In this invited Afterword Matthiessen positions this volume as the third step in a series of books introducing students and colleagues to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) – following on from the general introduction in Matthiessen and Halliday (1997/2009) and the introduction to formulating system networks in Martin, Wang and Zhu (2013). It also positions the work on English, Spanish and Chinese in this volume in relation to work on other languages, much of which has been curated and/or mentored by Matthiessen. In addition this afterword reviews a number of key issues arising in relation to language description based on SFL. These include the paradigmatic orientation of system descriptions, cryptogrammatical reasoning, trinocular vision (from about, from roundabout and from below), metafunction (ideational, interpersonal and textual), rank and functional language typology.

This chapter introduces the appliable linguistics theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), informing this grammar of Korean. The three basic theoretical dimensions of SFL are outlined – stratification (levels of language), rank (constituency) and metafunction (kinds of meaning). The approach to the distinctive relation of system to structure in SFL is then explained, including the formalisation of paradigmatic relations in system networks. The chapter closes with an outline of the book as a whole.

Chapter 3 targets the theoretical issues underlying non-finiteness. It is argued that spoken and written language should be distinguished because they require different grammars. With the wisdom in current literature and with the focus on written language, this chapter elaborates on cryptotype and cline, metafunctions as universal categories, process as the basic semantic unit, clause as the basic syntactic unit, ideational grammatical metaphor as the mechanism, two principles in constructional tendency, the difference between rankshifting and embedding, and a new definition of non-finiteness. Thus, the answer is provided to the question: In what way is the finite/non-finite distinction universal?