Michael Halliday

Builder of systemic functional linguistics, reading grammar as choices for making social meaning.

Core Principles & Analysis

• His systemic functional grammar treats language as a resource of choices, not a rulebook.
• Learning How to Mean followed his own son’s invention of a proto-language before words.
• He began as a scholar of Chinese, and his framework powers much of discourse analysis and genre pedagogy.

Specifications & Metrics

• ERA: 1925 – 2018