Halliday之前的许多学者试图从语言学、心理学和社会学等不同学科视角提出功能的思想。本文比较Jacobson与Halliday的语言功能观,着重介绍后者的元功能思想。两位学者都从社会文化角度出发,把语言视为行为,都将语境与语义功能紧密联系。Halliday的功能思想源于对儿童习得母语的实证观察,认为语言元功能是在人与社会环境的互动过程中逐渐抽象出来的,其功能思想内容更加丰富也更具概括性,Halliday将各种功能的语言体现形式进行了系统化和范畴化描写。本文认为Halliday的功能观是辩证的。 Many of Halliday’s previous scholars tried to propose functional ideas from different disciplinary perspectives, such as linguistics, psychology and sociology. This article compares Jacobson with Halliday’s linguistic features, focusing on the meta-functional thinking of the latter. Both scholars regard the language as a behavior from the perspective of social culture and close the connection between context and semantic function. Halliday’s functional thinking stems from the empirical observation of children’s acquisition of their mother tongue, that language metafunction is gradually abstracted in the process of interaction between human and social environment, and its functional thought is richer and more generalized. The functional language manifests itself in a systematic and categorical way. This paper argues that Halliday’s functional conception is dialectical.