1 republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary specialised education

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday
(often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 
2018) was a British linguist who developed the 
internationally influential systemic functional 
linguistics (SFL) model of language. His 
grammatical descriptions go by the name of 
systemic functional grammar. Halliday described 
language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of 
a system of signs, but a systemic resource for 
meaning". For Halliday, language was a "meaning 
potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as 
the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday 
described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at 
language from every possible vantage point", and has described his 
work as "wander[ing] the highways and byways of language". But he 
said that "to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: 
language as the creature and creator of human society". 
Halliday's grammar differs markedly from traditional accounts 
that emphasise classification of individual words (e.g. noun, verb, 
pronoun, preposition) in formal, written sentences in a restricted 
number of "valued" varieties of English. Halliday's model conceives 
grammar explicitly as how meanings are coded into wordings, in both 
spoken and written modes in all varieties and registers of a language. 
Three strands of grammar operate simultaneously. They concern: (i) the 
interpersonal exchange between speaker and listener, and writer and 
reader; (ii) representation of our outer and inner worlds; and (iii) the 
wording of these meanings in cohesive spoken and written texts, from 
within the clause up to whole texts. Notably, the grammar embraces 
intonation in spoken language. Halliday's seminal Introduction to 
Functional Grammar (first edition, 1985) spawned a new research 
discipline and related pedagogical approaches. By far the most progress 
has been made on English, but the international growth of communities 
of SFL scholars has led to the adaptation of Halliday's advances to some 
other languages. 
Halliday's grammatical theory and descriptions gained wide 
recognition after publication of the first edition of his book An 
Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985. A second edition was 
published in 1994, and then a third, in which he collaborated with 

---

335 
Christian Matthiessen, in 2004. A fourth edition was published in 2014. 
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 "meaning potential" (see Systemic functional 
linguistics).