Michael Halliday

Who is Michael Halliday?

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British-born Australian linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. 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[ing] 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".