Michael Halliday

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 2018) was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language.

His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar.

Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning".

For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'".

Halliday described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at language from every possible vantage point", and has described his work as "wander[ing] the highways and byways of language".

But he said that "to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: language as the Creature and creator of human society".

Halliday's grammar differs markedly from traditional accounts that emphasise the classification of individual words (e.g. noun, verb, pronoun, preposition) in formal, written sentences in a restricted number of "valued" varieties of English.

Halliday's model conceives grammar explicitly as how meanings are coded into wordings, in both spoken and written modes in all varieties and registers of a language.

Three strands of grammar operate simultaneously.

They concern (i) the interpersonal exchange between speaker and listener, and writer and reader; (ii) representation of our outer and inner worlds; and (iii) the wording of these meanings in cohesive spoken and written texts, from within the clause up to whole texts.

Notably, the grammar embraces intonation in spoken language.

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 the University of London—an external degree for which he studied in China.

He then lived for three years in China, where he studied under Luo Changpei at Peking University and under Wang Li at Lingnan University, before returning to take a PhD in Chinese linguistics at Cambridge under the supervision of Gustav Hallam and then J.R. Firth.

Halliday's first academic position was as an assistant lecturer in Chinese, at Cambridge University, from 1954 to 1958.

In 1958 he moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he was a lecturer in general linguistics until 1960, and a reader from 1960 to 1963.

His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961.

From 1963 to 1965 he was the director of the Communication Research Centre at University College, London.

During 1964, he was also a Linguistic Society of America Professor, at Indiana University.

From 1965 to 1971 he was a professor of linguistics at UCL.

In 1972–73 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, Stanford, and in 1973–74 professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois.

In 1974 he briefly moved back to Britain to be a professor of language and linguistics at Essex University.

In 1976 he moved to Australia as a foundation professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until he retired in 1987.

Halliday worked in multiple areas of linguistics, both theoretical and applied and was especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory and practices of education.

Halliday's seminal Introduction to Functional Grammar (first edition, 1985) spawned a new research discipline and related pedagogical approaches.

By far the most progress has been made in English, but the international growth of communities of SFL scholars has led to the adaptation of Halliday's advances to some other languages.

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.

Halliday's grammatical theory and descriptions gained wide recognition after the publication of the first edition of his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985.

In 1987 he was awarded the status of Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, Sydney.

He has honorary doctorates from the University of Birmingham (1987), York University (1988), the University of Athens (1995), Macquarie University (1996), Lingnan University (1999) and Beijing Normal University(2011).

A second edition was published in 1994, and then a third, in which he collaborated with Christian Matthiessen, in 2004.

Having taught languages for 13 years, he changed his field of specialisation to linguistics, and developed systemic functional linguistics, including systemic functional grammar, elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J.R. Firth and a group of European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague school.

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.

He died in Sydney of natural causes on 15 April 2018 at the age of 93.