Essential Halliday

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. Acts of meaning; 2. Complexity in language: density & intricacy; 3. Context of culture and of situation: field, tenor, mode; 4. Function in language & linguistics; 5. Grammatical metaphor; 6. Grammatics & metalanguage; 7. Indeterminacy in language; 8. Language development; 9. Language in education; 10. Linguistic computing; 11. Meta-functional analysis; 12. Phonetics and phonology; intonation; 13. Quantifying language; 14. Semantic system; 15. Socio-semiotics; 16. Structure and rank; 17. Text and discourse analysis; 18. Theory & description; 19. Trinocular vision; 20. Variation in language.

"Distils the major insights from six decades of research by the foremost functional linguist of our times" - J. R. Martin, Professor of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Australia.