For nearly half a century, Professor M.A.K. Halliday has been enriching the discipline of linguistics with his keen insight into this social semiotic phenomenon we call language. This is the first volume in a series presenting the collected works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday. This first volume contains seventeen papers, including a new piece entitled "a personal perspective", in which Professor Halliday offers his own perspective on language and linguistic theory as covered in his collected works. The first part presents early papers (1957-1966) on basic concepts such as category, structure, class, and rank.The second part highlights how over the span of two decades (mid-sixties to mid-eighties) Halliday developed systemic theory to account for linguistic phenomena extending upward through the ranks from word to clause to text. The third part includes more recent work in which Halliday discusses the issues confronting those who would study linguistics, or as Firth described it "language turned back on itself".

CONTENTS

Introduction: A Personal Perspective by M.A.K. Halliday Section One: Early Papers on Basic Concepts

1. Some Aspects of Systematic Description and Comparison in Grammatical Analysis 2. Categories of the Theory of Grammar 3. Class in Relation to the Axes of Chain and Choice in Language 4. Some Notes on "Deep" Grammar 5. The Concept of Rank: A Reply Appendix to Section OneSection Two: Word-Clause-Text 6. Lexis as a Linguistic Level 7. Language Structure and Language Function 8. Modes of Meaning and Modes of Expression: Types of Grammatical Structure and Their Determination by Different Semantic Functions 9. Text Semantics and Clause Grammar: How is a Text Like a Clause? 10. Dimensions of Discourse Analysis: Grammar Section Three: Construing and Enacting 11. On the Ineffability of Grammatical Categories 12. Spoken and Written Modes of Meaning 13. How Do You Mean? 14. Grammar and Daily Life: Concurrence and Complementarity 15. On Grammar and Grammatics