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Interviews with M. A. K. Halliday: Language turned back on himself

Article  in  English for Specific Purposes · January 2015

DOI: 10.1016/j.esp.2014.12.003

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78 Reviews / English for Specific Purposes 39 (2015) 75–82

The weak point of this book is that some chapters (e.g., Chapter 4, 6, 10, 11) are too short to explain the topic thoroughly.
For example, as the author pointed out, non-Anglophone scholars are also required to write genres other than research ar-
ticles, but the author did not elaborate on the structures and linguistic features of those genres in Chapter 6. It would be
necessary for the author to extend those short chapters if she were to reprint the book. Furthermore, it is unfortunate that
some hotly-debated topics such as the dichotomy of globalisation and localisation for science publication have not been
included in the book. I suggest that readers of the book comprehend the viewpoints in this volume by referring to some other
references like Hanauer and Englander (2013), Kuteeva and Mauranen (2014) and Lillis and Curry (2010).
That being said, this volume is a timely review of studies about writing and publishing in English in the last decades,
drawing on findings from “applied linguistics, rhetoric, sociology of science, history of science, and bibliometrics” (p. 88). It is
salient not only for multilingual scientists and graduate students but also for ERPP researchers. Based on this book, re-
searchers could further investigate the issues ranging from non-Anglophone writers’ challenges and strategies, to the rela-
tionship between the journal reviewers and the authors.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No.: 14BYY151).

References

Cargill, M., & Burgess, S. (2008). Introduction to the special issue: English for research publication purposes. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7(2),
75-76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2008.02.006.
Hanauer, D. I., & Englander, K. (2013). Scientific writing in a second language. Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press.
Kuteeva, M., & Mauranen, A. (2014). Writing for publication in multilingual contexts: An introduction to the special issue. Journal of English for Academic
Purposes, 13, 1-4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2013.11.002.
Lillis, T. M., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English. London: Routledge.

Congjun Mu is a professor at the College of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Maritime University in Shanghai. His current research interests cover second
language writing, applied linguistics, metadiscourse and translation.

Congjun Mu
School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Maritime University,
1550 Hai Gang Avenue, Lin Gang New Town, Shanghai, China
E-mail address: congjun.mu@gmail.com

Available online 09 January 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.12.004

Interviews with M. A. K. Halliday: Language Turned Back on Himself, James R. Martin (Ed.). Bloomsbury Academic,
London and New York (2013). xivD272 pp., US$39.95, hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-4411-5487-3

The volume under review is a collection of fourteen academic interviews conducted over the past four decades with
Michael Halliday, the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Prefaced with a compendious introduction by the
editor, the volume presents the interviews in a chronological sequence, with two of them belonging to the 1970s, five of them
to the 1980s, three of them to the 1990s, and four of them to the new century. As far as the content is concerned, the volume
features a broad coverage of topics and themes, and a spoken mode of description, interpretation, explanation and evaluation.
To my understanding, the volume complements the previously published ten-volume The Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday
(2002–2007) and The Essential Halliday (2009a), constituting an engaging addition to the repository that intensively dem-
onstrates Halliday’s ideas, views, positions, and ideals in the fields of linguistics and semiotics.
Though most of the interviews have been separately published in previous years and decades, the volume is the first
publication that integrates all the interviews hitherto formally conducted with Halliday, and thereby has several features that,
in my view, deserve readers’ attention. First, the volume provides biographical details about Halliday’s growth in the field of
linguistic research and incorporates critical reviews of the epistemological influences that benefit the evolution of Halliday’s
 Reviews / English for Specific Purposes 39 (2015) 75–82 79

linguistic theory. The biographical details inform readers of both Halliday’s career path and his scholastic pursuits (Interview
6, 13 and 14). The epistemological influences cover not only those from Halliday’s precursors and seniors but also those from
his contemporaries and colleagues. These intellectual sources include Saussure, Hjelmslev, Malinowski, Firth, Whorf, Bern-
stein, Wang Li, Edelman, Pike, Lamb, Hymes, and Hasan, to name just a few. Knowledge of the above biographical details and
epistemological influences is very helpful for ushering novices into the realm of Hallidayan linguistics.
Second, the volume probes into many concept-related issues where Halliday’s interpretations and clarifications serve well
to ensure a profound understanding of the conceptual foundations on which SFL is built. These issues can be found in most of
the interviews. Particularly prominent are those that deal with the relations between system and text, discourse and text,
transitivity and ergativity, context of culture and context of situation, language and social action, the linguistic system and the
social system, stratification and metafunction, instantiation and logogenesis, register and genre. The volume also covers the
distinctions between system and structure, lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor, dialectal variation and coding
orientation, the intraorganism perspective and the interorganism perspective. In addition, it tackles the three senses of
function, the stratal relations in language, the identification of themes, the probabilistic nature of linguistic systems, and the
conception of appliable linguistics. Halliday’s discussions of these issues turn the volume into a tremendous source of
inspiration and insight, and thus will continue to promote fruitful research in the fields of linguistics and semiotics.
Third, the volume abounds with discussions focused on child language development and language in education, and
thereby constitutes a valuable resource to build up readers’ knowledge about Halliday’s endeavors and contributions in the
field of educational linguistics. On the one hand, the volume enables readers to know that Halliday, committed to the
integration of theory and practice, has long been concerned with mother tongue education, especially language moving up
the age range and across the curriculum. On the other hand, the volume brings to light some central ideas of Halliday’s
language-based theory of learning, which proposes that child language development is a social interactive process (Interview
2, 4 and 14) and that all learning is learning language and learning through language (Interview 4 and 7).
Fourth, the volume brings into very clear vision Halliday’s positions about sociolinguistics, pragmatics, applied linguistics,
cognitive linguistics, critical linguistics, Chomskyan linguistics, and the emerging field of multimodal studies. While noting
that his conception of linguistics is invariably ‘socio’ and that pragmatics is simply the instantial end of the semantics, Halliday
proposes that there is no need for such separate disciplines as sociolinguistics and pragmatics (Interview 10). As regards
applied linguistics, Halliday prefers it to be deemed as a theme rather than a discipline, arguing that it is a problem-solving
activity which takes language as an instrument for intervening in something else (Interview 11). Cognitive linguistics is
perceived by Halliday as another way of doing semantics, except that it looks into meaning from outside language and the
categories proposed in it are devoid of realization rules (Interview 10, 11 and 12). As for critical linguistics, Halliday comments
that critical discourse analysts still need to locate what they say about language clearly within a general framework (Interview
10). The volume is abundant with Halliday’s remarks on Chomskyan linguistics. In a nutshell, Halliday is opposed to
Chomsky’s theory of language learning and disapproves his separation of theoretical linguistics from applied linguistics, as
revealed in Interview 2, 5, 10, 11, and 13. In the case of multimodality, Halliday agrees that many modalities other than
language are actually part of the contextualization of language, but shows cautiousness about the extent to which his social
semiotic theory can be pushed beyond language (Interview 14). Given the above positions, it stands to reason that the volume
will enable readers to develop a better sense of the scope and objective of SFL.
Fifth, the volume is also remarkable for its explorations of the Marxist orientation in Halliday’s theory of language. Taken
together, the explorations, which can be found in Interview 6, 9, 10 and 14, suggest that Halliday’s view of language can be said
to have evolved from a classical Marxist phase into a neo-Marxist phase. In the former phase, language is viewed merely as a
reflection of material reality and the theory of language gives value to varieties of language that are traditionally neglected. In
the latter phase, however, language is seen as a product of the dialectic between material processes and semiotic processes,
and the linguistic theory recognizes that language construesdnot only reflects but more importantly constructsdreality. This
means that in the latter phase, language is no longer perceived as a kind of second-order phenomenon, and priority is given to
the semiotic component which becomes constructive or constitutive. As the Marxist orientation in Halliday’s theory of
language is a theme rarely covered in his other works, the present volume is sure to establish itself as a reference that cannot
be overlooked when there appear explorations into the Marxism in SFL.
All in all, the volume can be largely taken, as the editor says in the preface, as a useful surrogate for those who desire to
engage with Halliday in spoken academic interactions. Moreover, while being in epitome a reservoir of Halliday’s responses to
the questions posed to him at different times, the volume captures the complexity and richness of SFL, which has been
evolving towards a general linguistic theory and an appliable theory (Halliday, 2009b). This assures us that the volume will
become another treasure trove to those students and researchers who are interested in the history, theory and practice of
Hallidayan linguistics.

References

Halliday, M. A. K. (2002–2007). In J. J. Webster, The collected works of M. A. K. Halliday (Vols. 1–10). London and New York: Continuum.
Halliday, M. A. K. (2009a). In J. J. Webster (Ed.), The essential Halliday. London and New York: Continuum.
Halliday, M. A. K. (2009b). Methods–techniques–problems. In M. A. K. Halliday, & J. J. Webster (Eds.), Continuum companion to systemic functional linguistics
(pp. 59-86). London and New York: Continuum.
80 Reviews / English for Specific Purposes 39 (2015) 75–82

Wenchao Zhao is a Ph.D. serving in Henan University of Science and Technology, China. His research interests include systemic functional linguistics,
(critical) discourse analysis, and multimodality. He has published book reviews in such journals as Discourse & Society, Visual Communication and Modern
Foreign Languages.

Wenchao Zhao *
School of Foreign Languages, Henan University of Science and Technology, No. 263, Kaiyuan Road, Luoyang City,
Henan Province 471023, PR China

Tel.: þ86 13525498084.

E-mail address: w_yxy2009@163.com

Available online 03 January 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.12.003

The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing: Discourses, Communities and Practices. Karen Bennett (ed.). Palgrave
MacMillan. (xiv D 282pp.) ISBN: 978-1-137-35118-0. £63.

This well-edited collection is timely, surprising, and important. We have known since the 1970s about center-periphery
models and the inequalities and distortions they perpetuate. Only much more recentlydat least in applied language
studiesdhas the useful intermediary concept of semiperiphery come to the fore in order to capture the ambivalent academic
status of countries that are neither in the center, such as USA, UK, Germany or Japan, nor operating in penurious and isolated
conditions, such as in Paraguay, Chad or Burma. This volume in fact restricts itself to the European semiperiphery with
chapters dealing with academic writing in Croatia, The Czech Republic, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Turkey,
Spain and Italy. At first sight, the inclusion of the last two might strike many as unexpected since the ‘new’ Spain has in recent
years been modernizing and internationalizing its universities while Italy has impressive and long-standing scholarly tra-
ditions in the arts and humanities. However, Burgess, for Spain, emphasizes the deleterious effect of the economic crisis on
Spanish academic life, while Negretti, for Italy, reveals the sclerotic state of the Italian university system.
The volume consists of opening and closing sections by the editor, Karen Bennett, who is clearly a rising star in studies of
academic discourse, and 12 chapters divided into three four-part sections. The first, entitled Discourses in Tension, deals with
the stresses that arise when established national rhetorics run up against empiricist Anglo-American discoursal practices. The
second, Communities in Conflict, moves on to studies of individual academics in the semiperiphery and their attempts to
negotiate a space between local norms and those of a globalized, internationalized world of scholarship. The third, Publication
Practices, rounds out the volume with accounts of how knowledge can be distributed and evaluated in a number of semi-
peripheral academic cultures. However, this tripartite division is less firm than it might appear; for example, Negretti’s study
of Italian scholars could have been placed in the first section rather than the second, while the wide-ranging chapter by Bardi
and Muresan on research writing practices in Romania essentially deals with all three sub-categories. The volume ends with a
consolidated bibliography of some 400 items and a comprehensive index, neither of these virtues being exactly ubiquitous in
today’s publishing world of multi-authored scholarly volumes.
I said at the outset that this volume was “surprising”dat least to me. One of these surprises was that the editor and just
one of the other thirteen contributors were the only native speakers of English. (And only one contributor is male!) Although
the work of pioneers such as Lillis and Curry (e.g.2006) is here widely acknowledged, it appears that more and more nationals
in the semiperiphery are now making important contributions to this area of research and inquiry. In an exploration of the
early years of ESP (Swales, 1985), Swales lamented the fact that none of the fifteen extracts he had chosen for illustrative
purposes had been written by a person with English as an Additional Language. How times have changed, and these changes,
not only in Europe but also in Asia, are themselves something of a wake-up call to largely “Anglo” institutions, such as BALEAP.
Secondly, as many as half of the contributors were not known to me and this again was something I might not have expected.
So, there are several new voices here. A third feature of this volume is perhaps less surprising, but needs mentioning all the
same: Almost without exception, the chapters are well-written, widely-referenced, and full of interest.
The four authors in the first section go about their similar tasks in dissimilar ways. Bennett’s exploration of historiographic
discourses in Portugal offers detailed analysis of changes in writing style over the last few decades, mapping these changes
against an impressive list of ten distinguishing discoursal features. What emerges is something of a hybrid modernizing style
that apparently has received a mixed response from Portuguese historians, some appreciating the new moves toward
internationalization, others regretting that specialized local knowledge can no longer be taken as a given. Dontcheva-

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