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Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". [2] For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". [3]
[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".
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".
The nominal group is a structure which includes nouns, adjectives, numerals and determiners, which is associated with the thing under description (a.k.a. entity), and whose supporting logic is Description Logic. The term noun has a narrower purview and is detached from any notion of entity description.
Halliday's findings can be compiled as a list of nine criteria that a language must meet to be considered an anti-language: An anti-society is a society set up within another society as a conscious alternative to it. Like the early records of the languages of exotic cultures, the information usually comes to us as word lists.
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 ...