This article's citation style may be unclear. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking. (October 2010)

This article is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (April 2011)

In linguistics, meaning is what the source or sender expresses, communicates, or conveys in their message to the observer or receiver, and what the receiver infers from the current context.^[1]

The sources of ambiguity[link]

Ambiguity means confusion about what is conveyed, since the current context may lead to different interpretations of meaning.

Pragmatic meaning[link]

Pragmatics is the study of how context affects meaning. The two primary forms of context important to pragmatics are linguistic context and situational context.

Linguistic context is how meaning is understood without relying on intent and assumptions. In applied pragmatics, for example, meaning is formed through sensory experiences, even though sensory stimulus cannot be easily articulated in language or signs. Pragmatics, then, reveals that meaning is both something affected by and affecting the world. Meaning is something contextual with respect to language and the world, and is also something active toward other meanings and the world. Linguistic context becomes important when looking at particular linguistic problems such as that of pronouns.

Situational context refers to every non-linguistic factor that affects the meaning of a phrase. An example of situational context can be seen in the phrase "it's cold in here", which can either be a simple statement of fact or a request to turn up the heat, depending on, among other things, whether or not it is believed to be in the listener's power to affect the temperature.

Semantic meaning[link]

Semantics is the study of how meaning is conveyed through signs and language. Linguistic semantics focuses on the history of how words have been used in the past. General semantics is about how people mean and refer in terms of likely intent and assumptions. These three kinds of semantics: Formal, Historical, and General-Semantics are studied in many different branches of science (methods of studying meaning vary widely). Understanding how facial expressions, body language, and tone affect meaning, and how words, phrases, sentences, and punctuation relate to meaning are examples of Semantics. Denotations are the literal or primary meaning[s] of [a] word[s]. Connotations are ideas or feelings that a word invokes for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning. during the 19th century Philosopher John Stuart Mill defined semantic meaning with the words "denotation" and "connotation".^[2] The original use of "meaning" as understood early in the 20th century occurred through Lady Welby, after her daughter translated the term "semantics" from French.

Conceptional meaning[link]

Languages allow information to be conveyed even when the specific words used are not known by the reader or listener. People connect words with meaning and use words to refer to concepts. A person's intentions affect what is meant. Meaning (in English) as intent harkens back to the Anglo-Saxon and is associated today still, with the German verb "meinen" as to think or intend.

Semiotics[link]

Ferdinand de Saussure described language in terms of Signs, which he in turn divided into signifieds and signifiers. The signifier is the sound of the linguistic object. The signified is the mental construction, or image associated with the sound. The sign, then, is essentially the relationship between the two.

Signs themselves exist only in opposition to other signs, which means that "bat" has meaning only because it is not "cat" or "ball" or "boy". Signs are essentially arbitrary, as any foreign language student is well aware: there is no reason that bat couldn't mean "that bust of Napoleon over there" or "this body of water". Since the choice of signifiers is ultimately arbitrary, the meaning cannot somehow be in the signifier. Saussure instead defers meaning to the sign itself: meaning is ultimately the same thing as the sign, and meaning means that relationship is between signified and signifier. All meaning is both within us and communal. Signs "mean" by reference to our internal lexicon and grammar, and despite their being a matter of convention, signs can only mean something to the individual (what red means to one person may not be what red means to another). However, while meanings may vary to some extent from individual to individual, only those meanings which stay within a boundary are seen by other speakers of the language to refer to reality: if one were to refer to smells as red, most other speakers would assume the person is talking nonsense (although statements like this are common among people who experience synesthesia).

See also[link]

• Meaning (non-linguistic)
• Sphoṭa

Fields

• General Semantics, semiotics, pragmatics

Perspectives

• Logical positivism
• Ordinary language philosophy

Theories

• Causal theory of names
• Definite descriptions
• Theory of descriptions
• Universal grammar

Considerations

• Idea
• Image
• Information
• Metaphor
• Sense
• Symbol
• Symbol grounding

Important theorists

• J. L. Austin
• Roland Barthes
• Rudolf Carnap
• Noam Chomsky
• Eugenio Coseriu
• Umberto Eco
• Viktor Frankl
• Gottlob Frege
• Paul Grice
• Roman Jakobson
• Saul Kripke
• Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• Bertrand Russell
• Ferdinand de Saussure
• John Searle
• P. F. Strawson
• Willard Van Orman Quine
• Ludwig Wittgenstein

References[link]

1. ^ Nick Sanchez. "Communication Process". New Jersey Institute of Technology. http://web.njit.edu/~lipuma/352comproc/comproc.htm. Retrieved January 14, 2012. 
2. ^ Fred Wilson (Thu Jan 3, 2002). "John Stuart Mill". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill/#LanLog. Retrieved October 8, 2010. 

Further reading[link]

• Akmajian, Adrian, Richard Demers, Ann Farmer, and Robert Harnish. Linguistics: an introduction to language and communication, 4th edition. 1995. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Allan, Keith. Linguistic Meaning, Volume One. 1986. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Austin, J. L. How to Do Things With Words. 1962. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Bacon, Sir Francis, Novum Organum, 1620.
• Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. 1967. First Anchor Books Edition. 240 pages.
• Blackmore, John T., "Section 2, Communication", Foundation theory, 2000. Sentinel Open Press.
• Blackmore, John T., "Prolegomena", Ernst Mach's Philosophy - Pro and Con, 2009. Sentinel Open Press.
• Blackmore, John T. Semantic Dialogues or Ethics versus Rhetoric, 2010, Sentinel Open Press
• Chase, Stuart, The Tyranny of Words, New York, 1938. Harcourt, Brace and Company
• Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Meaning, 2nd edition. 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dummett, Michael. Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd Edition. 1981. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Edited by Michael Beaney. 1997. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing
• Gauker, Christopher. Words without Meaning. 2003. MIT Press
• Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1959. Anchor Books.
• Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. 1989. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Hayakawa, S.I. The Use and Misuse of Language, 11th edition, 1962 [1942]. Harper and Brothers.
• Ogden, C.K. and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, New York, 1923. Harcourt Brace & World.
• Schiller, F.C.S., Logic for Use, London, 1929. G. Bell.
• Searle, John and Daniel Vanderveken. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. 1985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Searle, John. Speech Acts. 1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Searle, John. Expression and Meaning. 1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stonier, Tom: Information and Meaning. An Evolutionary Perspective. 1997. XIII, 255 p. 23,5 cm.

External links[link]

• "Conceptual role semantics" by Ned Block
• A summary of Wittgenstein's view of meaning
• Meaning at CCMS
• Meaning from a translator's point of view
• Meaning.ch - research group
• Semiotics and Saussure at CCMS
• USECS as the general catalog of meanings

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday
M.A.K. Halliday
Born	13 April 1925 Yorkshire
Residence	Australia
Nationality	English
Fields	Linguistics
Known for	Systemic functional linguistics
Influences	Wang Li, J.R. Firth, Benjamin Lee Whorf
Influenced	Ruqaiya Hasan, C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, J.R. Martin
Spouse	Ruqaiya Hasan

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M.A.K. Halliday) (born 13 April 1925, Leeds, Yorkshire, England) is a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar (SFG).^[1] Halliday describes language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning".^[2] For Halliday, language is a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defines linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'".^[3] Halliday describes himself as a generalist, meaning that he has tried "to look at language from every possible vantage point", and has described his work as "wander[ing] the highways and byways of language".^[4] However, he has claimed that "to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: language as the creature and creator of human society".^[5]

Biography[link]

Halliday was born and raised in England. His fascination for language was nurtured by his parents: his mother, Winifred, had studied French, and his father, Wilfred, was a dialectologist, a dialect poet, and an English teacher with a love for grammar and Elizabethan drama.^[6] In 1942, Halliday volunteered for the national services' foreign language training course. He was selected to study Chinese on the strength of his success in being able to differentiate tones. After 18 months' training, he spent a year in India working with the Chinese Intelligence Unit doing counter-intelligence work. In 1945 he was brought back to London to teach Chinese.^[7] He took a BA Honours degree in Modern Chinese Language and Literature (Mandarin) through the University of London. This was an external degree, with his studies conducted in China. He then lived for three years in China, where he studied under Luo Changpei at Peking University and under Wang Li at Lingnan University,^[8] before returning to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge under the supervision of Gustav Hallam and then J. R. Firth.^[9] Having taught languages for 13 years, he changed his field of specialisation to linguistics,^[10] and developed systemic functional linguistics, including systemic functional grammar, elaborating on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a group of European linguists of the early 20th century, the Prague school. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961.

Halliday's first academic position was Assistant Lecturer in Chinese, at Cambridge University, from 1954 to 1958. In 1958 he moved to Edinburgh, where he was Lecturer in General Linguistics until 1960, and then Reader from 1960 to 1963. From 1963 to 1965, he was the director of the Communication Research Center at University College, London. During 1964, he was also Linguistic Society of America Professor, at Indiana University. From 1965 to 1971, he was Professor of Linguistics at UCL. In 1972–73 he was Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, at Stanford, and in 1973–74 Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois. In 1974 he briefly moved back to Britain as Professor of Language and Linguistics at Essex University. In 1976 he moved to Australia as Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until he retired in 1987.^[11]

Halliday has worked in various regions of language study, both theoretical and applied, and has been especially concerned with applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory and practices of education.^[12] He received the status of Emeritus Professor of the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, Sydney, in 1987. He has honorary doctorates from University of Birmingham (1987), York University (1988), the University of Athens (1995), Macquarie University (1996), and Lingnan University (1999).^[13]

Linguistic theory and description[link]

Halliday is notable for his grammatical theory and descriptions, outlined in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar, first published in 1985. A revised edition was published in 1994, and then a third, in which he collaborated with Christian Matthiessen, in 2004. But Halliday’s conception of grammar – or ‘lexicogrammar’ (a term he coined to argue that lexis and grammar are part of the same phenomenon) – is based on a more general theory of language as a social semiotic resource, or a ‘meaning potential’ (see systemic functional linguistics). Halliday follows Hjelmslev and Firth in distinguishing theoretical from descriptive categories in linguistics.^[15] He argues that ‘theoretical categories, and their inter-relations, construe an abstract model of language...they are interlocking and mutally defining.^[16] The theoretical architecture derives from work on the description of natural discourse, and as such ‘no very clear line is drawn between ‘(theoretical) linguistics’ and ‘applied linguistics’.^[17] Thus, the theory ‘is continually evolving as it is brought to bear on solving problems of a research or practical nature’.^[18] Halliday contrasts theoretical categories with descriptive categories, defined as ‘categories set up in the description of particular languages’.^[19] His descriptive work has been focussed on English and Chinese.

Halliday rejects explicitly the claims about language associated with the generative tradition. Language, he argues, "cannot be equated with 'the set of all grammatical sentences', whether that set is conceived of as finite or infinite".^[20] He rejects the use of formal logic in linguistic theories as "irrelevant to the understanding of language" and the use of such approaches as "disastrous for linguistics".^[21] On Chomsky specifically, he writes that "imaginary problems were created by the whole series of dichotomies that Chomsky introduced, or took over unproblematized: not only syntax/semantics but also grammar/lexis, language/thought, competence/performance...Once these dichotomies had been set up, the problem arose of locating and maintaining the boundaries between them linguistics" ^[22]

Studies of grammar[link]

Halliday's first major work on the subject of grammar was "Categories of the theory of grammar", published in the journal Word in 1961.^[23] In this paper, he argued for four "fundamental categories" for the theory of grammar: unit, structure, class, and system. These categories, he argued, are "of the highest order of abstraction", but he defended them as those necessary to "make possible a coherent account of what grammar is and of its place in language"^[24] In articulating the category unit, Halliday proposed the notion of a rank scale. The units of grammar formed a "hierarchy", a scale from "largest" to "smallest" which he proposed as: "sentence", "clause", "group/phrase", "word" and "morpheme".^[25] Halliday defined structure as "likeness between events in successivity" and as "an arrangement of elements ordered in places'.^[26] Halliday rejects a view of structure as "strings of classes, such as nominal group + verbalgroup + nominal group" among which there is just a kind of mechanical solidarity" describing it instead as "configurations of functions, where the solidarity is organic".^[27]

[edit] Grammar as systemic

Halliday's early paper shows that the notion of "system" has been part of his theory from its origins. Halliday explains this preoccupation in the following way: "It seemed to me that explanations of linguistic phenomena needed to be sought in relationships among systems rather than among structures – in what I once called "deep paradigms" – since these were essentially where speakers made their choices".^[28] Halliday's "systemic grammar" is a semiotic account of grammar, because of this orientation to choice. Every linguistic act involves choice, and choices are made on many scales. Systemic grammars draw on system networks as their primary representation tool as a consequence. For instance, a major clause must display some structure that is the formal realization of a choice from the system of "voice", i.e. it must be either "middle" or "effective", where "effective" leads to the further choice of "operative" (otherwise known as 'active') or "receptive" (otherwise known as "passive").

Grammar as "functional"[link]

Halliday's grammar is not just systemic, but systemic functional. He argues that the explanation of how language works "needed to be grounded in a functional analysis, since language had evolved in the process of carrying out certain critical functions as human beings interacted with their ... 'eco-social' environment".^[29] Halliday's early grammatical descriptions of English, called "Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English – Parts 1–3"^[30] include reference to "four components in the grammar of English representing four functions that the language as a communication system is required to carry out: the experiential, the logical, the discoursal and the speech functional or interpersonal".^[31] The "discoursal" function was renamed the "textual function".^[32] In this discussion of functions of language, Halliday draws on the work of Bühler and Malinowski. Halliday's notion of language functions, or "metafunctions", became part of his general linguistic theory.

Language in society[link]

The final volume of Halliday's 10 volumes of Collected Papers is called Language in society, reflecting his theoretical and methodological connection to language as first and foremost concerned with "acts of meaning". This volume contains many of his early papers, in which he argues for a deep connection between language and social structure. Halliday argues that language does not merely to reflect social structure. For instance, he writes:

^[33]

Studies in child language development[link]

In enumerating his claims about the trajectory of children's language development, Halliday eschews the metaphor of "acquisition", in which language is considered a static product which the child takes on when sufficient exposure to natural language enables "parameter setting". By contrast, for Halliday what the child develops is a "meaning potential". Learning language is Learning how to mean, the name of his well-known early study of a child's language development.^[34]

Halliday (1975) identifies seven functions that language has for children in their early years. For Halliday, children are motivated to develop language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them. The first four functions help the child to satisfy physical, emotional and social needs. Halliday calls them instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions.

• Instrumental: This is when the child uses language to express their needs (e.g.'Want juice')
• Regulatory: This is where language is used to tell others what to do (e.g. 'Go away')
• Interactional: Here language is used to make contact with others and form relationships (e.g. 'Love you, mummy')
• Personal: This is the use of language to express feelings, opinions, and individual identity (e.g. 'Me good girl')

The next three functions are heuristic, imaginative, and representational, all helping the child to come to terms with his or her environment.

• Heuristic: This is when language is used to gain knowledge about the environment (e.g. 'What the tractor doing?')
• Imaginative: Here language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to create an imaginary environment.
• Representational: The use of language to convey facts and information.

According to Halliday, as the child moves into the mother tongue, these functions give way to the generalized "metafunctions" of language. In this process, in between the two levels of the simple protolanguage system (the "expression" and "content" pairing of the Saussure's sign), an additional level of content is inserted. Instead of one level of content, there are now two: lexicogrammar and semantics. The "expression" plane also now consists of two levels: phonetics and phonology.^[35]

Halliday's work represents a competing viewpoint to the formalist approach of Noam Chomsky. Halliday's concern is with "naturally occurring language in actual contexts of use" in a large typological range of languages whereas Chomsky is concerned only with the formal properties of languages such as English, which he thinks are indicative of the nature of what he calls Universal Grammar. While Chomsky's search for Universal Grammar could be considered an essentially platonic endeavor (i.e. concerned with idealized forms), Halliday's orientation to the study of natural language has been compared to Darwin's method^[36]

Selected works[link]

• Halliday, M.A.K. (1973). Explorations in the functions of language, London, Edward Arnold
• Halliday M.A.K. (1975). Learning how to mean, London, Edward Arnold
• Halliday, M.A.K., and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen (2004). An introduction to functional grammar, 3d ed. London, Arnold
• Halliday, M.A.K. (2002). Linguistic studies of text and discourse, Jonathan Webster (ed.), Continuum International Publishing
• Halliday, M.A.K. (2003). On Language and Linguistics, Jonathan Webster (ed.), Continuum International Publishing
• Halliday, M.A.K. (2005). On grammar, Jonathan Webster (ed.), Continuum International Publishing
• Halliday, M.A.K. (2006). The language of science, Jonathan Webster (ed.), Continuum International Publishing
• Halliday, M.A.K. (2006). Computational and quantitative studies, Jonathan Webster (ed.), Continuum International Publishing
• Halliday, M.A.K., and Greaves, W.S. (2008). Intonation in the Grammar of English, London, Equinox.

See also[link]

• Ruqaiya Hasan
• C.M.I.M. Matthiessen
• J.R. Martin
• Thematic equative
• Cline (linguistics) which notes Halliday's concept "cline of instantiation"
• Nominal group

References[link]

External links and references[link]

• Systemic functional linguistics
• Halliday and SFL Overview
• Interview of Halliday by G Kress, R Hasan and JR Martin, May 1986
• Halliday's Collected Papers in 10 volumes
• Michael Halliday's 2010 talk at UBC
• Halliday, M.A.K. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold, 1973.
• Halliday, M.A.K., and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3d ed. London: Arnold, 2004.
• A beginners simplified introduction to Systemic Functional Grammar for teachers