Blurb:

An excellent way of understanding ‘system’ as it has been used in SFL and the phenomena that it was developed to capture is to observe how its manifestations emerge in the course of ontogenesis, from the early phase of young children learning how to mean to the later phase when they have begun to master the mother tongue(s) spoken by members of their immediate meaning group and the wider community that it is part of. In this chapter, I review the systemic functional account of how children learn how to mean from the point of view of the development of the system, beginning with emergence of protolanguage and its separate microfunctional meaning potentials. I use it to illuminate the gradual separation of the two semiotic dimensions of axis and stratification, and introduce the basics of systems forming system networks.