Note on Halliday's INSTRUMENTAL FUNCTION

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday often known as M.A.K Halliday or Michael Halliday,
who is English born linguist, born in 13 April 1925 and died in 15 April 2018. His name is often
cited as an functional linguist, M.A.K Halliday is a student of J.R Firth. M.A.K Halliday goes
one step ahead than J.R Firth because Halliday gave importance on meanings, and meaning is
basic, and a little more importance what we want to say.

At first we need to know what is functional competence? basically, my ability to perceive my

functional competence, i.e. basic skills and behavior is needed to do a job successfully. M.A.K
Halliday refuted Chomsky’s LAD system. In 1975 he identified seven functions, in 1978
Halliday proposed 7 stages of function. They are, Instrumental function, Regulatory function,
Interactional function, Personal function, Heuristic function, Imaginative function,
Representational function.

In this part I will briefly discuss about instrumental function. Simple definition of instrumental
function is “the language used to satisfy needs”. And make it more simple to understand that “I
want”, language that is used to fulfill a need. Use language to express a need. Through which we
satisfy our personal need that refer to instrumental function. i.e. I want food, I want to go for
shopping. If you ask your sister, are you free tomorrow? Do you have class in the afternoon,
speaker use these kind of utterance for personal request.

So from this brief discussion we got idea about as M.A.K Halliday,s function and instrumental
function. This discussion will give you idea about instrumental functional.(263)