Michael Halliday - Language evolving: Some systemic functional reflections on the history of meaning
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- čas přidán 24. 08. 2010
- Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Halliday poses the evolution of language seems a simple enough concept: it arose in the work of scholars studying the history of linguistic forms (phonology, morphology, some syntax). But a language is a semiotic system; more importantly a semogenic, or meaning-creating, system; and meaning also has a history - a highly complex one. Every language has, in Sapir's term, a "certain cut", its own (constantly evolving) ways of meaning; yet most of its features are shared with other languages. We seek out the history of meaning along various routes: in the history of the form of language, in the history of the people that speak it, in the history of the locale where it is spoken, and in the history of its varied cultural contexts. Consider English and Chinese, as two widely spoken and widely-documented languages. The history of meaning in English includes changes that took place in ancient Greek and in ancient and medieval Latin, even though English is not "descended from" these languages; Chinese has undergone somewhat less upheaval, but the history of Mandarin involved contact with ways of meaning derived from Sanskrit and from Mongolian, both also "unrelated" to Chinese. I think that, to study the history of meaning, we take account of both child language development and the emergence of learned forms of discourse; we maintain a trinocular perspective; and we seek systemic and functional (especially metafunctional) explanations of semiotic patterns in discourse.
A true Genius of Linguistics of our life time. Feel so proud to have studied his theories of Linguistics.
This is a classic, a template, of what a linguistics, and more broadly, a humanities lecture should be; engaging throughout, invitingly conversational in tone, wide-ranging, erudite, interdisciplinary, boldly pointing out hidden correspondences and parallels, allusive at every turn, instructing to the right degree of specificity given the time constraints while leaving sufficiently condensed keys for his audience's further exploration. Every academic in the humanities should take this lecture of Halliday's for inspiration, and follow closely how he unfolds his message without leaving his audience behind at any stage, how he provokes an irresistible urge to wander down those ostensibly obscure bye-ways of knowledge which so often lead to rewarding insight.
Rich and engaging. Thx UBC, LLED & ISFC37! For folks hanging on his every word or perhaps every other word, what he says between 11:03-33, when his mic cuts out, is:
"...which requires a totally open-ended articulatory or other [sound cuts out] symbol generating system. Unless [clears throat] unless you evolve a truly arbitrary sign [clears throat] Unless you evolve a truly arbitrary sign system, decoupling the expression plane from the content plane, you cannot refer. Is there a problem?..."
Thank you for providing a framework on how to construe the text in different ways using three metafunctions such as ideation, interpersonal, and textual function. Those are the basic foundations for comprehension or for rational discussion with peers while analyzing any kinds of texts. The beauty of this framework is its derivation from analyzing how we produce text - content pool where we experience the information, context of text producer ( cultural and social surroundings, frequency of exposure to content pool where domain knowledge derived, personal emotion involved on that process and so on), processing of content pool and context information to produce language instance called text using either written or spoken forms.
Hello can i contact you?
It's the golden era. The era of establishing knowledge. Halliday is unavoidable. He is the father of Language, a pioneer mayor...etc. no comment
My cousin Micheal, this is a wonderful watch! R.I.P
☹️ R.I.P.
a very humble scholar, I cant wait meeting and learn from Prof Halliday. ameen
SFL is an amazing way of analyzing language phenomena by finding the ideational, interpersonal, and textual dimensions of the text.
This is such a wonderful experience to listen to the great linguist "in person"...I read about him when I was in China through such scholars as Hu Zhuanglin and Huang Guowen, particularly the latter in his analytical studies on the translating of classic Chinese poems into English. Thank you for posting this.
MAK Halliday, one of the greatest linguist of our times!
Thank you very much for sharing such amazing ideas from amazing people in this field. It is always good to know the varieties of reasonable mind frame. It is fortunate being an intellectual but it is a blessing listening and learning from them.
He is so humble and down to earth. 👍✌
Thank you very much for this upload. At last I have seen him in person. I have followed his work since I read about the theme-rheme concept about 22 years ago. I am still into progressions, rank-scale, and transitivity which I find very useful in literary and linguistic analysis.
galing! na discuss ng maige ang detalye ng topic.... snay madme p kaung gwin n videong katulad nito
Thank you very much for sharing this lecture! What a great professor!
love this lexicogrammar! i used sfg as a framework to analyse my data for my thesis. it was really difficult to fully understand sfg and be able to analyse all my texts. the hardest part was to interpret data from the analysis as i couldnt find any book showing me how to do it. my thesis advisor is friend with halliday. i saw their pics in his office :) i recommend that you read functional grammar book by halliday which was published in 2004 as it is pretty simple.
Don't know if you'll respond, but I'm a law student and we had a course on SFL. With no formal background to linguistics (or English grammar) and English being a second language to me I couldn't understand much. I somehow waded through IFG (Halliday's book). I would be interested to know how you used it in your analysis because I couldn't really see any use of it but I'm inclined to believe that there is a lot that I could explore.
Sankalp Jain I’d recommend you read the book “introducing functional grammar” by Geoff Thompson. It’s personally the best book for new SFG learners. By the way, it’s interesting to see law students learning SFG. May I know how SFG is used in legal context?
michael halliday great presentation my thesis based on sfg
this video expands my knowledge
Thank you so much, sir! RIP (1925 - 2018)
Very useful video keep it up
I agree with you.. it's very useful
Thanks for this upload! I love this man. Although, as he says, he is a bit old fashion in terms of language definition. I am afraid I have to agree with Van Leeuwen and Kress.
Halliday is the most important linguist alive in the world today.
RIP.
...Chomsky?
Crystal?
@@Orkanplaysguitar Halliday's insights about language were much more impactful and accurate than Chomsky's. The latter is just more popular
@@Orkanplaysguitar both of them.
Great presentation.
Simply terrific!
wow...I use his theories for my language class
Informative indeed.
It would be really helpful in a video this long to give a contents table with timings.
my thesis was about students communicative competence. my framework was the 3 metafunctions. so, i must analyse every single element (participants,process, mood, theme, etc) in each clause. i was suggested to read hallidays book, an introduction to functional grammar (3d ed. 2004) lol think it's the best book so far. don't you think 1976 is too old? you should use the one from the year 2000 if not later if you can. just a thought :)
Kiitos!
I believe that Chomsky and Halliday --not necessarily in that order-- are the most influential linguists of our generation.
KOMPAN IS LAYF
Thanks Sir Michael Haliday.
oh and i dont have a digital copy. i have a book but it's not with me. you can get it on amazon. sorry about that.
this is the best post
really impressing .but I don'n know why the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky seems more rational to me. maybe Chomsky's theories (e.g generative syntax) is more limited and, hence , is less misinterpreted.
Chomskyan grammar is nearly all syntax.
A great counter to Chomsky is Pieter Seuren. It'd be great to read both together :)
My dog asks me: Are we going? It knows my procrastination habbits and gets all "excited" telling me so by facial expressions as well as sounds, getting up, walking over to the door and back. Then it (actually: she) sees that I am not ready to leave and still have to take a drink or go to the bathroom and it tells me about its disapointment. It grunts and sits down. Closes one eye pretending to be disinterested. But after a minute or two it gets up again and says: OK stop that! You are getting me aggravated! This is extremely annoying. You promised we are going and even got my leash before, so what's happening now? She gives a singlee sharp bark walks to the door showing me the way, then comes over to pull the leash and get me going. If we break down the discussion between me and my dog, we can see that in fact there are "sections" and semiotics. Its just me and you who are reluctant to recognize these and break them up into the slow process of verbal communication, just because we stupidly decided to evolve into that system of communication. In fact there are cultures where verbal communication is used differently. And we ourselves, if not for technology, would still be using them between ourselves as well.
thanks
can we share about it? i'm doing my thesis on it, too
Does anyone here knows the answer of this qs: functional orientation???? It doesn't matter whether definition or signification or.....
Functional orientation means that even phases of language development are functional in nature. The primary linguistic system of a child recreates such dynamics of functionality here.
Pragmatic function and mathetic functions are primary functions of child's protolanguage. This then develops into metafunction like Ideational component and Interpersonal function. So language learning means learning how to perform same functions with different language resources. And when our language develops from childhood to adulthood, we not only acquire language but also learn how to mean namely communicative competence.
por favor, si pudieran agregarle subtitulos en español... Gracias.
👍
GOOD LECTURE INDEED
Subtítulos en Español, por favor. Gracias...
So what is the function in filling the gap in previous linguistic ?
soem important aspect from mr halliday can learning
Please what are the salient points of Halliday's systemic grammar?
It's functional, and most important of all, it's systemic.
Tony B so language viewed as social semiotic is neo-Marxist? What the hell are you smoking? Marxism has zilch to do with SFL any more that leftism has to do with TG.
I know I'm late here but SFL and Transformational Grammar have nothing to do with the linguists' politicial leaning.
A great linguist
R.I.P.
He speaks fine. That is your problem.
A disappointing end indeed to a life-work that could have been huge. You were right all those years ago. Pockets of real depth, and areas of real potential, undermined by the dilettanti you spoke of. Oh what could have been! Perhaps my work -I am sure you recall it well- will still see the light of day, who knows. That, I think, might be game changing, but who knows. In any event, I do hope I live to see it.
This man is so cute💝
rest in peace
Hi Dalton😂
My names Morgan Halliday whoa proud
Can anyone tell me what he said is all about?my brain is not functionally well😂
A great loss to the world of languages. I love his theory, more than any other.
those who claim that Halliday is the most influential are those who are most influenced by Halliday.
So? The same can be said of virtually any expert.
Not most influential living linguist , that honour goes to Chomsky surely
Actually, Noam Chomsky's real influence as a linguist among linguists has been in decline since the late 1960s. You can check this through citation counts.
The rise of functional grammars (Dik, Halliday, Van Valin, etc.) in the '70s played a major role in the 'decline'.
@@binukj7970 Because Halliday died in 2018.
...What did he say again? I'm surprised he did not fall asleep at his own lectern. Interesting also how he included his politics and swipes at the media in what is supposed to be an objective lecture.
summary plsssss
This lecture is very broad ranging. I’m sure the ideas are valuable, but the themes shift so much every couple of minutes, it’s difficult to focus on his overarching thesis. I rather wish he’d presented a question or problem and spent the time showing how his approach of functional grammar could answer the question or solve the problem. As it is, he skips through so many connected ideas, being diverted down alleyways left and right. For those used to a focussed approach, it’s rather dissatisfying.
another discussion about the evolution of language without mentioning the effect the maturational constraints would have? what a complete waste of time. any discussion of the evolution without factoring in the maturational constraints is not a scientific approach. It is closer to a campfire story.
Write your own damn dissertation on that then, we'd all love to see it. Jeez!
FWIW, his discussion (and this event as a whole) is organized around a linguistic theory pioneered by him in the '50s (around the same period as Chomsky's), that leans quite heavily into what you might call _sociolinguistics._ It's a quite niche school of linguistics in stark contrast with the more popular fields of linguistic activity you may be familiar with.
Therefore the focus here is not on biological evolution, but of evolution of entire human language systems in interaction with our ever-increasingly complex eco-social environment across history, which for you is 'unscientific', a 'campfire story' and a 'complete waste of time'.
@@musical_lolu4811 wao sir. You rocked. I love the way you bounced on him. Actually, the thing is Halliday makes eco social factors as foundations to talk on the history of evolution of language. In these terms, he simply defines inter organismic linguistics and intra organismic linguistics wherein the former is sociological in perspective and the latter one concerns with psychophysiological in nature and henceforth Halliday calls both of these perspectives the domain of linguistics but Halliday prefers to study sociological endowment in the history of evolution of meanings, not that what Chomsky did. Chomsky formulates highly artificialized sentences to interpret brain mechanisms in terms of competence as idealization of language and performance as actualization of such idealization. This is far away the functionality of language. Hallidayan Linguistics is more descriptive and scientific. So far Chomskyian Linguistics is concerned, he himself calls his linguistic discussions as a Minimalist program. Hence theory in science and program in philosophy are two different things which this guy should put into consideration.
man, this crap is boring AF
Boring