In the academic context, the discourse community tends to have its preferred pattern and lexical realizations to unfold discourse, present information, and perform macro discoursal or textual functions. These functions are called academic discourse functions. Within Halliday’s framework of the metafunctions of language, this paper generalizes three primary discourse functions of phraseological sequences (PSs) in English academic texts: organizational, experiential, and stance, which are the specific embodiment of textualmatafunctions in academic discourse. It is argued that some PSs are so frequently used to perform concrete discourse functions that in a sense, the most typical of them become signals of the functions.