Hallidays Theory of Language.

Michael Hallidays taxonomy is documented below:- Instrumental: Language used to

fulfil a need on the part of the speaker. Directly concerned with obtaining food, drink
and comfort.

Regulatory: Language used to influence the behaviour of others. Concerned with

persuading / commanding / requesting other people to do things you want.

Interactional: Language used to develop social relationships and ease the process
of interaction. Concerned with the phatic dimension of talk.

Personal: Language used to express the personal preferences and identity of the
speaker. Sometimes referred to as the Here I am! function announcing oneself to
the world.

Representational: Language used to exchange information. Concerned with

relaying or requesting information.

Heuristic: Language used to learn and explore the environment. Child uses
language to learn; this may be questions and answers, or the kind of running
commentary that frequently accompanies childrens play.

Imaginative: Language used to explore the imagination. May also accompany play
as children create imaginary worlds, or may arise from storytelling.
2.1 Hallidays Theory

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday describes

language as a semiotic system, "not in a system of
signs, but a systemic resource for meaning".

In an attempt to understand how humans develop

language, Michael Halliday spent twenty-one
months studying early childhood language
development. Although his sample size consisted of
one child (his son, Nigel), Halliday emerged with
insights that continue to generate meaning, nearly forty years later, across multiple
fields and disciplines. Halliday worked as a participant observer, using pencil and
paper to document Nigels utterances at six-week intervals from age 9 months to 2-
years-old, with two points of focus in mind: the instance and the system. Halliday
aimed to document Nigels progression as an individual, across each stage of his
linguistic development; at the same time, he proposed a systemic theory of language
that unites our earliest meaningful utterances with those we enact as adults. Through
his three part stage-model, Halliday argued that humans develop language because
we are creatures who need to mean, and language, above all else, is our primary
resource for meaning.

For Halliday, language is always a resource for making meaning. Even an infant who
cannot talk is developing language, and thereby, learning how to mean. Even if the
infant cant walk, but he is still learning how to use his body. Nonetheless, the child
uses protolanguage (alternately referred to as protoconversation and protosemiosis)
in order to express meaning, even before he has words in his communicative
repertoire. His protolanguage (child tongue), is created through interactions with
native speakers of the mother tongue. The child learns to mean through such
occasions, and even though his protolanguage consists of basic content/expression
pairs, his language nonetheless expresses meaning and performs concrete functions
in the world. And while Halliday associates protolanguage with the childs crawling
stage, generally from six to twelve months, children voice meaningful intentions from
much earlier in life.

For instance, Halliday cites an occasion when his twelve-day old son Nigel cried
miserably until bath time, when his mother noticed an unpleasant injury on his
elbow. As soon as she called her husband (Halliday), Nigel stopped crying, and did
not cry again, even though the wound remained. Halliday considers this Nigels first
act of communication: he knew his mother had found out what was wrong, and that
was what mattered. Thus, as early as weeks old, children (at least Hallidays child,
through his data) are communicating their needs and performing their desires. For
now, though, we will maintain our focus on Phase I, in order to consider the
foundational role protolanguage plays in early literacy, particularly in terms of
function and meaning-making.

At the protolanguage stage (Phase I), language performs five primary functions
(microfunctions) across the following pragmatic contexts: instrumental, regulatory,
interactional, personal and imaginative. That is, the child meaningfully voices his
pre-verbal language to express particular intentions and desires. In order to
understand that which otherwise seems hard to pin down Halliday managed to
catalogue the various functions of these intentions, in order to understand that
which otherwise seems hard to pin down, by asking, what has the child learnt to do
by means of language. More specifically, this is what he found: the child enacts an
instrumental function of protolanguage to obtain goods and services (these are I
want utterances); the regulatory (Do as I tell you) function aims to manipulate
others; the interactional (me and you) function is the exchanging of attention; the
personal (Here I come/am) function enables the child to communicate his
affective states; the imaginative function enables the child to pretend.

Halliday believes that children are driven to expand their meaning potential in order
to get more done through language. Thus, the need for words in order to mean
more effectively is the driving force pushing the child into the lexicogrammatical
stage, or Phase II, where words are first formed.

When the body is ready, the child moves into Phase II, the transitional stage. This
stage is distinguished from its predecessor because the child now speaks words and
uses grammatical structures, but not in the sophisticated plaurifunctional way fluent
speakers of the mother tongue do in Phase III. Instead, most new words perform
only one function at a time. For instance, Nigels use of cat only meant hello, cat
an interactional function, which his use of syrup meant I want my syrup an
instrumental function. In time, during Phase II, words begin to take on multifunctional
properties, first over time, at separate instances, and eventually in a single instance.
Halliday observed this when Nigel uttered the word cake and simultaneously meant
Look theres a cake and I want some!. Such a linguistic occasion, for Halliday,
signifies an important advance toward adult-like speech, where words so often
signify multiple meanings. Because function precedes vocabulary in Hallidays
model, instances such as Nigels cake utterance suggest two things: 1) vocabulary
allows the child to expand his functional meaning potential; 2) vocabulary allows for
the combination of functions.

For Halliday, Nigels early acts of communication are certainly meaningful, and yet
they are not yet systematic. That is, they are not intentional choices of meaning
expression, even if they are directed toward an addressee. As the brain and body
develops, so does the childs meaning potential through language. The child learns
to move his head, to roll over, and correspondingly he becomes increasingly curious.
When his caregiver interprets his squeaks and sounds semiotically, his
communicative acts are given real-world value. In time, this confluence of
experiences creates the conditions for stable, recognizable, even predictable signs,
or content/expression pairs, to emerge. Protolanguage, like the physical act of
crawling around, involves more systematically intentioned utterances, based on
stable signs developing into systems. At this point, meanings have become
systemic. That is to say, each individual act of meaning is the instantiation of some
meaning potential This is key because meaning potential connotes real-world
function, and if the function of language development is learning how to mean, as
Halliday maintains, then language develops primarily to get things done in the world.
This concept allows Halliday to holistically bridge a humans language development
from birth to adulthood, via the construction of language systems, each designed to
facilitate meaning.

Even at the protolanguage stage (Phase I), language performs five primary functions
(microfunctions) across the following pragmatic contexts: instrumental, regulatory,
interactional, personal and imaginative. That is, the child meaningfully voices his
pre-verbal language to express particular intentions and desires. In order to
understand that which otherwise seems hard to pin down Halliday managed to
catalogue the various functions of these intentions, in order to understand that
which otherwise seems hard to pin down, by asking, what has the child learnt to do
by means of language. More specifically, this is what he found: the child enacts an
instrumental function of protolanguage to obtain goods and services (these are I
want utterances); the regulatory (Do as I tell you) function aims to manipulate
others; the interactional (me and you) function is the exchanging of attention; the
personal (Here I come/am) function enables the child to communicate his
affective states; the imaginative function enables the child to pretend.

Again, the child is not yet using words, but is expressing intentions, thanks to his
increasingly systematizing sign systems that correlate with his brain and body
development. The child is using (proto)language to construct meaning as he
constructs language from meaningful experiences, particularly by learning to
distinguish when language and how language pays, in reality. Halliday believes that
children are driven to expand their meaning potential in order to get more done
through language. Thus, the need for words in order to mean more effectively is
the driving force pushing the child into the lexicogrammatical stage, or Phase II,
where words are first formed.

Before exploring the childs development of words, it is time to give Hallidays own
words the floor, for this passage particularly illuminates his systems-based theory of
language:

we can (now) gain a coherent picture of the childs early semiotic development: how
children are steadily increasing the number of semogenic vectors, the various
parameters that open up the total potential for meaning. First, they tease apart the
content from expression; then they separate the system from the instance; then they
open up further strata, further levels of organization within the content and within the
expression; then they prise apart the distinct functional components inside each new
stratum. With each step, they are opening up a new domain in which to move, so
construing a multidimensional semiotic space analogous to the increasing
dimensionality of the bodily space in which their material existence is located (p. 14).

Here again, Halliday correlates language, or rather meaning development, with body
development, and the childs potential for meaning expands as his environmental
interactions expand. The brain, body, and environment, then, shape the childs
development (or meaning potential, or semiotic behavior). Additionally, we have
considered how repeated instances become signs, which in turn become sign
systems, and how selective and purposeful enactments of such now-systemic
instances constitutes meaning-making language use (even in Phase I). Halliday asks
us to consider the development of systems as a network, and while each network
taken by itself is a representation of just one moment in the developmental
progression, the sequence of several such networks presents a moving picture of the
expanding consciousness of the child (14-15).

When the body is ready[2], the child moves into Phase II, the transitional stage. This
stage is distinguished from its predecessor because the child now speaks words and
uses grammatical structures, but not in the sophisticated plaurifunctional way fluent
speakers of the mother tongue do in Phase III. Instead, most new words perform
only one function at a time. For instance, Nigels use of cat only meant hello, cat
an interactional function, which his use of syrup meant I want my syrup an
instrumental function (p. 40). In time, during Phase II, words begin to take on
multifunctional properties, first over time, at separate instances, and eventually in a
single instance. Halliday observed this when Nigel uttered the word cake and
simultaneously meant Look theres a cake and I want some! (p. 41). Such a
linguistic occasion, for Halliday, signifies an important advance toward adult-like
speech, where words so often signify multiple meanings. Because function precedes
vocabulary in Hallidays model, instances such as Nigels cake utterance suggest
two things: 1) vocabulary allows the child to expand his functional meaning potential;
2) vocabulary allows for the combination of functions.

Halliday refused to separate the learning of words from learning in general, and even
though most of Nigels words during his transitional phrase did not serve
multifunctional purposes (indeed they did not direct social interaction at all), they
served the function of enabling learning. Such language use, for Halliday, is
mathetic, as opposed to the pragmatic utterances of doing. In keeping with his
systematized model of language development, he suggests that the mathetic
function arises from a synthesis of the personal (self-oriented) and heuristic (other-
oriented) non-pragmatic functions, and lays the foundation for communal and
reflective behavior. Likewise, the childs pragmatic utterances correspond to the
action-based instrumental and regulatory functions of Phase I.

The childs structures of language are functionally specific, early in the Phase II
transition stage between child and adult language: they are either pragmatic or
mathetic As the child moves closer to adult language, this functional binary shifts to a
more abstract plane, where all adult language is inherently plurifunctional (p. 45).
To explain this transition, I wish to present a claim of Hallidays and then work
backwards to unpack it. He says that, in grammatical terms, memory and self-
consciousness:

constitute, respectively, proto-transivity and proto-mood; taken together, they make it

possible for the child to transform experience into meaning to reflect on and to act
on the world and the people in it in one semiotic swoop (p. 20, emphasis added).
The ability to transform experience into meaning and to reflect and act on the world
is characteristic of Phase III language development. That said, just as protolanguage
precedes and enables the transition to adult language, Phase II precedes and
enables the child to eventually transform experience into meaning.

But why are memory and self-consciousness so integral, and how do they develop?
To answer this in Hallidayan terms is to begin to answer how the child is able to
move into the mother tongue. This requires a return to the expression/content
concept that enables signs, and then sign systems, and thus, protolanguage to
develop. The twelve-day-old Nigels cries subsided once his parents located his
wound. His cries, then, were an expression (signifier) of his physical discomfort, or
the content of what his cries signified. This particular expression/content pair led to
the parental response that satisfied the goals of the utterance. At twelve days old, a
child is not making conscious expression/content pairings in order to procure distinct
responses; however, the combination of responses (i.e., adult interpretations of
childs meaning) with expression/content pairings may eventually become schematic,
to the point where the child understands that crying about a wound is a direct signal
for attention and response.

I reiterate this point because Phase II signifies the structured formalization of content
and expression in order to expand the childs meaning-making potential. Content, or
what is signified, is represented formally through lexicogrammar (i.e., the
combination of words and grammar) and is related to semantics (or meaning).
Expression, or the signifier, is represented formally through phonology and is related
to phonetics, and thus, the body. Together, the content and expression levels of
signification interface between the formal systems of language and the material
world of the childs environment. This is why every adult utterance is multifunctional
because such conditions are built into the grammar and it is why adult, higher-
order language enables infinite meaning-making possibilities.

On the expression plane, the body is physically ready to enable phonological (as well
as non-verbal) development, and at the same time, the child begins making sense of
his world on the content plane. Both of these also enable the child to enact his own
social being with others, with real and immediate effects. As the child moves from
the primary semiotic of the protolanguage to the higher-order semiotic of the mother
tongue, memory and self-consciousness begin to develop. Memory allows the child
to construe classes of phenomena out of repeated instances, using a re-entrant
mapping to impose categories on its experience of the world (p. 20). This means
that the child can construe common nouns, which is the beginning of referential
meaning. Self-consciousness enables the child to distinguish between declarative
(how things are) and imperative (how I want things to be) meanings. Together, in
grammatical terms, memory and self-consciousness create the conditions necessary
for a child to transform experience into meaning to reflect on and to act on the
world and the people in it in one semiotic swoop (p. 20). But again, this cannot
happen without the increasingly specialized bodily domain of expression. For
Halliday, language development, or learning how to mean, through body, words, and
grammar, is a reflection of brain development.

Another proto- element of Phase II is that of dialogue, which functions through the
adoption and assignment of social roles. While protolanguage suggests dialogic
possibilities (e.g., Nigels cries of pain; his parents response), the dialogue of adult
language exemplifies the general principle whereby people adopt roles, assign
them, and accept or reject those that are assigned to them (p. 46). Halliday notes
that Nigel develops the ability to respond to Wh- questions in Phase II; that is, he is
able to accept the roles he is assigned but is not yet able to assign roles to others.
Nonetheless, his protodialogue suggests he is on his way to achieving the most
sophisticated of early language functions: the informative function. Dialogue also
enables the child to develop mathetic and pragmatic (especially personal,
interactional, and heuristic) functions, which allow for manipulations of mood
(declarative, interrogative, etc.). In turn, this opens up the entire interpersonal
component in the language system, which is where the speaker intrudes orbuilds
himself into the language structure, expressing his relations with other participants,
his attitudes and judgments, his commitments, desires, and the like (p. 48).
Ultimately, this is how the child participates in and receives the culture in which he
operates.

According to Halliday, Phase II can be said to end when the child has mastered the
principles of grammar and of dialogue, and thus effectively completed the transition
to the adult language system (p. 49). The adult language, on a functional level, is
comprised to two metafunctions the ideational and interpersonal and the textual
function, each of which maps outward from Phast I and Phase II components.
[Halliday called it systemic functional linguistics for a reason.] Each of these
functions represent major systems, with distinct linguistic properties and options,
within the larger language constellation. The ideational system embodies the
speakers (Halliday shifts from child to speaker in Phase III) personal experience
and interpretation of his internal and external realities; the interpersonal system
enables the speaker to assume and assign social roles, to both observe and intrude;
the textual function enables the construction of texts[3], which can be inhabited by
the other two metafunctions.

Where once function could be tracked through simple content/expression pairings,

Phase III-level function is significantly more complex, and yet, in the scope of this
theory, is nonetheless an explosion of the primary content/expression dynamic.
Typical utterances in adult language have both ideational and interpersonal
meaning-making components. Halliday invokes functional grammar to point out that
every main clause is a structured instantiation of both mood (interpersonal) and
transivity (ideational). Through his intense study of Nigel, motivated by the ideas of
Bernstein, Firth, and the many frustrated teachers of language he worked with,
Michael Halliday aimed to construct a unified, holistic theory of language
development. By 1975, he succeeded at least to the point where he could write the
following:

It appears, then, that the metafunctions of the Phase III grammatical system arise,
indirectly but unmistakably, out of the primary uses of language that the child
develops in Phase I. . . . Hence the childs Phase I functional system, which is a
system of the content in a content/expression language, evolves along the familiar
lines of generalization followed by abstraction into the Phase III (adult) functional
system, which is a system of the form in a content/form/expression language. . . .
the original Phase I functions have not just disappeared (but) have become the
generalized contexts of language use (p. 55).

Imagine the satisfaction he must have felt when composing that passage! But
Halliday was not even close to finished. Some of his most exciting work concerns
those generalized contexts of language use (i.e., the adult language abstractions of
primary human functions).

In The Social Context of Language Development, Halliday (1975b) examine the

intersection of two meaning-making (semiotic) systems: culture and language,
primarily at the level of text. Text, he says, is any language speech or writing that
is operational, and therefore means. Text is not simply sounds, letters, and words; it
is choice incarnate. Text is not only what is but is set against the background of
what might have been (p. 285). The multitude of choices that comprise texts
(Halliday calls these microlinguistic acts) represent the actualization of meaning-
potential, on an individual, social, and cultural level. These microlinguistic acts can
be traced back to infancy, when the child first learns the value of content/expression
pairings, whose functions are activated by adult-level respondents in real-world
contexts.

From the start, meaning is constructed through language that arises from situations
(e.g., Nigels wound). As these meaning-making situations become typified,
content/expression pairs become encoded as signs, and the language building
process is underway. In yet another echo of protolanguage in the world of the mother
tongue, Halliday identifies situation type as a generalized context of a situation and
argues that all text is indeed situated (p. 287). This is because texts by definition are
functional, constructed to serve social purposes, by humans intent to mean. The
development of language, after all, is learning how to mean.

Texts then are situated, both linguistically and culturally, and while they consist of a
multitude of microlinguistic acts (i.e., enacted options), they are shaped the
conditions of particular situation types[4], including the typified conventions they
enable, as well as the linguistic capacities and roles of the participants involved. For
instance, a typical cultural situation type may be that of mother reading bedtime
story to child. The situation, which is clearly a type (virtually everyone can conjure
it), has served a social, cultural, linguistic, and functional purpose for generations.
The situation type itself is woven into the fabric of our culture to the degree that it
enacts participants as participants enact it. In this way, participants are not
overwhelmed by the need to create language and communicative roles from scratch
each time they interact. The roles themselves, as well as an array of microlinguistic
acts, are built in to the situation; therefore, as language learners conceptualize
situation types, they also gain access to the array of discourse conventions
embedded in these situations.

Halliday stratifies situation types along textual, linguistic, and social planes, but these
are best captured by his notion of register. If situation types are typified social
contexts, register is characterized by the typical range of meaning-making options
that are available within the situation. Halliday identifies three components of register
field, tenor, and mode which can be used to analyze, understand, and represent
the situated, meaning-making activity of any communicative act. The communicative
field, which corresponds to the ideational metafunction (i.e., transivity), concerns
what takes place, and incorporates setting and subject matter. Tenor corresponds to
the interpersonal metafunction and concerns the participants, their tone, and the
discourse styles afforded and influenced by their role-relationships. Mode represents
the textual function and concerns the symbolic or rhetorical channel by which
language travels, including written or spoken genres and, indeed, speech or writing
itself. Collectively, these components of register create the conditions for
communication, and thus, for the creation of meaning through language.

Roughly twenty-five years after identifying the seven primary functions of early
childhood language, Halliday (1998) remarked that recording and interpreting (i.e.,
representing) the child is easy, requiring little more than pen and paper as long as
the child has not surpassed the protolanguage stage. At this point, his behavior is not
yet systemic, so what you see is what you get. Representing the older child, even as
young as three years of age, is significantly more complex. This childs language is
fully systemic, consisting of a system of networks, each stratified along cultural,
social, grammatical, phonological, and situation planes. Hallidays grand theory
attempts to unite primal, infantile utterances with the sophisticated language
exchanges of adulthood by arguing that language development is motivated above
all by a very human need to make meaning. And it makes me wonder: to what extent
is the composition of this paper merely an extension of my first days; being human,
after all, is a situation type.

References
Halliday, M. A. K., (2003). The Language of Early Childhood. Volume 4 in the
Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday, ed. by J. Webster. London: Continuum.

Halliday, M. A. K., (1998). Representing the Child as a Semiotic Being (One Who
Means) In The Language of Early Childhood.

Halliday, M. A. K., (1976). Early Language Learning: A Sociolinguistic Approach In

The Language of Early Childhood.

Halliday, M. A. K., (1975). Learning How to Mean In The Language of Early

Childhood.

Halliday, M. A. K., (1998). The Social Context of Language Development In The

Language of Early Childhood.

[1] Halliday is less than clear about whether the imaginative function is part of Phase
I or Phase II, but he does say this: the first four functions listed clearly precede the
rest, which in addition to imaginative includes heuristic (tell me why) and
informative (Ive got something to tell you) functions.

[2] The brain is no more capable of construing a grammar, at birth, than the human
body is of walking or the brain of directing it to do so (p. 18)

[3] Modern genre theorists have argued that such a construction is a two-way street,
where texts invent users as they are invented by users

[4] This is a foundational principle of rhetorical genre theory.

Language Development/Acquisition- What are Halliday's seven functions of a

child's language?
Halliday (1978) proposed that there are 7 stages or functions of a child's speech.
These are as follows.

Instrumental function - language that is used to fulfil a need, such as to obtain

food, drink or comfort. This typically includes concrete nouns.
Regulatory function - language that is used to influence the behaviour of others
including persuading, commanding or requesting.
Interactional function - language that is used to develop relationships and ease
interaction. This could include phrases like "I love you mummy" or "Thank you".
Personal function - language that expresses personal opinions, attitudes and
feelings including a speaker's identity.
Representational/Informative function- language that is used to relay or request
information.
Heuristic function - language that is used to explore, learn and discover. This could
include questions or a running commentary of a child's actions.
Imaginative function - the use of language to tell stories and create imaginary
constructs. This typically accompanies play or leisure activities.