flux of experience through the unit of the clause. The ideational metafunction reflects the contextual value of field, that is, the nature of the social process in which the language is implicated. An analysis of a text from the perspective of the ideational function involves inquiring into the choices in the grammatical system of "transitivity": that is, process types, participant types, circumstance types, combined with an analysis of the resources through which clauses are combined. Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar (in the third edition, with revisions by Christian Matthiessen) sets out the description of these grammatical systems. Interpersonal metafunction The interpersonal metafunction relates to a text's aspects of tenor or interactivity. Like field, tenor comprises three component areas: the speaker/writer persona, social distance, and relative social status. Social distance and relative social status are applicable only to spoken texts, although a case has been made that these two factors can also apply to written text. The speaker/writer persona concerns the stance, personalisation and standing of the speaker or writer. This involves looking at whether the writer or speaker has a neutral attitude, which can be seen through the use of positive or negative language. Social distance means how close the speakers are, e.g. how the use of nicknames shows the degree to which they are intimate. Relative social status asks whether they are equal in terms of power and knowledge on a subject, for example, the relationship between a mother and child would be considered unequal. Focuses here are on speech acts (e.g. whether one person tends to ask questions and the other speaker tends to answer), who chooses the topic, turn management, and how capable both speakers are of evaluating the subject. Textual metafunction The textual metafunction relates to mode; the internal organisation and communicative nature of a text. This comprises textual interactivity, spontaneity and communicative distance. Textual interactivity is examined with reference to disfluencies such as hesitators, pauses and repetitions. Spontaneity is determined through a focus on lexical density, grammatical complexity, coordination (how clauses are linked together) and the use of nominal groups. The study of communicative distance involves looking at a text's cohesion—that is, how it hangs together, as well as any abstract language it uses. Cohesion is analysed in the context of both lexical and grammatical as well as intonational aspects with reference to lexical chains and, in the speech register, tonality, tonicity, and tone.