London: Edward Arnold, 1978. — 256 p.Michael Halliday is an internationally recognised scholar who, from the late 1950s, has contributed significantly to theories of language and related areas. Best known for developing systemic functional linguistics (SFL), he transformed views about language by making choice a core concept of his theory, where choice in the language system is between meanings rather structures. His most popular work, Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985/1994/2004), shifted the focus of linguistics out of the “syntactic age”] into what we might now call the semiotic age. He was the first linguist to view language as a resource for construing meaning (Learning How to Mean, 1974), coining the expression Language as social semiotic in the early 70s.In SFL, every act of language is an act of meaning and “to mean is to act semiotically”. For Halliday “the internal organization of language is not arbitrary but embodies a positive reflection of the functions that language has evolved to serve in the life of social man”. This is unique because it means language must be explained as expressing meanings that are created within a social system. For those of us who are interested in how language acts both socially and semiotically, this is useful because it lets us describe and explain how social reality is encoded in language, both in terms of how language is a means of reflecting on things and how it is a means of acting (symbolically) on people.Introduction
The sociolinguinstic perspective
A sociosemiotic interpretation of language
The social semantics of text
Language and social structure
Sociolinguistics and education
References
Index of subjects
Index of names
