Studies of Grammar
Halliday's first major work on the subject of grammar was "Categories of the theory of grammar", published in the journal Word in 1961. In this paper, he argued for four "fundamental categories" for the theory of grammar: unit, structure, class, and system. These categories, he argued, are "of the highest order of abstraction", but he defended them as those necessary to "make possible a coherent account of what grammar is and of its place in language" In articulating the category unit, Halliday proposed the notion of a rank scale. The units of grammar formed a "hierarchy", a scale from "largest" to "smallest" which he proposed as: "sentence", "clause", "group/phrase", "word" and "morpheme". Halliday defined structure as "likeness between events in successivity" and as "an arrangement of elements ordered in places'. Halliday rejects a view of structure as "strings of classes, such as nominal group + verbalgroup + nominal group" among which there is just a kind of mechanical solidarity" describing it instead as "configurations of functions, where the solidarity is organic".
Read more about this topic: Michael Halliday
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