Professor M. A. K. Halliday (b. 1925) was Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia, until his retirement and has taught as a Visiting Professor around the world. As a self-styled 'generalist' he has published in many branches of linguistics. Professor Jonathan J. Webster is Head of the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics at the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

• 1. Introduction, Jonathan Webster (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong); 2. Ideas & new directions, Christian Matthiessen (Macquarie University, Australia); 3. Methods, techniques, problems, M. A. K. Halliday; 4. Language development, Clare Painter (University of New South Wales, Australia); 5. Language and other primate species, James Benson (York University, Canada) & Paul Thibault (Agder University College, Kristiansand, Norway); 6. Linguistics Computing, Elke Teich (Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Germany); 7. Corpus-based research, Wu Canzhong; 8. Clinical applications, Elizabeth Armstrong; 9. Discourse studies, Jim Martin (University of Sydney, Australia); 10. The place of context in a systemic functional model, Ruqaiya Hasan; 11. Stylistic analysis, Annabelle Lukin (Macquarie University, Australia) & David Butt (Macquarie University, Australia); 12. Resources and courses, Mick O'Donnell (University Autonoma de Madrid, Spain); 13. Keywords; Bibliography; Index.

"This volume brings together twelve contributions from leading figures working in ‘the IFG tradition' within Systemic Functional Linguistics. Each provides an overview of one aspect of recent thinking in this version of SFL, with its strongly social and cultural orientation. For readers who are looking for a one-volume summary that gives the authentic flavour of this significant body of work, I warmly recommend this book." - Robin P Fawcett, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Cardiff University, UK.