Michael Halliday - Linguistic Theory and Description

Linguistic Theory and Description

Halliday is notable for his grammatical theory and descriptions, outlined in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar, first published in 1985. A revised edition was published in 1994, and then a third, in which he collaborated with Christian Matthiessen, in 2004. But Halliday’s conception of grammar – or ‘lexicogrammar’ (a term he coined to argue that lexis and grammar are part of the same phenomenon) – is based on a more general theory of language as a social semiotic resource, or a ‘meaning potential’ (see systemic functional linguistics). Halliday follows Hjelmslev and Firth in distinguishing theoretical from descriptive categories in linguistics. He argues that ‘theoretical categories, and their inter-relations, construe an abstract model of language...they are interlocking and mutally defining. The theoretical architecture derives from work on the description of natural discourse, and as such ‘no very clear line is drawn between ‘(theoretical) linguistics’ and ‘applied linguistics’. Thus, the theory ‘is continually evolving as it is brought to bear on solving problems of a research or practical nature’. Halliday contrasts theoretical categories with descriptive categories, defined as ‘categories set up in the description of particular languages’. His descriptive work has been focussed on English and Chinese.

Halliday rejects explicitly the 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". On Chomsky specifically, he writes that "imaginary problems were created by the whole series of dichotomies that Chomsky introduced, or took over unproblematized: not only syntax/semantics but also grammar/lexis, language/thought, competence/performance...Once these dichotomies had been set up, the problem arose of locating and maintaining the boundaries between them linguistics"