On Grammar: Volume 1

Description

This is the first volume in a series presenting the collected works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday. This volume contains 17 papers, including a new piece entitled "A Personal Perspective", in which Professor Halliday offers his own perspective on language and linguistic theory as covered in his collected works. The first part of the book presents early papers (1957-1966) on basic concepts such as category, structure, class, and rank. The second part highlights how over the span of two decades (mid-sixties to mid-eighties) Halliday developed systemic theory to account for linguistic phenomena extending upward through the ranks from word to clause to text. The third part includes more recent work in which Halliday discusses the issues confronting those who would study linguistics, or as Firth described it "language turned back on itself".

Professor Jonathan J. Webster is Head of the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics at the City University of Hong Kong. He is also the Managing Editor of the International Linguistics Association's journal WORD, and the editor of the forthcoming Journal of World Languages (2014). M.A.K. Halliday was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.