The macro–functions are the most general categories of meaning potential, common to all uses of language.
- Halliday (1973), a pag.100

There is an immense functional diversity in the adult’s use of language; immense, that is, if we simply ask ʻin what kinds of activity does language play a part for him?ʼ. But this diversity of usage is reduced in the internal organization of the adult language system---in the grammar, in other words---to a very small set of functional components. Let us call these for the moment ʻmacro-functionsʼ to distinguish them from the functions of the child’s emergent language system, the instrumental, the regulatory and so on. These ʻmacro-functionsʼ are the highly abstract linguistic reflexes of the multiplicity of social uses of language.
- Halliday (1973), a pag.36