Abstract
This book contains 14 interviews with Halliday by Parret; Yamaguchi and Segawa; The English Magazine; Tickoo; Thibault; Hasan, Kress and Martin; O’Toole and Kress; Coffin; Hernandez; Thompson and Collins; Burns; Hu and Zhu; Rasheed; and Martin and Thibault, arranged chronologically from 1972 to 2011, with the last interview serving as a capstone to fill in missing details. Among some recurring themes that connect these interviews over the 40-year time span are: Halliday’s life and professional experience, theoretical continuity and influence from others, theoretical view of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), language and education, child language development, and application and future development of SFL.
Halliday started his linguistic journey with Cantonese dialectal study in China under the guidance of Wang Li, who also introduced him to Firthian theory. After an adventurous experience in China, he returned to Britain to finish his study of Chinese linguistics. However, the then political situation deprived him of a variety of positions as he was viewed as a Marxist linguist. After living and working in different parts of the world, Halliday finally settled in Australia and has been making significant contributions to SFL ever since.
One of the main traditions in modern linguistics is the European heritage of the Prague and London schools which view language as a tristratal system of semantics, grammar and phonology, each full of potential with alternatives (p. 5). Halliday has been deeply influenced by this tradition in his linguistic thought. He has also been influenced by anthropologists such as Bernstein, Malinowski, Buhler, Sapir and Whorf to highlight the significance of language in cultural transmission, social processes and the social semiotic nature of language.
The other main tradition is the structuralist school, represented by Chomskyan linguistics in North America, which, from a psychological tradition, prioritizes ‘constituency, deep structure, and formalization of constituent structure’ with no consideration of semantics (p. 33). To Halliday, Chomskyan linguistics is ‘highly idealized’ as a ‘form of reductionism’ (p. 4), in essence positivistic. He fights against the dichotomies between ‘langue/parole’ and ‘competence/performance’, and argues that the only distinction should be between an actualization and the total potential of the system. The two senses of language as autonomous knowledge inside the head and as instrument to facilitate interaction, embedded in social and cultural contexts, are complementary.
SFL differs from traditional grammar in that the latter isolates language as a thing in itself, detached from social system and process. Being a language-based theory of learning and knowledge, SFL also differs from other functional grammars in the delicacy of its focus and paradigmatic basis. Halliday progresses from a Marxist position that views language as a reflection of material reality to a non-Marxist one that relates language to its social context as a social semiotic system. SFL connects context and language in that language is viewed as a resource and a choice, constructing reality rather than reflecting it. Language construes context and context influences language use in a two-way relationship.
The current dominance of ‘psychology over sociology in the theory of education reflects western obsession with the individual, and the conviction that learning is an individual rather than a social process’ (p. 64). Influenced by Bernstein, who studies educational failure in relation to language and social class, Halliday argues that being a part of learning experience, language development starts from childhood and is a continuous process from the home into the school. All learning is learning language and learning through language. As school language brings unconscious knowledge to the conscious level, this could be difficult for children from some social class backgrounds due to the gap between their ‘natural’ language and the language of school. Treating language arbitrarily as a set of rules is problematic. SFL provides a tool to fix this problem of learning in the school setting.
Halliday analyzed child language development from a functional perspective. As the protolinguistic stage of child language development is not about the formal properties of human language, Halliday argues against the transformationalist view of language acquisition that ‘children learn or acquire structures of a language or rather rules by means of which those structures are generated’ (p. 49). He believes that children construe language as both an intersubjective and a social interactive process.
The theoretical conceptions of SFL can be applied to multiple areas of knowledge, including multimodality in images and music, visual arts, displayed art and so on; applications in translation for a variety of languages; the description of many languages other than English; language generation and machine translation; analysis of literature; clinical work on language and language pathology.
The future of SFL is to provide a resource for different questions about language, useful for people outside linguistics with other problems involving language. The value of SFL lies in its orientation toward application. Halliday proposes ‘applicable linguistics’ (p. 187) to replace ‘applied linguistics’ to emphasize the need to constantly broaden linguistics in other disciplines and involve contexts in which it can be applied. His wide experience with other languages and other systems makes SFL a flexible, comprehensive system. He warns against prioritizing other systems over language, and argues for a less Anglo-centric, socio-cognitive dynamic perspective of language.
To better understand Halliday’s works and ideas, a wide variety of background knowledge, such as history of linguistic development and different schools of language study, is needed to follow the interview themes. As a collection of interviews, this book does not specifically discuss SFL theory per se, but reviews its political, historical and theoretical background and connections to help readers gain a more comprehensive understanding of Halliday’s personal life and theoretical contribution. All interviewers are well versed in SFL. Their knowledge, expertise and explanation interact with Halliday’s answers as guidance, clarification and sometimes summary of the importance of Halliday’s works. As SFL is a powerful tool of various aspects of language study, including discourse analysis, readers will surely get a deeper understanding and respect for Halliday, as a great human being and scholar.