Halliday’s Conception of Language as a Probabilistic System
Systemic Functional Linguistics, Part 2 - Volume 2 - Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen [+]
University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) school, having authored or co-authored more than 160 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. He is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at University of International Business and Economics,
Beijing, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, in the School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Guest Professor at Beijing Science and Technology University, and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. Before this, he was Chair Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor in the Linguistics Department of Macquarie University. Professor Matthiessen has worked in areas as diverse as language typology, linguistics and computing, grammatical descriptions of various languages, grammar and discourse, healthcare communication studies, functional grammar for English-language teachers, text analysis and translation, multisemiotic studies, and the evolution of language. He has supervised over 40 research students.
Description
Chapter 9 gives an elaborate account for Halliday’s conception of language as a probabilistic system. It conducts a holistic review of Halliday’s work on probability, and the focus of this chapter is on the probability of choice in language. Halliday’s characterization of probabilities in language are discussed as one continuous phenomenon extended along the cline of instantiation – systemic probabilities at the potential pole of the cline and their instantiation as relative frequencies in particular texts at the instance pole.