Michael Halliday

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (born 1925) is a linguist who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar (which also goes by the name of systemic functional linguistics [SFL]). In addition to English, the model has been applied to other languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European.

Halliday was born and grew up in England. He took a BA Honours degree in Modern Chinese Language and Literature (Mandarin) at the University of London, then studied for three years in China (Peking University and Lingnan University), returning to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge. Having taught Chinese for a number of years, he changed his field of specialisation to linguistics, and developed systemic functional grammar, elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a group of influential European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague School. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961. He became the Professor of Linguistics at the University of London in 1965. In 1976 he moved to Australia as Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until he retired. He has worked in various regions of language study, both theoretical and applied, and has been especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory and practices of education. He received the status of emeritus professor of the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, Sydney, in 1987, and is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. With his seminal lecture "New Ways of Meaning: the Challenge to Applied Linguistics" held at the AILA conference in Saloniki (1990), he became one of the pioneers of eco-critical discourse analysis (a discipline of ecolinguistics).

Halliday (1975) identifies seven functions that language has for children in their early years. Children are motivated to acquire 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 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.