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A tribute to M.A.K. Halliday (1925-2018)

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

With the death of Michael Halliday on 15 April 2018, the world has lost a unique scholar who, with reference to the Renaissance concept of a ‘homo universalis’ can truly be called a ‘universal linguist’. Halliday’s work and thought have cast new light on all core areas of linguistics and on an exceptional range of cross-disciplinary domains involving linguistics, amongst which he himself singled out (Martin 2013: 185-186) text and discourse analysis, language development, computational studies, educational linguistics and sociolinguistics. Importantly, the opening up of horizons in all these domains is fundamentally rooted in his intense concern with the very core of linguistic meaning-making: how does the form of a language, i.e. its phonology and lexicogrammar, code linguistic interaction? It is this concern that makes his linguistic legacy, which engages with theory, description and application, “astonishingly coherent” (Engels 1990: 724).Halliday’s enormous impact on the field is most obvious in the rich (discourse) semantics he has described, mainly of English, and in what can be done with these semantics in cross-disciplinary domains. What has received less attention is the point that for Halliday semantic description fundamentally has to pass through functional-structural analysis of the phonological and lexicogrammatical form of any specific language (Halliday 1985: xxxi). Halliday has often been recorded as saying that he thought of himself as primarily a grammarian (Martin 2013: 185), but in personal conversations he spoke with particular delight about the contributions he had made to prosodic analysis (p.c. Halliday 2018). Halliday (2014: 4) in fact wrote that it was perhaps because he naturally tended “towards the expression end” [i.e. the phonological end of the linguistic sign] that he “became a grammarian, to redress the balance”. The first part of this tribute will survey Halliday’s work on language description and theory formation, which he viewed as inextricably interrelated. As Dixon (1984) put it, “Halliday emphasised that linguists should work simultaneously on two fronts. Detailed description of the grammars of a wide range of languages is necessary as input to high level generalisations about ‘the general nature of any grammar’” (Dixon 1984: 5). I will chronicle Halliday’s phonological and grammatical descriptions of Chinese (1.1.1), English (1.2.1), and the protolanguage of one specific child (1.3.1). These descriptions were started at different stages of his career, and he set about them, motivated by a specific “set of problems [and] queries” (Halliday in interview, Martin 2013: 183), which I will situate in their historical context. As the descriptions evolved, new theoretical insights arose about such topics as the semiotic structure of language, the categories needed to carry out phonological and lexicogrammatical analysis, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language organization, the functional motivation of the internal structure of the language system, and the relations between language use, context, and society. To bring out the interaction between description and theory formation, I will discuss Halliday’s Scale and Category model (1.1.2) in relation to his work on Chinese (1.1.1), his articulation of Systemic Functional Linguistics (1.2.2) in the context of his description of English (1.2.1), and his ideas on language as a social semiotic (1.3.2) in relation to his studies of language development (1.3.1). In the second part of the tribute, Halliday’s contributions to, and impact on, cross-disciplinary domains will be briefly surveyed. Throughout these two parts, many of the people Halliday interacted with will be highlighted, his mentors and collaborators, and many scholars who were inspired by him, but it is impossible to do justice to, or even mention, all.
Journal: Functions of Language
ISSN: 0929-998X
Issue: 2
Volume: 25
Pages: 205 - 228
Publication year:2018