Michael Halliday

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Michael Halliday : biography

13 April 1925 –
  • 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 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. Volume 3 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday. London and New York: Equinox.

Halliday’s work represents a competing viewpoint to the formalist approach of Noam Chomsky. Halliday’s concern is with "naturally occurring language in actual contexts of use" in a large typological range of languages whereas Chomsky is concerned only with the formal properties of languages such as English, which he thinks are indicative of the nature of what he calls Universal Grammar. While Chomsky’s search for Universal Grammar could be considered an essentially platonic endeavor (i.e. concerned with idealized forms), Halliday’s orientation to the study of natural language has been compared to Darwin’s method.Butt, D. G. 2005. Method and Imagination in Halliday’s science of linguistics. In Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective. Volume 1. London: Equinox.

Biography

Halliday was born and raised in England. His fascination for language was nurtured by his parents: 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.Webster, J. J. 2005. M.A.K.: the early years, 1925-1970. In R. Hasan, C. Matthiessen, and J.J. Webster. Continuing Discourse on Language. London: Equinox. p.3 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.Webster, J. J. 2005. M.A.K.: the early years, 1925–1970. In R. Hasan, C. Matthiessen, and J.J. Webster. Continuing Discourse on Language. London: Equinox. p. 4 He took a BA Honours degree in Modern Chinese Language and Literature (Mandarin) through the University of London. This was an external degree, with his studies conducted 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,Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. Systemic Background. In Systemic Perspectives on Discourse, Vol. 1: Selected Theoretical Papers from the Ninth International Systemic Workshop, edited by James D. Benson and William S. Greaves. Ablex. Reprinted in full in Volume 3 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday. London: Continuum. p188. before returning to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge under the supervision of Gustav Hallam and then J. R. Firth. Having taught languages for 13 years, he changed his field of specialisation to linguistics,Halliday, M.A.K. 2002. A Personal Perspective. Vol. 1 in The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday. London: Continuum. p. 2. 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. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961.