terms of a model of interaction with factors in the existing Common Ground, to an area that is close to the textual meta-function in SFL and again involves telling.
Briefly speaking, the available definitions of genre have addressed it from three basic perspectives: textual regularity, social function and social context (Hyon, 1996).
