Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
4. Language and society in a systemic functional perspect
Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Ruqaiya Hasan† [+]
Macquarie University
Ruqaiya Hasan, who died in 2015, was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation.
Read her obituary here
Description
In this chapter I attempt to provide a brief account of SFL’s continuing struggle to understand how and why language works. Since the work of language is always and only done in society, the struggle to understand why and how language works is also the struggle to understand the nature of the relationship between language and society – hence the importance of asking where, why and how people use language and what follows upon this fact. My account of how Halliday proceeded from this initial observation will not be organised chronologically: instead, it will be concept based for two reasons.