Quantitative Research in Systemic Functional Linguistics

Abstract

The research of Systemic Functional Linguistics has been quite in-depth in both theory and practice. However, many linguists hold that Systemic Functional Linguistics has no hypothesis testing or experiments and its research is only qualitative. Analyses of the corpus, intelligent computing and language evolution on the ideological background of Systemic Functional Linguistics show that this theory focuses its research on language-in-use and is significantly quantitative in nature. It carries out both top-down and bottom-up approaches in specific studies and emphasizes on the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, the complementation of competence and performance data and the integration of manual and automatic operations.