The Relation of Systemic Functional Linguistics to Sociolinguistics in Terms of Its Origin and Development

The origin and development of systemic functional linguistics and sociolinguistics can be traced back to the similar age.They are interrelated with each other, sharing the same feature, i.e.revealing and establishing the relation between language and social culture.This paper is intended to investigate the relation of systemic functional linguistics to sociolinguistics in terms of its origin and development, no matter in what way sociolinguistics is referred to, i.e., in the narrow or broad sense.For the sake of limited space, this paper on the one hand discusses thoughts of the founding figures of the discipline, such as Malinowski, Firth and Halliday, and on the other hand summarizes studies of the representatives of a new generation, such as Hasan, Martin and Matthiessen.