From:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/mak-halliday-university-sydney-chomsky-linguists-20180509-p4zeap.html
Although far too modest to admit it, Emeritus Professor Michael
Alexander Kirkwood Halliday, who has died at Manly aged 93, extended the work
of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx by drawing the study of language and ‘meaning’
further into the natural and social sciences.
Halliday (often known as ‘MAK’) was born in Leeds in Yorkshire on April
13, 1925. It was almost inevitable he would engage with language. Wilfred
Halliday, his father, was an English teacher and a poet of the Yorkshire
dialect. Winifred Kirkwood, his mother, taught French.
When war broke out, the British government resolved to deploy military
forces in Asia and established a national services foreign language training
course. Halliday volunteered for the course in 1942 and was posted to the
Chinese Intelligence Unit in Calcutta where, among other things, he debriefed
those who had fled Japanese-occupied China.
After the war, Halliday obtained a grant from the University of London
to study Chinese as an external student at Peking University, where he also
taught English. It was at Peking University he began to collect the strands of
thought he would later weave into his theories of functional linguistics and
grammar.
They included research on Mandarin and Sino-Tibetan languages with the
distinguished linguist Luo Changpei and on the languages and dialects of the
Pearl River Delta led by Wang Li of Lingnan University at Canton (now
Guangzhou). Thus Halliday saw Mao’s Red Army sweep to victory twice. He was in
the crowd watching it march into Beijing in February 1949 and, later that year,
he saw it triumph in the south.
Halliday returned to England for post-graduate work at the University of
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where he was influenced
by the leading English linguist, John Firth and, later, by the sociologist
Basil Bernstein. As Halliday’s China experiences had left him a firm Marxist,
the increasing tensions of the Cold War and outbreak of McCarthyism made him
ineligible to remain at the SOAS.
Halliday joined the Chinese department at Cambridge, where he completed
his PhD in 1955 under Firth’s supervision. There, Halliday became an active
member of the Communist Party and worked alongside luminaries including eminent
historians Joseph Needham and Eric Hobsbawm. Halliday broke with the party over
the Soviet Union’s brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956.
It was at Cambridge that Halliday applied his insights into language.
Drawing on Firth’s work, Halliday came to see language as a social construction
and, crucially, the mechanism by which society is reproduced and, occasionally,
transformed. That insight, combined with his commitment to improving social
conditions, left Halliday searching for a new way of teaching language to
improve literacy rates and give ordinary people greater opportunities.
This socially focused approach put Halliday at odds with established
figures on the ‘nature’ side of the ‘nature or nurture’ debate. They included
Noam Chomsky and his followers, who believed the human capacity for language
was innate rather than acquired during life.
Halliday argued the key to language development lay in how children
attribute "meaning" to elements in their environment. In contrast to
Chomsky and his followers, who advocated an inherent universal human grammar, Halliday
developed a theory of language based on a system of choices. The results were
Halliday’s models of systemic functional grammar and systemic functional
linguistics.
His approach remains a strong influence on the field of descriptive
linguistics and on teacher training curriculum across the world today. An
unexpected opportunity to demonstrate his theories arose on his resignation
from the University of London to take up a post at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver.
By then Halliday had married Ruqaiya Hasan, one of his early
postgraduate students and a formidable linguist. When the Canadian government
declined to grant Halliday a visa, he realised their young son, Neil, offered a
chance to closely monitor how children develop grammar.
Halliday’s study showed how children build grammar in stages through the
specific interactions of their lives. This led to the publication of his
seminal work Learning how to Mean in 1975, in which Neil was given the rather
unconvincing pseudonym ‘Nigel’. It is indicative of Halliday’s sense of humour
that he considered dedicating his book to the Canadian government.
Halliday’s ground-breaking work was recognised by the University of
Sydney, which appointed him foundation professor of linguistics in 1976. For
the following decades, the family home at Killara and later Manly would be an
international meeting house for language studies with both Halliday and Hasan
(who was appointed Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University) both in
great demand for international conferences, visiting professorships, and
publications.
Halliday’s retirement in 1987 gave him the chance to pursue a range of
pastimes, including bushwalking, train travel and the Herald’s cryptic
crossword. He and Hasan divided their time between Manly and Urunga on the NSW
north coast, where they listed the native birds of the district.
A steady stream of conference papers and books flowed, culminating in
the publication of Halliday’s 11-volume collected works. He retained ties to
China, where his theories struck fertile ground, and regularly lectured at the
major universities in Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai.
Both Halliday and Hasan attended the opening of a Centre for Language
Studies based on his work at City University in Hong Kong in 2006. Waiters at
Manly yum cha restaurants were often astonished to find an elderly Westerner
ordering off the menu in fluent Mandarin.
Halliday’s thick glasses and long sideburns gave him an owlish
appearance; features picked up by the cartoonist who drew him (and Chomsky) for
Icon Books’ Introduction to Linguistics. A remarkably friendly, approachable
man considering his Olympian academic status, Halliday remained optimistic
about the future, although his views were tempered by Yorkshire pragmatism.
Concerned that media reports on China often overlooked positive
developments there, he nevertheless worried over China attempts to expand its
geopolitical influence. “We may have to get used to having less freedom” he
observed during our conversations on foreign affairs. Donald Trump’s electoral
appeal reminded Halliday of Marx’s comment that the working class often voted
against its own interests.
Hasan’s death in 2015 deprived Halliday of his lover and collaborator.
He celebrated his 93rd birthday, but a painful outbreak of shingles clouded his
last years.
Halliday married several times prior to his relationship with Hasan. His
first marriage was to Trenchu Wong at Shanghai in 1947. He later married Irene
(‘Pat’) Woolf, with whom he had a son Andrew and daughter Polly. After their
divorce, he and the geneticist Anne McLaren had a daughter, Caroline.
Halliday later married Brenda Stephen and they had a daughter, Clare.
Halliday is survived by his children and four grandchildren, Bianca,
Nicole, Rhona and Cameron and an extraordinary intellectual legacy with which a
third generation of scholars continue to engage and extend.
Justin Cahill
Michael Halliday 1925 - 2018
PORTAL DA
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