Abstract
This edited volume in the Bloomsbury Companions series celebrates Halliday’s lifelong contribution to Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), a grammatical model underpinned by the premise that language choices resonate with the context of society and culture in relation to three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Unlike the mainstream transformational–generative paradigm, focused on rules, SFG views language as a resource. Specifically, language is seen as a semantic resource influenced by socially logical choices. As such, SFG is a social semiotic theory in nature.
The volume is divided in four parts. Chapter 1, ‘Halliday’s life’, chronicles Halliday’s career development as chance irrevocably gives way to choice. Halliday’s academic pursuits suggest that he is not wedded to a particular theory or approach, but rather references a wide range of human sciences championed by his antecedents and contemporaries, including Saussure, Hjelmslev, Whorf, Firth and Meshchaninov. By sketching the timescale of Halliday’s theoretical developments, this chapter sets out a roadmap for the following chapters detailing his influential works in linguistics.
Part II, ‘Halliday: The making of a mind’ (Chapters 2–6), situates Halliday’s construal of SFG within a historical context. Chapter 2 looks at this semantic theory from the perspective of the natural sciences and shows the influence of the interaction between social theories and other sciences on the making of SFG, which are detailed in the remaining chapters in this part. Halliday’s early work on the analysis of Chinese is the topic of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 shows how the inseparability of form and meaning and the incorporation of social context in linguistic study are the most notable outcomes of the influence and supervision of Firth. Halliday and Hasan, from a somehow personal angle, each contribute a chapter, dealing respectively with advances in the Marxist idea of language functions (Chapter 5) and the final formulation of social semiotic theory (Chapter 6).
Part III, ‘Halliday: Ideas about language’, comprises eight chapters highlighting SFG’s key tenet: privileging the role of paradigmatic choices over syntagmatic ones in linguistic meaning-making. This axial rethink (discussed at length in Martin’s Chapter 10) stands at the heart of the SFG model, with influences going beyond linguistics. By comparing functional with formal linguistics from a historical perspective, Matthiessen’s engaging Chapter 7 argues the flow of influence from Halliday’s model to non-SFG frameworks with regard to authentic natural data and the incorporation of semantics into syntax. The rest of Part III approaches the application of this theory in varying disciplines, such as probabilistic/corpus linguistics (Chapter 8), children’s language acquisition (Chapter 9), intonation (Chapter 11), text linguistics (Chapter 12), language teaching and learning (Chapter 13) and stylistics (Chapter 14).
Part IV offers a much more diverse collection of chapters on the ‘Directions of development from Halliday’. It departs from Halliday’s own work in Part III and moves forward, suggesting new and promising frontiers in multimodal genres (e.g. painting and music in Chapter 15; architecture in Chapter 16), multilingual studies (Chapter 17 on translation; Chapter 18 on language comparison and typology) and computational linguistics (Chapter 19).
This volume, featuring an impressive roster of functionalists of diverse backgrounds and specializations, makes an important contribution to the study of SFG and more generally to social semiotics. One of the major strengths is its emphasis on the social and semantic, rather than syntactic, orientation of Halliday’s model. This helps clear up some misinterpretation and misunderstanding that has permeated SFG literature over the past decades, such as the ambiguous interpretation of ‘choice’ and the controversy pertaining to the notions of ‘coherence’ and ‘cohesion’. Another highlight is the breadth of its topical and thematic coverage: moving from Halliday’s original thinking to its influences on rule-based linguistic frameworks, and to its expansion as a tool of enquiry into neighbouring areas such as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and non-verbal semiotics. It rightly pinpoints the productive connections between theory and application from various perspectives that make up the field, the message of which would be valuable for experienced and novice scholars alike.
That said, this thorough overview of Halliday’s achievements within a wide variety of contexts leaves out some desirable improvements for an in-depth account. For example, while the continuum of lexis and grammar has been mentioned in Chapter 7, the chapter could have benefited from an elaboration of how the conception of lexicogrammar has been modelled in follow-up frameworks such as Emergent Grammar, Construction Grammar and Pattern Grammar. Similarly, the volume often tells us more about SFG in general, such as the textual metafunction, while perhaps leaving the onus on individual readers to zoom in on specific notions such as theme and rheme and its influence on other information structure models.
It is also worth remarking on the lack of account of opposing theories. Some of the less satisfactory points in Halliday’s grammar do not seem to be given due attention. For example, while a theory of syntax was certainly included in SFG’s conception of ‘categories’, this idea seems to have been accorded a peripheral status in the later development of Halliday’s model. Ideas drawn upon from formalist approaches to the mapping of form and function, such as the Cardiff Model, could have been welcome additions to the volume. Also desirable would have been a greater focus on studies in a wide range of languages. Examples in most chapters concern English, and besides the typological study in Chapter 18, only Chapter 10 and Halliday’s doctoral research concern languages other than English (or Indo-European languages).
Despite these quibbles, this book collectively and vividly blends Halliday’s life with the making of functional ideas, and captures the diversity and richness of his model. While the chapters in this Companion vary somewhat in their accessibility, writing style and level of detail, this volume will prove an informative and profitable read for advanced scholars interested in multifunctional, multimodal and socially anchored semiotic studies.