A central challenge in linguistics pertains to understanding how the polished, static form of a written text emerges from the messy, moment-by-moment decisions of the writer. While the structures of finished texts have been extensively theorized, and the real-time cognitive processes of writing have been widely studied, the relationship between these real-time processes and the functional linguistic structures produced during writing remains undertheorized and empirically underexplored. Understanding this relationship is essential for developing theoretically grounded models of how writers manage competing linguistic demands during composition. This thesis addresses this gap by bringing together two research traditions that have largely developed in parallel: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and writing process research. While SFL provides a theoretical framework for understanding how meaning is structured through metafunctional organization and hierarchical linguistic units, empirical evidence for how such constructs emerge during the writing process has been limited. Conversely, from a writing process research perspective, pauses are a key behavioral indicator of underlying cognitive processes, revealing moments of planning, monitoring, and decision-making in real-time. As such, they offer a window into how writers construct meaning and structure text as it unfolds. Although writing process research has revealed much about the temporal dynamics of writing through keystroke logging, it has often lacked theoretically grounded frameworks for connecting the behavioral patterns during writing to the linguistic structures being produced. Through three empirical studies using keystroke logging methodology, this thesis examines pause patterns in relation to SFL-defined boundaries, addressing four research questions about the alignment between pause patterns and linguistic units, the relationship between metafunctional organization and pause distribution, SFL's contribution to production unit identification, and its role in understanding cognitive effort during writing. The results provide evidence for systematic alignment between pause behavior during writing and SFL-defined linguistic units. Functional context analysis demonstrated that pauses occurred disproportionately at boundaries of functional roles such as participants and processes in clauses, while thematic analysis revealed that thematic choices affected pause activity. A pre-task planning manipulation showed that cognitive effort redistributes rather than disappears, with planning reducing demands at lower-level boundaries while maintaining demands at higher-level discourse boundaries. Through pause analysis, the findings provide partial support for SFL theoretical constructs that demonstrate the psychological reality of metafunctional organization and offer methodological innovations for writing process research. The research contributes to both SFL theory and writing process research by showing that a metafunctional view of language reflects certain aspects of language processing, through which cognitive load distribution across different meaning-making tasks during the process of writing can be potentially better understood.
Mojtaba Sayyad Mahernia (Fri,) studied this question.