Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) views text as a semantic unit that realises social meaning through three simultaneously operating metafunctions of language: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. This article aims to analyse the development of the concept of text within the SFL framework through a systematic literature review of 45 primary sources published between 1978 and 2024. Findings reveal that the notion of text has expanded from a primarily grammatical unit (Halliday, 1961; Halliday & Hasan, 1976) to a multimodal semiotic entity (O’Halloran, 2004; Kress, 2010) and an interactional unit in digital contexts (Martin & White, 2005; Zappavigna, 2018). Three dominant themes emerged: (1) cohesion and coherence as core criteria of textuality (Halliday & Hasan, 1989), (2) register and genre as organisers of situational and cultural meaning (Martin, 1992; Eggins, 2004), and (3) appraisal and evaluation as extensions of the interpersonal metafunction in text (Martin & Rose, 2007). This review concludes that the concept of text in SFL is dynamic and context-dependent, continuously evolving in response to increasingly complex social practices. For Indonesian language education, the findings imply the necessity of genre-based and contextually grounded text pedagogy. Future research is recommended to apply this framework to contemporary Indonesian-language digital corpora.
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