Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M.A.K. Halliday) (born 13 April 1925) is a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar (SFG). 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 the highways and byways of language". However, 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".