Michael Halliday

School of Thought

Halliday is notable for his grammatical theory and descriptions, his first major work on the subject of grammar was “Categories of the theory of grammar”, published in the journal Word in 1961. In this paper, he argued for four “fundamental categories” for the theory of grammar: unit, structure, class, and system. These categories, he argued, are “of the highest order of abstraction”, but he defended them as those necessary to “make possible a coherent account of what grammar is and of its place in language”. In articulating the category unit, Halliday proposed the notion of a rank scale. The units of grammar formed 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’. Halliday rejects a view of structure as “strings of classes, such as nominal group + verbalgroup + nominal group”, among which there is just a kind of mechanical solidarity” describing it instead as “configurations of functions, where the solidarity is organic”.

Theory publication year

His book An Introduction to Functional Grammar, was first published in 1985. A revised edition was published in 1994, and then a third, in which he collaborated with Christian Matthiessen, in 2004. The fourth edition was published in 2014. But 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 a ‘meaning potential’. Halliday follows Hjelmslev and Firth in distinguishing theoretical from descriptive categories in linguistics. 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’. Although, 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 been focused on English and Chinese.

Main tenets or premises

* The point of departure for Halliday’s work in linguistics has been the simple question: “how does language work?”. Across his career he has probed the nature of language as a social semiotic system; that is, as a resource for meaning across the many and constantly changing contexts of human interaction. In 2003, he published a paper setting out the accumulated principles of his theory, which arose as he engaged with many different language-related problems.

*Some interrelated key terms underpin Halliday’s approach to grammar, which forms part of his account of how language works. These concepts are: system, (meta)function, and rank. Another key term is lexicogrammar. In this view, grammar and lexis are two ends of the same continuum.

*For Halliday, grammar is described as systems not as rules, on the basis that every grammatical structure involves a choice from a describable set of options. In relation to English, for instance, Halliday has described systems such as mood, agency, theme, etc. Halliday describes grammatical systems as closed, beacuse you can have a finite set of options. By contrast, lexical sets are open systems, since new words come into a language all the time.

Contributions to the study of language

Michael Halliday in 1973 outlined seven functions of language with according to the grammar used by children:

• 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

Drawbacks of the theory

Halliday describes his grammar as built on the work of Saussure, Louis Hjelmslev, Malinowski, J.R. Firth, and the Prague school linguists. In addition, he drew on the work of the American anthropological linguists Boas, Sapir and Whorf. His “main inspiration” was Firth, to whom he owes, among other things, the notion of language as system. Among American linguists, Whorf had the most profound effect on his own thinking. Whorf showed how it is that human beings are not all in the same way, and how their unconscious ways of meaning are among the most significant manifestations of their culture.

From his studies in China, he lists Luo Changpei and Wang Li as two scholars from whom he gained “new and exciting insights into language”. He credits Luo for giving him a diachronic perspective and insights into a non-Indo-European language family. From Wang Li he learned many things, including research methods in dialectology, the semantic basis of grammar, and the history of linguistics in China.

How do you see this theory reflected in your language acquisition experience?

As future teachers, we must keep in mind that there are many funtions and stages that we need to consider and analize to be aware of them whenever we have to.

According to Halliday, the acquisition of a language is one the most important functions, that increases as we grow.