This is the second in a series of volumes presenting the collected works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday. The papers in this volume focus on the application of systemic functional grammar to the analysis of texts, both highly-valued and everyday, both written and spoken. Presenting detailed linguistic analyses of specific texts, ranging from the highly-valued by such authors as William Golding, J.B. Priestly, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Charles Darwin, to the more everyday variety, such as a fund-raising letter and part of a doctoral defence, Halliday explores the power of grammar at work to create meaning, to change our lives for better or worse. Each text is studied as one would any kind of language, in terms of the linguistic resources that contribute to the realization of its "meaning potential". Not only are the analyses interesting for what they reveal about the texts under investigation, but also instructive in the practice and methods of systemic grammar analysis.
Table of Contents
Preface / Part One: Linguistic Analysis and Textual Meaning / 1. The Linguistic Study of Literary Texts / 2. Text as Semantic Choice in Social Contexts / Part Two: Highly-valued Texts (Novel; Drama; Science in Poetry; Poetry in Science) / 3. Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding's The Inheritors / 4. The Deautomatization of Grammar: From Priestley's An Inspector Calls / 5. Poetry as Scientific Discourse: The Nuclear Sections of Tennyson's In Memoriam / 6. The Construction of Knowledge and Value in the Grammar of Scientific Discourse: With Reference to Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species / Part Three: Everyday Texts (Written; Spoken) / 7. Some Lexicogrammatical Features of the Zero Population Growth text / 8. 'So You Say "Pass"... Thank You Three Muchly'
Author Biography
M A K Halliday was born in Yorkshire in 1925. In 1965 he became Professor of General Linguistics at University College London. In 1975 he was appointed Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.
