Volume 2 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday

Lingusitic Studies of Text and Discourse
M.A.K. Halliday
Edited by Jonathan J. Webster

For nearly half a century, Professor M.A.K. Halliday has been enriching the discipline of linguistics with his keen insight into this social semiotic phenomenon we call language. This is the first volume in a series presenting the collected works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday.

The papers in this second volume focus on the application of systemic functional grammar to the analysis of texts, both literary and everyday, writen and spoken. Through detailed linguistic analyses of specific texts, ranging from the highly valued by such authors as William Golding, J.B. Priestley, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Darwin, to the more everyday, such as a fund-raising letter and part of a doctoral defence, Halliday explores the power of grammar to create meaning, to change our lives for better or worse. Each text is studied, as one would study any kind of language, in terms of the linguistic resources that contribute to the realization of its 'meaning potential'.The analyses are not only interesting for what they reveal about the texts under investigation, but also instructive about the practice and methods of systemic grammar abalysis..

x +301 pp / 2002

Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
http://www.continuumbooks.com

CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgements

Part One: Linguistic Analysis and Textual Meaning
Editor's Introduction
1. The linguistic study of literay texts (1964)
2. Text as semantic choice in social contexts (1977)

Part Two: Highly Valued Texts (Novel, Drama, Science In Poetry, Poetry In Science)
Editor's Introduction
3. Linguistic function and literary style: an inquiry into the language of William Golding's The Inheritors (1971)
4. The de-automatization of grammar: from Priestley's An Inspector Calls (1982)
5. Poetry as scientific discourse: the nuclear sections of Tennyson's In Memoriam (1987)
6. The construction of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientifc discourse: with reference to Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1990)

Part Three: Everyday Texts (Written, Spoken)
Editor's Introduction
7. Some lexicogrammatical features of the Zero Population Growth text (1992)
8. "So you say 'pass'...thank you three muchly" (1994)

Appendix 1 Transcription of "subtext"
Appendix 2 Analysis of "subtext"
Appendix 3 'Dear Friend of ZPG'
Index

M A K Halliday was born in Yorkshire in 1925. He was trained in Chinese for war service with the British army; studied in China, taught Chinese in Britain for a number of years, then moved into linguistics, becoming in 1965 Professor of General Linguistics at University College London. In 1975 he was appointed Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until his retirement. He has taught as Visiting Professor in many countries and has honorary degrees from universities in Australia, Britain, Canada, China, France, Greece and India. As a self-styled "generalist" he has published in many branches of linguistics, both theoretical and applied (a distinction which he himself rejects), including grammar and semantics, discourse analysis and stylistics, phonology, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, language education and child language development. The volumes in the present series encompass all these aspects of Halliday's work.

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