Revisiting Halliday (1990) ‘New Ways of Meaning

The Challenge to Applied Linguistics’

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21784698
AutoresLocky Law (0000-0003-2234-9337, University of Hong Kong), Christian M I M Matthiessen (0000-0003-0247-5723, Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Año2023
Volumen15
Número3
Páginas337-368
Fecha de publicación2023-07-12
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLinguistics and the Human Sciences (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1742-2906 • E-ISSN: 1743-1662
EditorialUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1558/lhs.23599
OpenAlexW4384071983
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas42

Three decades ago, M. A. K. Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), presented a paper to AILA in Greece entitled ‘New Ways of Meaning: A Challenge to Applied Linguistics’ (Halliday, 1990), which introduced the notion of an ecological study of language (Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001). In this seminal paper, Halliday emphasizes that ‘language does not passively reflect reality; language actively creates reality’ (cf. Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999) and that ‘lexicogrammar... shapes experience and transforms our perceptions into meanings’ (Halliday, 1990: 65). He identifies three ‘problematic spheres’ as foreseeable challenges – language planning, the register of scientific discourse and of language and prejudice, involving the deployment of resources within the system that constructs sexism, racism, growthism, and classism; and highlights the role of future applied linguists – ‘to use our theory of grammar... as a metatheory for understanding how grammar functions as a theory of experience’ (1990: 69) and ‘to learn to educate five billion children ... at such a time it is as well to reflect on how language construes the world’ (1990: 91), one that contains numerous ecosystems essential to the human survival. Three decades later, at a time when we humans continue to destroy the only habitable planet known in the universe, ‘ecolinguistics’ has been established and recognized as a field of research and activity (one involving ideological tensions, cf. Martin, 1986), drawing centrally on Halliday (1990), but is his challenge being met outside the academic community? We revisit the challenge and mission envisaged by Halliday to answer the questions, ‘What has changed?’ and ‘What still needs to be done?’ We adopt a systemic functional linguistics approach to investigate the questions in a wide range of registers where environmental issues are being processed semiotically and opinions are being formed, including examples from political discourse, news media, social media, and late-night talk shows on topics surrounding climate change, renewable energy, wildlife conservation and extinction, and economic inequality. We also pay attention to texts likely to be influential in the life of children and their gradual construal of their own world views with associated value systems (cf. Matthiessen, 2015)

Epistemology · Grammar · Ideology · Linguistics · Metatheory · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Systemic functional grammar · Systemic functional linguistics · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language and cultural evolution · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy