The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday

Jonathan J. Webster

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781441102546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to one of the world's leading and most influential linguists. Born in 1925, Halliday is the figure most responsible for the development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The impact of his work extends beyond linguistics, into the study of stylistics, computation linguistics, visual narrative and multimodal communication. He is considered a founder of the field of social semiotics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of his early career, his most important theoretical findings and how his work has influenced linguistics as a discipline. From the publishers of his 'Collected Works' and 'The Essential Halliday', this is another must have book underlining Halliday's era-defining impact on the field of linguistics.

Part I

Halliday’s Life

1

Michael Alexander Kirkwood (M. A. K.) Halliday – A Brief Biography¹

Jonathan J. Webster

Born Easter Monday 13 April 1925 in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, Michael Alexander Kirkwood MAKH grew up with two fascinations: one being to go to China – he recalls writing a story when he was about 4 years old about a little boy who went to China. His other fascination was language, nurtured by both his parents. His mother had been a teacher of French and as a child he heard French spoken, and listened to French rhymes and songs. His father, a dialectologist and dialect poet, was an English teacher with equal love for grammar and Elizabethan drama.

Although happy at school, he felt rather trapped in a system which was so overspecialized that from the age of about 14, he was spending most of his time studying the classics, either Latin or Greek, or else classical history. His only respite from the classics came by way of the few hours of classes in English literature. While he enjoyed studying literature, nevertheless he felt that what his teachers had to say about the language in literature was out of touch with what was actually there. Though not yet able to be explicit about what it was exactly that he was looking for, still he felt that there ought to be some way of talking about the language in literature beyond what he was hearing from his teachers. This curiosity about language led to his first encounter with ‘linguistics’ having discovered in the library ‘a book about language by an American professor called Bloomfield’. But Bloomfield proved difficult to understand, and MAKH recalls not getting ‘very far with it!’

In early 1942, MAKH volunteered for the national services’ foreign language training course. The initiative for conducting this intensive course came from J. R. Firth, who pointed out at the beginning of the war that Britain was obviously going to be involved in the war in Asia and it was high time that they trained some service people in Asian languages. Those who applied for the training course were taken out of school and brought to London and given a wide-ranging aptitude test, which evidently had also been designed by Firth. The test had two parts, the first being a general language aptitude test, which included, among other things, decoding made-up languages. The second part focused on the specific character of each of the four languages which had been selected to be offered in the first course: Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Persian. One of the tasks in this part required applicants to repeat from memory an increasingly long list of monosyllables with different tones. Had MAKH been unable to hear a falling tone from a rising tone, he would have probably ended up studying Persian or some other language, but in fact he succeeded in being selected to study Chinese, his first choice, and, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he had his first lesson in Chinese, from Dr Walter Simon.

After 18 months’ training, MAKH joined up with the services, doing half a year’s army training in Britain, followed by a year of serving overseas in India. During the year in India, he was with the Chinese Intelligence Unit in Calcutta, doing counterintelligence work. Besides interviewing those who came out of Japanese-occupied China about the situation there, finding out about the fighting at the front, who was fighting who, and how it was going, they would also read and censor the mail going in and out of China.

After that year and a half, he along with three others from the first batch who had learned Chinese – including John Chinnery, who went on to become head of the Chinese Department at Edinburgh, Cyril Birch who later taught at Berkeley, and Harry Simon who ended up at Melbourne as Head of the Department of Chinese – were pulled back to London from their respective postings, to teach Chinese to new recruits. It was 1945, and everyone figured there were still years of war ahead against the Japanese, so the number of those being trained in Chinese and Japanese for the three services was increased. This, of course, meant that they needed more teachers of Chinese. So MAKH spent most of his last two years in the army teaching Chinese. To this day, he remembers the first Chinese class he ever had to teach, on 13 May 1945, during which he gave dictation to a group of very high-powered air force officers.

The course which was offered in the Services Unit for Language Training was taking place at S.O.A.S (School of Oriental and African Studies); although because of the bombing, S.O.A.S. was not in fact located in a single place, but scattered around London. Realizing that these service instructors might be interested in studying language academically, Eve Edwards, who was the Professor and Head of the Chinese Department at S.O.A.S, and Walter Simon, who was then Reader, organized things in such a way that the service instructors taught their courses in the morning and studied Chinese in the afternoon. One could specialize in either modern or classical Chinese. Most, like MAKH, were interested in modern Chinese, so they mainly studied modern Chinese literature and did as much as they could by way of conversation.

As a learner, MAKH often had been puzzled by the grammar of Chinese, and wanted explanations to questions like ‘how does one actually know what can (or cannot) be said?’ This struggle to engage with the grammar of Chinese became all the more pressing when he began teaching Chinese, and was put in the position of having to explain things to his students. He began with very straightforward questions about the grammar, because he found that there were so many things about Chinese grammar which just simply hadn’t been described at all, and fell outside the scope of both traditional and then current grammars of Chinese. This interest in exploring such pedagogical questions about Chinese became his first source of attraction to linguistics.

When MAKH came out of the army in 1947, he decided he wanted to go on studying Chinese. He did not yet have a degree, so he thought he would pursue his degree from the University of London externally in China. Walter Simon happened to know the president of Peking University, Hu Shih; so he wrote to him to ask if he would take MAKH on as a student and help him find some way of earning a living, perhaps by teaching English in a high school.

About this time the Ministry of Education was offering grants to ex-servicemen to complete their higher education if this had been interrupted by the war; normally this offer was taken up to pay fees at a university in the United Kingdom; MAKH applied to be given this grant for use to travel to China where he intended to complete his higher education. When he arrived in China, and turned up at Peking University, Hu Shih said, ‘Good. You start teaching next week in our English Department’. So in 1947, at the beginning of classes, he enrolled as a student at Peking University in the Chinese Department, and began teaching English in the English Department. MAKH had never taught any English before; but they were desperate for speakers of English. English had been totally banned under the Japanese occupation and most of their students were beginners. Not knowing what he wanted to do afterwards, except that he needed to prepare himself for the examinations for the London degree, he took classes in the Chinese Department in modern Chinese literature, and also in the Chinese classics.

After one year at Peking University, in June 1948, MAKH flew down to Nanking, where the British Council had made the necessary arrangements for him to take the University of London examination, which was exactly the same examination as the internal exam. The examination was on Modern Chinese: nine papers on a combination of language and literature, including the history of Chinese literature from 500 BC to the present day – all in one paper! As MAKH recalls, there was one question that you knew you were going to get, which was ‘Write about the author of your choice’. MAKH had in fact been to see his author, the playwright Cao Yu, who was living and working in Shanghai at the time, and had even spent a whole day with him; so he was, of course, ideally prepared for that question!

After completing his London degree, at that point in his life, he had no intention of going on to do postgraduate study, so he took a job in China working for the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, whose founder was a New Zealander, Rewi Alley. Taking this job meant going up to a remote part of northwest China, where there were these village cooperatives that had been a kind of industrial base in the unoccupied areas during the Second World War. The cooperatives were about the only source of industrial production in wartime, because all the cities had been occupied by the Japanese. Most were pretty well defunct by this time, killed off by inflation and civil war, but about 350 of them were still going. MAKH travelled with a young Chinese who was an accountant, and helped to keep the books. MAKH, meanwhile, wrote publicity in English which would be used to help in appeals for money back in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and North America. MAKH worked for the cooperative for about four months; until, in some small village up in Shaanxi, a letter arrived which had been chasing him for about three months, saying he’d been given a scholarship from England for postgraduate study. He had not applied for it; but Professor Edwards had seen his results and said ‘Let’s apply for him.’ So she had applied on his behalf for this government scholarship.

The letter read ‘Proceed back to Peking immediately’ (or words to that effect!). The conditions were that MAKH could spend two more years studying in China before returning to England to do a higher degree. ‘Well do I do this, or not?’ he thought, but in the end, he finally decided to accept, knowing that they probably wouldn’t ask him again if he turned it down. That meant he would have to get back to Peking, which would not be easy, however, since he was miles away from any city, and much of the countryside around was in Communist hands, with fighting still going on. After travelling five days by bus he got to Lanzhou, where there was an airport, and there he was able to catch a plane going by some devious route to Peking. He arrived in Peking just a few days before the Communists occupied Peking airport. Any later and he would never have been able to get back in.

It was towards the end of November when MAKH re-enrolled at Peking University. Professor Luo Changpei, who MAKH had met during his first year at Peking University when he attended one of Luo’s courses on the history of Chinese, took MAKH on and started training him in historical linguistics and Sino-Tibetan studies. Luo, who had worked on the reconstruction of early Chinese, was familiar with the comparative method as worked out in Indo-European linguistics; but his own specialization was in Sino-Tibetan studies.

After about six months or so, however, it became clear to Luo that MAKH really wanted to work on modern Chinese dialects, so Luo told him, ‘Well then you need to go and do some work in synchronic studies; next year you should go and study with my friend Wang Li.’ Wang Li was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Lingnan University in Canton, about 1,500 miles to the south of Peking. Wang Li was both a grammarian, a phonologist and phonetician, and also a dialectologist. He, who had been trained in Europe, was very much influenced by Jespersen. MAKH credits Wang Li with teaching him the tradition of Chinese linguistics, as well as the principles of Chinese grammar and phonology.

Around this time, other influences included the Marr school of linguistics, which grew out of his interest in Russian ideas dating back to 1946 when he studied Russian in London. MAKH once wrote a long essay for Wang Li about convergence versus divergence as a model of linguistic history, because the Marrist position was that the traditional view of the history of languages as divergence from a common ancestor was largely wrong. Marr argued that the process should be seen much more as one of convergence. During this time in Canton, MAKH also became aware of some of Firth’s notions after reading his paper ‘Personality and language in society’. MAKH felt very sympathetic with what Firth was saying about language; Firth’s ideas made sense to MAKH both in terms of his own experience and his own interests. He looked forward to exploring these ideas further with Firth when he returned to England.

It was May, 1949, and getting to Canton was complicated by the very heavy fighting then going on in central China. Only a few months earlier, in February, the Communists had liberated Peking, and by May, the last big battles of the civil war were going on in central China. So MAKH travelled by boat from Tientsin to Korea, then down to Hong Kong; and from there back into China, arriving in late August in Canton, which at the time was still Nationalist, but would be liberated just a few weeks after his arrival there.

Wang Li was doing a survey of the widely differing varieties of Cantonese of the Pearl River Delta. But because there was too much chaos all around, Wang Li and his students could not do their survey work in the surrounding villages. Instead, they surveyed university students who were natives of these small towns and villages, and who spoke their own local dialects in addition to standard Cantonese. When it came to the analysis, MAKH did the tones – Wang Li said he was the best among his research students at hearing and identifying tones! MAKH also developed a grammar questionnaire which he used to get the students to give him the versions of the Cantonese sentences in their own local dialects. MAKH was fascinated by the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese grammar, and also by how these local dialects differed in their grammar from Cantonese.

The terms of his scholarship required MAKH to return to England to complete his PhD. MAKH anticipated that he not only would be working on the material from his dialect work with Wang Li but also would be working under Firth while teaching Chinese in the Chinese department at S.O.A.S. But, in fact, he was in for some bitter disappointment. Three years on from when he left in 1947, England in 1950, was at the height of McCarthyism. Known to be sympathetic to the Chinese communists, MAKH was asked when he went for the job at S.O.A.S. whether he was a member of the Communist Party (that was the only question, in fact). He answered, ‘No’, because he wasn’t. But he also refused to undertake that he would not become a member of the Communist Party in the future. In the end, he didn’t get the job. When MAKH later asked the person who had questioned him whether that was the reason for him not to get the job, the interviewer replied simply, ‘Political considerations were not absent.’

Witch-hunted out of the more politically sensitive S.O.A.S, MAKH got shunted off to the Chinese department at Cambridge, where there was no Modern Chinese at all, only classical. Not only would he not be working with Firth, but also he could not pursue his Chinese dialect studies as part of his Ph.D. research. There was simply no one at Cambridge qualified to supervise him on modern Chinese dialects. Neither did he consider himself suited to working with classical Chinese. Being someone who learns exclusively by ear, he had always felt quite put off by the idea of ‘engaging with dead languages’. As a compromise, his supervisor at Cambridge, Gustav Haloun, then Professor of Chinese, suggested that MAKH work instead on the C14 Chinese translation of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols [元朝祕史].

The Secret History, a traditional Mongolian biography of Genghis Khan, was the earliest known text in the Mandarin dialect. The reason it was in Mandarin was that it had been translated into Chinese to be used as a textbook for Chinese civil servants who had to learn the official language of the civil service, Mongolian. The fact that it was not supposed to be a work of literature, but rather intended to be more like a language manual, made it an interesting case study into an earlier stage of modern Mandarin.

MAKH negotiated with Professor Haloun to be allowed to go up to London to study with Firth, who had agreed to take him on for informal supervision. But then Haloun died, quite suddenly, at the end of that year; so MAKH went to ask if Firth would be willing to become his supervisor, officially, if it could be arranged. Firth agreed, and MAKH, although still a student at Cambridge, was allowed to transfer to the supervision of Professor Firth, travelling regularly to S.O.A.S. As well as giving MAKH time himself, Firth also arranged for Professor R. (Bobby) H. Robins to see him for tutorial sessions and assign him essays to write.

Being supervised by Firth was ‘a wonderful experience’, recalls MAKH. Though Firth could be ‘very tough’, intellectually, even occasionally ‘bullying’, still ‘if you said to him, “Hang on, I don’t think I agree with you”, he would listen, and say “Oh yes, you might be right”’. Besides sharing ‘speech fellowship bonds’ – both MAKH and Firth came from Yorkshire – there were also family connections (which, as MAKH is careful to note, were never referred to): MAKH’s mother had known Firth (then known as Rupert) as a child – they were at the same elementary school, in Bramley, a suburb of Leeds. The principal, Miss Firth, was Rupert Firth’s aunt. Rupert was 5 years older than MAKH’s mother; Miss Firth sometimes asked him to help with teaching the younger children; according to his mother, Firth was very nice to them. Later she often travelled on the same train with him when he was a student of history at Leeds; during the trip, Firth would quiz the high school girls on historical dates.

MAKH attended lectures by both Firth and Robins, and also courses in phonology given by Eugenie Henderson and Eileen Whitley. These lectures gave MAKH both a theoretical foundation to underpin everything he had learned from Wang Li and also a direction in which a methodology might be developed. He also attended lectures by visiting scholars whenever possible, including a series of three lectures given by Louis Hjelmslev, who spoke on the semiotics of traffic lights. On one occasion, MAKH was among a few privileged postgraduate students who were invited to afternoon tea in the Senior Common Room where he was introduced to Hjelmslev by Firth. MAKH recalls Firth saying, ‘The trouble with you, Louis, is that you are too stratospheric.’ ‘No, John’, Hjelmslev replied. ‘You are stratospheric. I have no ceiling.’

Firth’s general theoretical view of language, and his post-Saussurean system-structure descriptive model, provided the sort of insights MAKH felt were needed. The problem MAKH faced was how to build on Firth’s system-structure theory so that it became a way of talking about the language of the Secret History. The text was closed, in the sense that you couldn’t go out and get any more data; this was, after all, fourteenth-century Mandarin. Modern Mandarin could serve comparatively, as a point of departure, but not as a source of further textual data. So it had to be treated as it was. Taking the lexicogrammar as the core, MAKH used quantitative methods to test internal predictions based on proportionality.

Firth wanted his students to be broadly grounded in the branches and schools of linguistics. Given that Firth’s orientation was primarily European,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Part I  Halliday’s Life
• Part II  Halliday: The Making of a Mind
• Part III  Halliday: Ideas about Language
• Part IV  Directions of Development from Halliday
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright