Applications of the functional grammar to spanish

The present work has two goals to accomplish; first of all, to apply the theoretical tools provided by the Functional Grammar perspective for the analysis of texts; and secondly, to attain an approximation to notions of genre and register. Thus, we will begin by exploring and analysing the theoretical and conceptual model proposed by such an approach in order to discover its possible applications to the Spanish system. To make a start, we will make some methodologic considerations related to the study and development of the concepts and key ideas established by that perspective. Then we will try a comparative analysis of two excerpts where the similarities and differences detected by applying its triple outlook -experiential meanings that encode our experiences of the world; interpersonal meanings that allow us to interact with others; and textual meanings that organize previous elements to construct coherent and relevant messages-are discussed. The corpus consists of two pieces of writing that have been selected because they share the same topic: the role of grammar. One of them has been extracted from a manual on prosody, orthography and grammar of the Spanish Language; the other is an excerpt taken from an interview with the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Msrquez, conducted during a debate triggered by his speech at the First International Congress of the Spanish Language that took place in Mexico in 1997.