M.A.K. Halliday

Michael Halliday
M. A. K. Halliday
Born	(1925-04-13) 13 April 1925 (age 92) Leeds, Yorkshire, England
Residence	Australia
Nationality	English
Fields	Linguistics
Known for	Systemic functional linguistics
Influences	Vilém Mathesius (Prague school) Wang Li, J.R. Firth, Benjamin Lee Whorf
Influenced	Ruqaiya Hasan, C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, J.R. Martin, Norman Fairclough
Spouse	Ruqaiya Hasan

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; born 13 April 1925) is a linguist from England who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar (SFG). 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".

Halliday was born and raised in England. His fascination for language was nurtured by his parents: his mother, Winifred, had studied French, and his father, Wilfred, was a dialectologist, a dialect poet, and an English teacher with a love for grammar and Elizabethan drama. In 1942, Halliday volunteered for the national services' foreign language training course. He was selected to study Chinese on the strength of his success in being able to differentiate tones. After 18 months' training, he spent a year in India working with the Chinese Intelligence Unit doing counter-intelligence work. In 1945 he was brought back to London to teach Chinese. He took a BA Honours degree in Modern Chinese Language and Literature (Mandarin) through the University of London. This was an external degree, with his studies conducted in China. He then lived for three years in China, where he studied under Luo Changpei at Peking University and under Wang Li at Lingnan University, before returning to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge under the supervision of Gustav Hallam and then J. R. Firth. Having taught languages for 13 years, he changed his field of specialisation to linguistics, and developed systemic functional linguistics, including systemic functional grammar, elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a group of European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague school. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961.