XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was born in Leeds, Yorkshire on 13 April 1925.1 Leeds was (and still is) a prosperous town in the North of England, with a population around 450,000 at that point. The major industries were tailoring, publishing and brewing. Michael was the only child of two teachers, who taught at the secondary level at Pudsey Grammar School (fairly well respected in those days, now called Grangefield School, Pudsey, half-way between Leeds and Bradford). His father, Wilfrid Joseph Halliday, taught English and Latin, his mother taught French.

For his first few years, Michael lived in the family house at 5 Armley Grange Drive, Leeds,14 which is in the Upper Armley part of West Leeds. He went to the local school, West Leeds Elementary School, starting at four years of age. When Michael was 7, the family moved to Whitby, in the far north of Yorkshire.3 He attended the Abbey School in Whitby from 1932-1934, and then the Fyling Hall School (Robin Hood Bay, an area just south of Whitby), from 1934-1938.15 Fyling Hall School was (and still is) an independent school, with an emphasis on drama, and rural skills. The school was co-educational, which was rare in those days for a private school.

Halliday worked in multiple areas of linguistics, both theoretical and applied, and was especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory and practices of education.^[19] In 1987 he was awarded the status of Emeritus Professor of the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, Sydney. He has honorary doctorates from University of Birmingham (1987), York University (1988), the University of Athens (1995), Macquarie University (1996), Lingnan University (1999) and Beijing Normal University(2011).

He was an English-born linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. Halliday describes language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". For Halliday, language is a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defines linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday describes himself as a generalist, meaning that he has tried "to look at language from every possible vantage point", and has described his work as "wander[ing] the highways and byways of language". But he has claimed that "to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: language as the creature and creator of human society".

Halliday's grammar differs markedly from traditional accounts that emphasise classification of individual words (e.g. noun, verb, pronoun, preposition) in formal, written sentences in a restricted number of "valued" varieties of English. Halliday's model conceives grammar explicitly as how meanings are coded into wordings, in both spoken and written modes in all varieties and registers of a language. Three strands of grammar operate simultaneously. They concern: (i) the interpersonal exchange between speaker and listener, and writer and reader; (ii) representation of our outer and inner worlds; and (iii) the wording of these meanings in cohesive spoken and written texts, from within the clause up to whole texts. Notably, the grammar embraces intonation in spoken language. Halliday's seminal Introduction to Functional Grammar (first edition, 1985) spawned a new research discipline and related pedagogical approaches. By far the most progress has been made on English, but the international growth of communities of SFL scholars has led to the adaptation of Halliday's advances to some other languages.

Halliday argues against some claims about language associated with the generative tradition. Language, he argues, "cannot be equated with 'the set of all grammatical sentences', whether that set is conceived of as finite or infinite".He rejects the use of formal logic in linguistic theories as "irrelevant to the understanding of language" and the use of such approaches as "disastrous for linguistics".