Michael Halliday - Biography

Biography

Halliday was born and raised in England. His fascination for language was nurtured by his parents: his mother, Winifred, had studied French, and his father, Wilfred, was a dialectologist, a dialect poet, and an English teacher with a love for grammar and Elizabethan drama. In 1942, Halliday volunteered for the national services' foreign language training course. He was selected to study Chinese on the strength of his success in being able to differentiate tones. After 18 months' training, he spent a year in India working with the Chinese Intelligence Unit doing counter-intelligence work. In 1945 he was brought back to London to teach Chinese. He took a BA Honours degree in Modern Chinese Language and Literature (Mandarin) through the University of London. This was an external degree, with his studies conducted in China. He then lived for three years in China, where he studied under Luo Changpei at Peking University and under Wang Li at Lingnan University, before returning to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge under the supervision of Gustav Hallam and then J. R. Firth. Having taught languages for 13 years, he changed his field of specialisation to linguistics, and developed systemic functional linguistics, including systemic functional grammar, elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a group of European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague school. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961.

Halliday's first academic position was Assistant Lecturer in Chinese, at Cambridge University, from 1954 to 1958. In 1958 he moved to Edinburgh, where he was Lecturer in General Linguistics until 1960, and then Reader from 1960 to 1963. From 1963 to 1965, he was the director of the Communication Research Center at University College, London. During 1964, he was also Linguistic Society of America Professor, at Indiana University. From 1965 to 1971, he was Professor of Linguistics at UCL. In 1972–73 he was Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, at Stanford, and in 1973–74 Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois. In 1974 he briefly moved back to Britain as Professor of Language and Linguistics at Essex University. In 1976 he moved to Australia as Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until he retired in 1987.

Halliday has worked in various regions of language study, both theoretical and applied, and has been especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory and practices of education. He received the status of Emeritus Professor of the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, Sydney, in 1987. He has honorary doctorates from University of Birmingham (1987), York University (1988), the University of Athens (1995), Macquarie University (1996), and Lingnan University (1999).