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Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 2018) was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. [1]
[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 ...
For Halliday, all languages involve three simultaneously generated metafunctions: one construes experience of our outer and inner reality as well as logical relations between phenomena (ideational); another enacts social relations (interpersonal relations); and a third weaves together these two functions to create text (textual—the wording).
Halliday follows Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) in seeing linguistics as the study of both instances of language and the linguistic system. Halliday argues that linguists must take both into account: "For a linguist, to describe language without accounting for text is sterile; to describe text without relating it to the system is vacuous". [5]
For this reason, systemic linguists analyse a clause from three perspectives. Halliday argues that the concept of metafunction is one of a small set of principles that are necessary to explain how language works; this concept of function in language is necessary to explain the organisation of the semantic system of language. [2]
Halliday borrowed the term group from the linguist/classicist Sydney Allen. [4] In the second place, the functional notion of nominal group differs from the formal notion of noun phrase because the first is anchored on the thing being described whereas the second is anchored on word classes.
British linguist Michael K. Halliday proposes a useful dichotomy of spoken and written language which actually entails a shift in paradigm: while linguistic theory posits the superiority of spoken language over written language (as the former is the origin, comes naturally, and thus precedes the written language), or the written over the spoken ...
Michael Halliday, the father of systemic functional linguistics, coined the word "lexicogrammar" [citation needed] to express the continuity between grammar and lexis. For many linguists, these phenomena are discrete. But Halliday brings them together with this term.