Biography
Halliday was born and raised in England. His parents nurtured his fascination for language: his mother, Winifred, had studied French, and his father, Wilfred, was a dialectologist, a dialect poet, and an English teacher with a love for grammar and Elizabethan drama. In 1942, Halliday volunteered for the national services' foreign language training course. He was selected to study Chinese on the strength of his success in being able to differentiate tones. After 18 months' training, he spent a year in India working with the Chinese Intelligence Unit doing counter-intelligence work. In 1945 he was brought back to London to teach Chinese. He took a BA honours degree in modern Chinese language and literature (Mandarin) through theLinguistic theory and description
Halliday's grammatical theory and descriptions gained wide recognition after publication of the first edition of his book ''An Introduction to Functional Grammar'' in 1985. A second edition was published in 1994, and then a third, in which he collaborated with Christian Matthiessen, in 2004. A fourth edition was published in 2014. Halliday's conception of grammar – or "lexicogrammar", a term he coined to argue that lexis and grammar are part of the same phenomenon – is based on a more general theory of language as a social semiotic resource, or "meaning potential" (see Systemic functional linguistics). Halliday follows Hjelmslev and Firth in distinguishing theoretical from descriptive categories in linguistics.Halliday, "A Personal Perspective". In ''On Grammar'', Vol. 1 in ''The Collected Works'', p. 12. He argues that "theoretical categories, and their inter-relations, construe an abstract model of language ... they are interlocking and mutally defining. The theoretical architecture derives from work on the description of natural discourse, and as such 'no very clear line is drawn between '(theoretical) linguistics' and 'applied linguistics'". So the theory "is continually evolving as it is brought to bear on solving problems of a research or practical nature". Halliday contrasts theoretical categories with descriptive categories, defined as "categories set up in the description of particular languages". His descriptive work has focused on English and Mandarin. Halliday argues against some claims about language associated with the generative tradition. Language, he argues, "cannot be equated with 'the set of all grammatical sentences', whether that set is conceived of as finite or infinite". He rejects the use of formal logic in linguistic theories as "irrelevant to the understanding of language" and the use of such approaches as "disastrous for linguistics".Halliday, M.A.K. 1995. "A Recent View of 'Missteps' in Linguistic Theory". In ''Functions of Language'' 2.2. Vol. 3 of ''The Collected Works'', p. 236. On Chomsky specifically, he writes that "imaginary problems were created by the whole series of dichotomies that Chomsky introduced, or took over unproblematized: not only syntax/semantics but also grammar/lexis, language/thought, competence/performance. Once these dichotomies had been set up, the problem arose of locating and maintaining the boundaries between them."Studies of grammar
Fundamental categories
Halliday's first major work on grammar was "Categories of the theory of grammar", in the journal ''Word'' in 1961. In this paper, he argued for four "fundamental categories" in grammar: ''unit'', ''structure'', ''class'', and ''system''. These categories are "of the highest order of abstraction", but he defended them as necessary to "make possible a coherent account of what grammar is and of its place in language" In articulating unit, Halliday proposed the notion of a ''rank scale''. The units of grammar form a hierarchy, a scale from largest to smallest, which he proposed as: ''sentence'', ''clause'', ''group/phrase'', ''word'' and ''morpheme''. Halliday defined structure as "likeness between events in successivity" and as "an arrangement of elements ordered in places". He rejects a view of structure as "strings of classes, such as nominal group + verbalgroup + nominal group", describing structure instead as "configurations of functions, where the solidarity is organic".Grammar as systemic
Halliday's early paper shows that the notion of " system" has been part of his theory from its origins. Halliday explains this preoccupation in the following way: "It seemed to me that explanations of linguistic phenomena needed to be sought in relationships among systems rather than among structures – in what I once called "deep paradigms" – since these were essentially where speakers made their choices".Halliday, M. A. K. forthcoming. "Meaning as Choice". In Fontaine, L., Bartlett, T., and O'Grady, G. ''Choice: Critical Considerations in Systemic Functional Linguistics'', Cambridge University Press, p. 1. Halliday's "systemic grammar" is a semiotic account of grammar, because of this orientation to choice. Every linguistic act involves choice, and choices are made on many scales. Systemic grammars draw on system networks as their primary representation tool as a consequence. For instance, a major clause must display some structure that is the formal realization of a choice from the system of "voice", i.e. it must be either "middle" or "effective", where "effective" leads to the further choice of "operative" (otherwise known as 'active') or "receptive" (otherwise known as "passive").Grammar as functional
Halliday's grammar is not just ''systemic'', but ''systemic functional''. He argues that the explanation of how language works "needed to be grounded in a functional analysis, since language had evolved in the process of carrying out certain critical functions as human beings interacted with their ... 'eco-social' environment". Halliday's early grammatical descriptions of English, called "Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English – Parts 1–3" include reference to "four components in the grammar of English representing four functions that the language as a communication system is required to carry out: the experiential, the logical, the discoursal and the speech functional or interpersonal". The "discoursal" function was renamed the "textual function". In this discussion of functions of language, Halliday draws on the work ofLanguage in society
The final volume of Halliday's 10 volumes of Collected Papers is called ''Language in society'', reflecting his theoretical and methodological connection to language as first and foremost concerned with "acts of meaning". This volume contains many of his early papers, in which he argues for a deep connection between language and social structure. Halliday argues that language does not exist merely to reflect social structure. For instance, he writes:Studies in child language development
In enumerating his claims about the trajectory of children's language development, Halliday eschews the metaphor of "acquisition", in which language is considered a static product which the child takes on when sufficient exposure to natural language enables "parameter setting". By contrast, for Halliday what the child develops is a "meaning potential". Learning language is ''Learning how to mean'', the name of his well-known early study of a child's language development. Halliday (1975) identifies seven functions that language has for children in their early years. For Halliday, children are motivated to develop language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them. The first four functions help the child to satisfy physical, emotional and social needs. Halliday calls them instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions. * Instrumental: This is when the child uses language to express their needs (e.g. "Want juice") * Regulatory: This is where language is used to tell others what to do (e.g. "Go away") * Interactional: Here language is used to make contact with others and form relationships (e.g. "Love you, Mummy") * Personal: This is the use of language to express feelings, opinions, and individual identity (e.g. "Me good girl") The next three functions are heuristic, imaginative, and representational, all helping the child to come to terms with his or her environment. * Heuristic: This is when language is used to gain knowledge about the environment (e.g. 'What is the tractor doing?') * Imaginative: Here language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to create an imaginary environment. * Representational: The use of language to convey facts and information. According to Halliday, as the child moves into the mother tongue, these functions give way to the generalized "metafunctions" of language. In this process, in between the two levels of the simple protolanguage system (the "expression" and "content" pairing of the Saussure's sign), an additional level of content is inserted. Instead of one level of content, there are now two: lexicogrammar and semantics. The "expression" plane also now consists of two levels: phonetics and phonology.Halliday, M.A.K. 2003. "On the 'architecture' of human language". In ''On Language and Linguistics''. Vol. 3 in ''The Collected Works''. London and New York: Equinox. Halliday's work is sometimes seen as representing a competing viewpoint to the formalist approach of Noam Chomsky. Halliday's stated concern is with "naturally occurring language in actual contexts of use" in a large typological range of languages. Critics of Chomsky often characterise his work, by contrast, as focused on English with Platonic idealization, a characterization which Chomskyans reject (see Universal Grammar).Selected works
* * * 1967–68. "Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English, Parts 1–3", '' Journal of Linguistics'' 3(1), 37–81; 3(2), 199–244; 4(2), 179–215. * 1973. , London: Edward Arnold. * 1975. , London: Edward Arnold. * With C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, 2004. , 3d edn. London: Edward Arnold. (4th edn. 2014) * 2002. , ed. Jonathan Webster, Continuum International Publishing. * 2003. , ed. Jonathan Webster, Continuum International Publishing. * 2005. , ed. Jonathan Webster, Continuum International Publishing. * 2006. , Jonathan Webster (ed.), Continuum International Publishing. * 2006. , ed. Jonathan Webster, Continuum International Publishing. * With W. S. Greaves, 2008. , London: Equinox.See also
* Thematic equative *References
Sources and external links