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For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". [3] 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 ...
[citation needed] Halliday's theory encourages a more open approach to the definition of language as a resource; rather than focus on grammaticality as such, a systemic functional grammatical treatment focuses instead on the relative frequencies of choices made in uses of language and assumes that these relative frequencies reflect the ...
The paradigmatic principle of organization was established in semiotics by Saussure, whose concept of value (viz. "valeur") and of signs as terms in a system "showed up paradigmatic organization as the most abstract dimension of meaning". [2] However, Halliday points out that system in the sense J.R. Firth and he himself used it was different ...
Halliday argues that it was through this process of humans making meaning from experience that language evolved. Thus, the human species had to "make sense of the complex world in which it evolved: to classify, or group into categories, the objects and events within its awareness".
Halliday argues that, unlike system in the sense in which it was used by Firth was a conception only found in Firth’s linguistic theory. [4] In this use of the term “system”, grammatical, or other features of language, are considered best understood when described as sets of options.
For Halliday, languages evolve as systems of "meaning potential" (Halliday, 1978:39) or as sets of resources which influence what the speaker can do with language, in a particular social context. For example, for Halliday, the grammar of the English language is a system organised for the following three purposes (areas or "metafunctions"):
Halliday and Hasan considered exophoric reference as not cohesive, since it does not tie two elements together into in text. A homophoric reference is a generic phrase that obtains a specific meaning through knowledge of its context. For example, the meaning of the phrase "the Queen" may be determined by the country in which it is spoken.
Alongside stratification and metafunction, it is one of the global semiotic dimensions that define the organization of language in context. [1] [need quotation to verify] According to Michael Halliday, instantiation is "the relation between an instance and the system that lies behind it". It is "based on memory and is a feature of all systemic ...