Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday - life history

1. Umm-e-Rooman Yaqoob
Roll no. 3
B.S (English) 6th semester
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday
Introduction:
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M.A.K. Halliday) (born 13 April 1925) is a British-born
Australian linguistwho developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language.
His grammatical descriptionsgo by the name of systemic functional grammar (SFG). Halliday describes languageas
a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs,buta systemic resourcefor meaning". For Halliday,
languageis a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defines linguisticsas thestudy of "how people exchange
meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday describes himself as a generalist, meaning that he has tried "to look at
languagefrom every possiblevantagepoint", and has described his work as "wander[ing] the highways and
byways of language". However, he has claimed that"to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social:
languageas the creature and creator of human society".
Halliday`s Grammatical Theory:
Halliday is notablefor his grammatical theory and descriptions,outlined in his book An Introduction to Functional
Grammar, firstpublished in 1985.Arevised edition was published in 1994,and then a third,in which he
collaborated with Christian Matthiessen,in 2004.But Halliday’sconception of grammar – or "lexicogrammar"(a
term he coined to argue that lexis and grammar are partof the same phenomenon) – is based on a more general
theory of languageas a social semiotic resource,or a ‘meaning potential’(see systemic functional linguistics).
Halliday follows Hjelmslevand Firth in distinguishingtheoretical fromdescriptivecategories in linguistics. Heargues
that ‘theoretical categories,and their inter-relations,construean abstractmodel of language...they are
interlockingand mutually defining.The theoretical architecturederives from work on the description of natural
discourse,and as such ‘no very clear lineis drawn between ‘(theoretical) linguistics’and ‘applied linguistics’. Thus,
the theory ‘is continually evolvingas itis broughtto bear on solvingproblems of a research or practical
nature’. Halliday contraststheoretical categories with descriptivecategories,defined as "categories set up in the
description of particularlanguages". His descriptivework has been focused on English and Chinese.
Halliday rejects explicitly theclaims aboutlanguageassociated with the generative tradition.Language, he argues,
"cannot be equated with 'the set of all grammatical sentences',whether that set is conceived of as finiteor
infinite".He rejects the use of formal logic in linguistic theories as "irrelevantto the understandingof language"
and the useof such approaches as "disastrous for linguistics". On Chomsky specifically,hewrites that "imaginary
problems were created by the whole series of dichotomies that Chomsky introduced,or took over
unproblematized: not only syntax/semantics butalso grammar/lexis,language/thought,
competence/performance. Once these dichotomies had been set up, the problem aroseof locatingand
maintainingthe boundaries between them."
Halliday’s view of language:
Halliday’s “lexicogrammar”is a functional accountof the “meaning potential”that speakers of English haveat their
disposal.For Halliday,a languageis madeup of more-or-less closed “systems” of words and grammatical
structures,with our vocabulary constitutinga relatively open system, and grammar a fixed number of relatively
closed ones. From these systems speakers make selections in order to construct, simultaneously,“wordings” and
“meanings”. The systems of wordings and meanings thus availableto a languageuser reflect the social and cultural
context of the languageas well as the needs of the immediate situation.So the meanings that a speaker can
encode, although they may be in some sense new, are heavily constrained by the recurrent nature of the
situations of use.

2. For Halliday “meanings”areof three sorts,and every utterance encodes meaning on three levels simultaneously.
The three types of meanings availableto speakers areideational , interpersonal and textual. These broad types of
meaning are in factcalled “metafunctions”. Speakers use their lexicon-cum-grammar over the courseof a given
utterance a) to represent experience, b) to achieve interpersonal goals,and c) to structureinformation as
efficiently and effectively as possiblefroma communicative pointof view. It can be seen from this that for Halliday
“meaning” means “function” (more exactly,“function in context”). The kinds of meaning we communicate can be
overt, as in the words we use and what we say,or covert, in that the structures we employ indirectly also convey
more abstractkinds of meaning. In 1978,in a seminal publication called Languageas Social Semiotic, Halliday tied
many theoretical threads together to give languagea central but ambivalentplacein a powerful theory of human
lifein social contexts.Here he develops an explicitaccountof how “languageand society meet in the grammar” (as
DianeKilpert,2003, felicitously putit). According to this account, our languageon the one hand shapes the way we
perceive the world we livein and, in particular,our social world;but, at the same time, through its rich potential
for creatingnew meanings, itallows us to act upon and shape that world.
Eco-linguistics:
Halliday is widely regarded as a pioneer of eco-critical discourse analysis after an influential lectureentitled “New
Ways of Meaning: the Challengeto Applied Linguistics”atthe AILA conference in Saloniki in 1990 (AILA
= Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée, otherwise the International Applied LinguisticsAssociation).
The lecture has been published in The Ecolinguistics Reader (edited by Alwin Fill and Peter Muhlhausler,2001).The
main example he gives in this paper is the widespread metaphor of economic growth; he goes on to describehow
the English languagehas become pervaded with terms such as large,grow, tall,all of which areimplicitly evaluated
as positiveand good – despite inevitably negativeconsequences for the ecology. This is oneof the few public
statements Halliday has madeabout the ideological contentof discoursein social life(though it must be said that
practitioners of Critical Linguistics and Critical DiscourseAnalysisoften acknowledge their debt to Hallidayan
linguisticsas method).
In fact Halliday has always been a political radical,atleastsincean early sojourn in China and his involvementwith
the British CommunistParty whileat Cambridge (in the early 1950s).However, disappointed with Marxist
linguistics(as itwas called),he“deferred” political activismin order to work on his own theory of language –
though this for Halliday was notso much a theory of languageas a theory of language in social lifeand hence a
theory of how society works. Halliday has never engaged directly,or at leastpublicly,in political debates and it can
be argued that his social theory (and the articulation of this in terms of field,tenor and mode) fails to account,
overtly at least,for disparateinterests,motives, and conflict(JimMartin’s work on hortatory exposition,and on
genre and ideology,has filled this gap to some extent, but he is more interested these days in positive discourse
analysis.)
Conclusion:
Investigatinglanguageas a socially situated phenomenon, Halliday has revealed the invisibleinfrastructureof daily
life,and of human relationships and identities.His functional linguistics,in detailingthenanomechanics of
everyday talk and texts, has shown us how social actors both constructmeaning and are embedded in constructed
meaning. The meaning potential of language,made accessiblein this way,is whatgives us our ability to invent and
innovate and (in theory at least) develop the civilizingparameters of our world.