The Principal Ways to Express Future Time in Functional Analysis

In the light of Hallidays functional grammar, this paper starts with meaning and tries to discuss which of the five grammatical items are chosen to express subjective judgement of the future reality and intention and in what kind of context of situation, what metafunctions the six varieties of additional meaning of futurity predominantly realize through lexical grammatical patterns. According to the investigation into the four genres, the paper analyzes the occurrences of the five items.