Continuing Discourse on Language is published as a two volume set and offers the reader a selective account of the evolution of important aspects of M.A.K, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics over a period of many years. The range of topics covered includes not only certain fundamental concepts at the level of theory but also an account of the wide range of applications enabled by the descriptive framework that the theory has generated. The volumes together provide an insight into the continuing evolution of the impressive range of frames of description and their applications from typology to multimodality, from models of discourse analysis to translation and stylistics, from the role of language in knowledge construal to language education, genre based pedagogy and web based learning. Picture of M.A.K, Halliday

Continuing Discourse on Language is published as a two volume set and offers the reader a selective account of the evolution of important aspects of M.A.K, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics over a period of many years. The range of topics covered includes not only certain fundamental concepts at the level of theory but also an account of the wide range of applications enabled by the descriptive framework that the theory has generated. The volumes together provide an insight into the continuing evolution of the impressive range of frames of description and their applications from typology to multimodality, from models of discourse analysis to translation and stylistics, from the role of language in knowledge construal to language education, genre based pedagogy and web based learning.

This biographical sketch of Professor M. A. K. Halliday’s early years, 1925–1970, has been compiled from two sources: (i) a previously unpublished interview conducted with Professor Halliday in 1987 by Gunther Kress, Jim Martin and Ruqaiya Hasan; (ii) ‘M. A. K. Halliday’ in   Keith Brown and Vivien Law (eds) Linguistics in Britain   personal histories , Publications of the Philological Society, 36, 2002, pp 116–26. Although rendered here in third person, the narrative attempts as much as possible to adhere to Halliday’s own wording as found in the above mentioned sources.  

In the following sections, we will briefly introduce Chinese SFL work in the areas of discourse analysis, cohesion and coherence, grammatical metaphor, stylistics and foreign language teaching. Then we will go on to look at Halliday’s own work on the Chinese language and its influence and end up with a short discussion of problems and prospects for SFL studies in China. 

In the present chapter, we attempt to position Halliday’s work in relation to two contexts of intellectual climate in the field of linguistics: first the context of mid-twentieth century when his interest in linguistics took its initial shape and direction; secondly, the context of today’s linguistics, when it may be justifiably claimed that Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) – the model, he and his colleagues have been developing to explain how and why language works – is one of the most well-tried, comprehensive and competent, judged by any such criteria as those of observational, descriptive and/or explanatory adequacy. 

In this chapter I attempt to provide a brief account of SFL’s continuing struggle to understand how and why language works. Since the work of language is always and only done in society, the struggle to understand why and how language works is also the struggle to understand the nature of the relationship between language and society – hence the importance of asking where, why and how people use language and what follows upon this fact. My account of how Halliday proceeded from this initial observation will not be organised chronologically: instead, it will be concept based for two reasons.

Linguists, like other varieties of scientists, have varied in the degree to which they invest space and rhetorical energy in telling other linguists what is and is not linguistics and what is and is not science. Halliday appears to have done little of such telling; certainly by comparison with other influential figures of his era. This lower visibility as a gatekeeper to a science of linguistics has led to a number of seriously mistaken assumptions amongst linguists themselves and amongst those in the wider academic community who, at various removes from linguistic investigations, have had to rely on generalised reports of the goals, methods and findings of linguistic research. The first mistake has been to assume that Halliday has not been as scientific as other linguists who have protested their conceptions of science ostentatiously (viz. Bloomfield, 1933: Chapter 9; Chomsky, 1972: 112–14 and 115ff).

In this chapter, I shall consider some of the ways in which Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) can contribute to our understanding of the reflexive mind and the role that the child’s development of his meaning-making plays in the creation of mind. In doing so, I shall emphasise the new dialogue that can now be created between SFL and the neurological, biological and cognitive sciences due to the recent developments in these sciences concerning the emergence of meaning, mind and consciousness in the individual. The chapter will focus on research on early (proto)linguistic development in the human infant in the SFL tradition in order to develop the arguments suggested. above. I will not be presenting a chronological recount, but a theoretical reconstruction of the developments which have made such a dialogue possible

This chapter presents short contributions on topics in multimodality that seem important to me and that have been influenced by Michael Halliday’s thinking about language, or in which his thinking is a source of insight. I have organised it as a composite chapter, mainly in order to give voice directly to the scholars whose work I would have reviewed, had I followed the more traditional format of a survey chapter. I have provided short contributions of my own in the form of topic introductions, where I discuss the topics more generally and there I draw on my own work. The crucial importance of Halliday’s thinking to systemic and social semiotic approaches to multimodality I think shines clearly throughout the various contributions. The scholars whose contributions appear below are those who responded to my invitation, for which I am extremely grateful.

The nature of knowledge has been a central concern of Western societies for more than two and a half thousand years. Trying to study it has been also a central issue, not only for the disciplines of philosophy but for many academic disciplines. As time goes on, the importance of this issue continues to increase, so that societies and economies trade on knowledge and individual livelihoods and disciplines depend on it. As a result (or perhaps it is a cause?) these issues are not solely the province of philosophers: politicians talk of ‘knowledge economies’ and technologists and computer scientists aim for ‘knowledge representation’ in their machines. Knowing about knowledge therefore becomes crucial for a whole range of individual and social activities. This chapter aims to explore what a linguist and, in particular, a Systemic Functional (SF) linguist might do with these issues.

One of the many strengths of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory as Halliday and his colleagues have developed it, has been the way in which contributions in the theoretical sense have had consequences for developments in applied areas, while applied studies have equally tended to rebound on theoretical studies. Hence it is that while we would argue there is a sense in which an educational linguistics has emerged from SF research, such an educational theory is intimately linked to the broader linguistic theory of which it is a part. An educational linguistics is concerned with the study of language in teaching and learning. As such, it has interests in the nature of the linguistic system and its role in learning, as well as in what kinds of Knowledge About Language (KAL, to use Carter’s term) should be taught to children. This chapter will attempt to trace some of the major developments in the emergence of a theory of language in education as proposed by Halliday and his colleagues, dating from the 1960s when Halliday first became actively involved in educational work.

Context is important – not just for the texts we study but also for the research we undertake. And functional linguists who have played a part in literacy oriented action research projects in Australia have done so in the fortunate context of Halliday’s ground-breaking work on language development (1975; 1993; 2004) and its ongoing elaboration by various scholars, especially Painter (e.g. 1984; 1989; 1996; 1998; 1999; 2000; 2003a; 2003b; 2004). Painter (1986) in particular documents the understanding of language learning in the home which inspired Rothery’s design of literacy pedagogy for primary and secondary school1 (Rothery, 1989; 1996; Martin and Rothery, 1990). From Halliday and Painter, Rothery took the notion of guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience’, a principle which turned out to resonate strongly with (but was not initially influenced by) neo-Vygotskyan notions of ‘scaffolding’ (Mercer, 1994; 1995; 2000; for mediation across Vygotskyan and SFL perspectives see Hasan, 1995; 2001; 2004a; 2004b). Indeed, Applebee and Langer (1983) refer directly to Halliday’s work in their influential popularisation of Bruner’s term ‘scaffolding’ (originally coined in Wood et al., 1976); and Wells (e.g. 1999) has further developed the connections between Halliday’s linguistics and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). In this paper we will briefly review the teaching/learning cycle developed by Rothery and her colleagues, which focused mainly on writing2. We will then describe how this pedagogy has been extended and refined for teaching both reading and writing in work by Rose and colleagues (Rose, 2004a, in press; Rose et al., 1999; Rose et al., 2004). This extension involves the re/design of both global and local patterns of interaction between teacher and students. Bernstein’s work on pedagogic discourse in relation to social class functions for us, as it has for Halliday, as the most relevant informing sociology for this work (Bernstein, 1975; 1990; 1996).

For educational linguists, grammatical description pushed ‘fairly far’ in the direction of semantics and written specifically for purposes of text analysis (Halliday, 1994: xv-xvii) poses a significant challenge. On the one hand, such a grammar provides a basis for a paradigm shift in pedagogical discourse, a shift towards interpretive discussion grounded in language itself, which is of course something some educators have long desired. However, on the other hand there is the obvious question of the grammar’s accessibility and efficacy in schooling. A grammar aiming to be useful for the exploration of semantics and context is necessarily a complex analytic framework. So is it, by design so to speak, beyond the comprehension of children? In this chapter I trace some key developments in language study in schools informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) since ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’ (Halliday, 2002 [1961]), then argue that the grammar appears to be both accessible and efficacious for pedagogic purposes. The basis for this claim is a set of indicative findings from a project in Sydney on children’s development of knowledge about language, which engaged six and 11-year olds in grammatical study. I will also argue that, since every theory of grammar must be embedded in a theory of instruction to enter pedagogical discourse (Bernstein, 1990), some concepts from Vygotskian theory are crucial to the way Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) is recontextualised into school discourses.

In this chapter we will report mainly on work that has gone on in Italy as the result of the combined efforts of scholars working at the Universities of Padua, Pavia, Pisa, Trieste, Udine and Venice beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present time, in the context of nationally-funded research projects, the most recent of which are known by the acronyms CITATAL, LINGUATEL and DIDACTAS. There are three central sections which are rather different in content, but all represent ways in which Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory has been used in language study that is both text-based and web-enhanced. The first of these is devoted to some interactive multimedia teaching materials which at once teach and make use of systemic functional theory. The second deals with computer annotation of texts and of corpora as a way of doing research and as a teaching technique through which students are brought to apply SFL theory as they learn it. The third is basically about Multimodal Corpus Authoring System (MCA) and how it has been used so far as a tool for storing corpora, especially multimodal corpora, for analysing them and for making the analysed texts or text portions available for retrieval on the basis of the annotations provided. Some related software produced outside Italy will also be discussed briefly.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as we know it today is the result of a continual evolution of theory and description. The theory had its roots in Firth’s teachings in linguistics,2 which were taken up and developed by Halliday, first in his system/structure description of Chinese (1950s), later in his development of scale and category grammar (1961) and afterwards in the evolving complexity of SFL. Intertwined with this evolution we find also the evolution of computers and their use in relation to SFL. Computational applications of SFL, such as sentence generation and analysis, have enabled practitioners to explore just how complete the systemic model of language is: when confronted with real texts, is the theory sufficient to provide formal instructions for interpreting those texts; and when confronted with meanings, is the theory sufficient for providing formal instructions that motivate natural texts corresponding to those meanings. In this way, the computer-using linguist (or computational linguists as they are now called) could find where the model failed to work and needed to be changed. They have also found gaps in the theory: places where SFL does not tell us enough to allow us to generate a text or to understand one – and thus point to where the theory needs to be extended. This chapter summarises the evolution of computational applications which use SFL, or help those who use SFL. We look at those applications which use SFL for machine translation, parsing, text generation and dialogue systems. We also look at tools which help the practitioner: coding tools and system network drawing tools.

The study of language disorder has historically encompassed a number of different perspectives. A significant amount of research has been undertaken using individuals with acquired brain damage as windows to brain function, e.g. from the studies which implied localisation of particular language function in particular parts of the brain based on aphasic individuals’ performance on language tasks (e.g. Geschwind, 1965; Goodglass and Kaplan, 1983; Luria, 1966), to the sophisticated studies currently being undertaken, focusing more on the complex neurological processes which might be occurring during language processing (e.g. Cao et al., 1999; Naeser et al., 2004). Another perspective involves what the breakdown of language might tell us about normal language function and indeed about the organisation of language regardless of neurological correlates. And yet another perspective involves the question of intervention – in finding out more about language disorder, can we learn better ways of facilitating language recovery or language improvement in the client or devise better ways to work with the person with the language disorder as well as assist their communication partners to overcome the social limitations they might encounter as a result of the disorder? This chapter addresses the latter two perspectives, exploring a social semiotic approach to language disorder. It focuses on what happens when communication becomes difficult for adult speakers and their conversational partners due to one speaker having restricted access to linguistic resources as a result of acquired brain damage. Through the inspiration of Halliday and Hasan, the authors have explored this area for a number of years, with a clinical perspective the focus of our work. Coming to linguistics from speech pathology backgrounds, we are concerned with the nature of the language disorder, how it affects speakers in their everyday conversations and whether linguistic principles can assist in remediation of, or compensation for, the disorder. We have been particularly interested in the application of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory to language disorder, as it offers a contextualised view of language rather than the decontextualised view offered by psycholinguistic models traditionally used in the field of speech pathology.

Both Halliday and Hasan – and others in the systemic functional tradition who have worked on literary texts, such as Butt (see e.g. 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1985; 1988a; 1988b; 1996) and O’Toole (e.g. 1976; 1980; 1982; 1988) – see the stylistic tradition through the Russian Formalist and Prague Structuralist schools as part of the theoretical antecedents for the orientation to the study of verbal art which has developed in systemic functional work. That Halliday, Hasan and others should have seen in these scholarly traditions a conception of language in literature which harmonises with the systemic functional orientation is not surprising: both the Russian Formalists and Prague School scholars, for various philosophical reasons, were committed to bringing linguistics to the study of literature. A brief discussion of this work, with particular reference to the work of Mukarˇovský, will provide some of the relevant theoretical background to the work in systemic functional studies of verbal art.

Semantic variation is a particularly complex and intriguing concept developed in SFL research through transdisciplinary work. Three fields have contributed: linguistics, sociology and psychology. The concept was foregrounded by Hasan (1989) as a legitimate and significant research field in linguistics, contra Weiner and Labov (1983). However, the origins of interest in the concept can be traced to the early twentieth century, through various attempts at modelling and theoretical clarification in mid-century, to work which Hasan and her colleagues undertook during the 1980s specifically as semantic variation research. this chapter presents a summary and overview of current theoretical trends in this application of SFL.

In this chapter, an attempt will be made to explore the mutual influence which systemic functional linguistics as a theory of language and the phenomenon of translation as a relationship between texts and as an activity, have had on each other. We shall argue that this influence so far has been largely one-way, as an influence which the theory has had on work in translation theory and didactics. Apart from trying to outline this influence in some more detail, we shall indicate potential ways in which the phenomenon of translation in its turn could have the role of a guiding application and thus of a source of insight, for further developments in the theory itself.

Original poem August 11, 2005

The development of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has always been of an evolutionary kind rather than of a revolutionary kind: Halliday (e.g. 1959; 1961) built on his immediate predecessors instead of distancing himself from them and new findings have been added in a cumulative fashion. This has been true of all aspects of SFL – theory, description, analysis, application – and it has certainly been a property of the development of the systemic functional model of the ‘architecture’ of language (and in more recent years of other semiotic systems as well). Here I will be concerned with the modelling of this ‘architecture’. The term ‘architecture’ has been used quite widely in discussing the organisation of language and of other systems as well (see Matthiessen, in press, for general remarks). It embodies a helpful metaphor – as long as we keep in mind that language is not rigid, it is not static and it is not designed.

In presenting his ideas on a ‘language based theory of learning’, Halliday (1993) has both emphasised the interpersonal beginnings of the child’s new linguistic achievements and also proposed a three step model of human semiotic development. In this chapter we will draw on the major systemic functional case studies that have contributed to this theory to present an outline of language development as a process enabling a gradual progression to generalisation, through to abstraction and finally to (grammatical) metaphor.

Context, when used as a technical term in human sciences, is neither transparent nor self-evident in its contribution to theory. The introduction of the notion, as a necessary level of semantic description, came out of the general movement 1890–1920 that placed the scientific study of human cultures alongside other sciences. The necessity of context became apparent to Malinowski and others, when such early anthropologists confronted the non-transferability of crucial meanings across cultures, despite the supposedly universal conditions under which human beings lived. The assumption of ‘simplicity’ amongst ‘savage races’ was also contested as the non-equivalences in translation drew researchers on into more delicate distinctions and connections within the community under investigation. Researchers need to judge the form and direction of current proposals on context in the light provided by theoretical notions drawn from complexity theory, fuzzy sets, probabilistic modelling, corpus linguistics, evolutionary theory and functionalism (when broadly and historically interpreted). We believe that the evidence of Malinowski’s own context (from Boltzmann to Russell; from Boas to Wittgenstein; from Darwin to Frazer) suggests that nothing of this list would have surprised or daunted him. His own assiduous habits of observation and note taking demonstrated his commitment to grounding theory in the ‘typicalactual’ of human activities. But, we argue, the concepts of Malinowski and of J. R. Firth only become powerful, abstract tools with Halliday’s theorisation of semiotic dimensions; with his distinction of use, function and metafunction; with his mapping of systems in relational networks; and with his elaboration of relations between text, context and register.

I wish to ask a seemingly basic question regarding multimodal texts, which I do not believe has been adequately answered in the literature so far. My question is: using Halliday’s model of context and in particular, the system networks of field developed by Hasan (1999), how can we account for context of situation in relation to multimodal texts? A second and related question is: how can we represent the construal of field in multimodal texts within the current SFL theoretical model? Before moving on to my attempt to answer these questions three important points need to be made. First, this chapter works within my interpretation of the traditional model of context as outlined by Halliday (see especially 1978; 1985) and as developed by Hasan (1995; 1999).2 Second, the focus of this chapter is on fi eld, but it should be pointed out that fi eld is one of the conceptual components of context of situation and that the parameters of fi eld are permeable. That is, although we can talk about the different contextual variables as though they were separate entities, they are interdependent and their configuration within any one situation is ‘like a chemical solution, where each factor affects the meaning of the others’ (Hasan, 1995: 231). Third, it is not possible to take account of all the different types and shapes of multimodal texts. Therefore, this chapter presents observations about the relationship between context (fi eld) and multimodal text on the basis of two page-based multimodal instructional texts. It is hoped, however, that the analyses and the discussion in this chapter will offer theoretical insights which may be useful in analysing other multimodal texts.

The last 20 years or so have seen the development of a number of discourse analytic tools based, to a greater or lesser degree, in the systemic functional model of language – cohesive harmony analysis (Hasan, 1984), rhetorical structure theory (Mann and Thompson, 1987a; Matthiessen, 1987), phasal analysis (Gregory, 1985) and rhetorical unit analysis (Cloran, 1994). As well as reviewing each model in the following sections, the use of each will also be illustrated in the analysis of a short written text. The text selected to illustrate the application of each of these models Sun Damage is a persuasive text type which recommends action for skin problems arising as a result of over-exposure to the sun.

Our understanding of Theme has, of course, developed considerably over the past 40 years, in terms of its function in both the clause and the text; but this has not meant abandoning or changing the nature of the concept. Rather, it has involved a process of unfolding the potential of the initial insights and exploring the implications, both in relation to the evolution of the model and through the analysis of an increasingly wide range of different registers and genres. In this process, Halliday’s accounts of Theme (see especially Halliday, 1967/8; 1985; 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) have provided constant points of reference, as the basis for other linguists to work from or react against – in many cases both together. In particular, since the 1970s the interpretations of Theme have been marked by a significant expansion of contributions relating Theme in clause and clause complex to patterns in textual organisation. In this chapter I will trace, without aiming for a simple chronology, some of the main directions in which this unfolding has led, indicating areas of uncertainty or disagreement – that is, the potential growth points. Though many of these echo issues raised in an earlier survey (Fries and Francis, 1992), there have been advances, as well as shifts of emphasis.

In SFL, the semantics of a language calls for as much attention as its lexicogrammar: in fact, meaning and wording are two sides of the same coin; the description of both is equally central to understanding ‘how language works’ (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens, 1964) – which has been Halliday’s agenda since the beginning of his engagement with linguistics. But what actually led SFL into the exploration of semantics as a legitimate domain for description was not these theoretical considerations, per se; rather, like other aspects of the evolution of SFL, interest in semantics too arose in attempts to resolve certain problems in the course of research during the 1960s. This chapter presents one perspective on the course of this development, specifically with respect to semantic networks as a resource for the analysis of meaning.

In this chapter we explore the ways in which academic writers persuade and align, in part through the strategic encoding of instances of inscribed positive or negative attitude, especially appreciation, but also, most importantly, through valuing phenomena indirectly. In particular we have explore multiple means by which academic writers can flag attitude by scaling ideational meanings. In evaluating other research in their field, academic writers show a very strong preference for this indirect evaluation (Hood, 2004a; 2004b). Writers subjectively position ideational meaning on a cline, implying a relative value. So construing research as a graduated activity enables ‘attitudinal’ work to be done while retaining an underlying ‘objectivity’. It allows academic writers to reconcile the apparently contradictory expectations for objectivity and critique. It might also be argued that an avoidance of inscribed attitude in favour of the flagging of attitude by scaled meanings establishes a particular kind of solidarity – one of relative positioning within a community, rather than one of in-group or out-group identity. By such means academic writers maintain solidarity with a research community while at the same time establishing difference and therefore space for their own research.

This chapter is concerned with the development of accounts of lexicogrammar in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) since the 1970s – in particular, with accounts relating to Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (IFG), the first edition of which was published in (1985). IFG has infl uenced other accounts both within SFL (see e.g. the contributions by Fawcett, Chapter 28 and by Tucker, Chapter 29) and outside SFL (see e.g. Kay, 1979; Lockwood, 2002), in other traditions; but my focus is on the IFG tradition itself. The boundaries are, of course, quite indeterminate – the tradition is not a bounded body of dogma, but an open-ended network of ideas about lexicogrammar.

This chapter is a ‘case study’ in systemic functional typology: the principles of systemic functional typology are applied to propose generalisations about grammatical systems by means of which interactants exchange meanings in dialogue in different languages. Such systems for dialogic negotiation are known as mood systems. The generalisations proposed here are based on comprehensive, text-based and meaning-oriented systemic functional descriptions of a range of languages, six of which are sketched here (Òkó, Spanish, French, Danish, Thai and Japanese), on descriptions couched in terms of other frameworks and typological accounts from the general typology literature. After a brief characterisation of systemic functional typology (Section 2), we will present certain generalisations about mood systems in different languages (Section 3) and then move on to illustrations from the six languages included in this chapter (Section 4).

This chapter is offered as an example of the type of contribution to Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) that is made by those working in the framework of the ‘Cardiff Grammar’ (a version of SFG about which I shall say a little more shortly). Thus, like the chapter by Tucker, it is an illustration of the type of detailed, comprehensive description of English that is required in the fully explicit SFG that we believe to be needed, if we are to meet the requirements of the users of our descriptions that we should expect in the twenty-first century. Specifically, this chapter seeks to contribute to the ‘continuing discourse’ about how best to model the lexicogrammar of English by suggesting the value of incorporating in our descriptions certain new elements of structure (and so their meanings) which have so far received short shrift in most grammars – including most Systemic Functional Grammars. Yet these items occur with a frequency that is already considerable and that is, I suggest, increasing. They are all exponents of what we shall term the Auxiliary Extensions (XEx), and they occur as part of what have been called ‘phrasal modals’.

What corpus linguistic research has demonstrated is that when language is investigated from the lexical end a whole raft of lexically related phenomena arise which challenge and require attention by theories and descriptions of language (see Stubbs, 1996) for an overview). And it is the systemic functional linguist’s task, not the corpus linguist’s alone, to provide theory-consistent accounts and descriptions of these phenomena. The key concept that unlocks the relationship between systemic description and corpus-linguistic findings is co-occurrence. Furthermore, it brings together a range of phenomena including collocation (lexical co-occurrence), colligation (lexical and grammatical co-occurrence) and in particular, I would argue, all types of phraseological unit. In this chapter, we shall explore the relationship between co-occurrence and systemic choice, drawing on corpus evidence as we proceed.

This chapter is organised in two parts. After providing a general introduction to Halliday’s own work in Section 2, the first part consisting of Sections 3 to 10 will present an account of Halliday’s theory of intonation. Here, while explicating a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) view of intonation, I will attempt to relate it to the well-known intonational transcription system, Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI). The second part of the chapter consists of brief descriptions of work in the area by other linguists who have used Halliday’s approach as their point of departure in further extensions, applications and so. This section is, in fact, collaborative, my account being based on information kindly provided by the colleagues whose names are specifically foregrounded. These sketches are not comprehensive and in many cases, for lack of space, I have had to exclude information. But so far as possible, I have provided references so that interested readers might be able to pursue the work in its original form.

A bibliography of published works current at the time of original publication of these volumes.

Continuing Discourse on Language is published as a two volume set and offers the reader a selective account of the evolution of important aspects of M.A.K, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics over a period of many years. The range of topics covered includes not only certain fundamental concepts at the level of theory but also an account of the wide range of applications enabled by the descriptive framework that the theory has generated. The volumes together provide an insight into the continuing evolution of the impressive range of frames of description and their applications from typology to multimodality, from models of discourse analysis to translation and stylistics, from the role of language in knowledge construal to language education, genre based pedagogy and web based learning.

Continuing Discourse on Language is published as a two volume set and offers the reader a selective account of the evolution of important aspects of M.A.K, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics over a period of many years. The range of topics covered includes not only certain fundamental concepts at the level of theory but also an account of the wide range of applications enabled by the descriptive framework that the theory has generated. The volumes together provide an insight into the continuing evolution of the impressive range of frames of description and their applications from typology to multimodality, from models of discourse analysis to translation and stylistics, from the role of language in knowledge construal to language education, genre based pedagogy and web based learning.