The Essential Halliday contains selected articles by M A K Halliday on the core areas of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Presenting a thorough survey of Halliday's published work across five decades, the reader includes discussion of function, metafunction, grammar, metaphor, learning and teaching language, child language, computational linguistics, semantics, social semiotics and discourse analysis. Detailed cross references and suggestions for further reading guide the reader to other articles of interest.
This comprehensive reader is an indispensable guide to the work of M A K Halliday. It will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of Systemic Functional Linguistics.
[I]t provides readers with a chance to identify a specific are of the theory they wish to explore and see it discussed and illustrated several times in different contexts, using different examples from Halliday's work. This repeated exposure throughout a single chapter allows for a gradual building of knowledge on a particular concept and may assist those readers having trouble with grasping the complexities of this theory of language...the concepts and their encompassing terminology are constantly introduced and revisited across the individual chapters of the book, helping to both reinforce the key concepts of Halliday's theory and create an understanding of the interrelatedness of these different concepts...this edited volume provides an extensive exploration of the features of Halliday's theories second only in depth and coverage to the original Collected Works themselves.
