Revisiting Halliday (1990) ‘New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics’

Abstract

Three decades ago, M. A. K. Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), presented a paper to AILA in Greece entitled ‘New Ways of Meaning: A Challenge to Applied Linguistics’ (Halliday, 1990), which introduced the notion of an ecological study of language (Fill and Mühlhäusler, 2001). In this seminal paper, Halliday emphasizes that ‘language does not passively reflect reality; language actively creates reality’ (cf. Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999) and that ‘lexicogrammar... shapes experience and transforms our perceptions into meanings’ (Halliday, 1990: 65). He identifies three ‘problematic spheres’ as foreseeable challenges – language planning, the register of scientific discourse and of language and prejudice, involving the deployment of resources within the system that constructs sexism, racism, growthism, and classism; and highlights the role of future applied linguists – ‘to use our theory of grammar... as a metatheory for understanding how grammar functions as a theory of experience’ (1990: 69) and ‘to learn to educate five billion children ... at such a time it is as well to reflect on how language construes the world’ (1990: 91), one that contains numerous ecosystems essential to the human survival. Three decades later, at a time when we humans continue to destroy the only habitable planet known in the universe, ‘ecolinguistics’ has been established and recognized as a field of research and activity (one involving ideological tensions, cf. Martin, 1986), drawing centrally on Halliday (1990), but is his challenge being met outside the academic community? We revisit the challenge and mission envisaged by Halliday to answer the questions, ‘What has changed?’ and ‘What still needs to be done?’ We adopt a systemic functional linguistics approach to investigate the questions in a wide range of registers where environmental issues are being processed semiotically and opinions are being formed, including examples from political discourse, news media, social media, and late-night talk shows on topics surrounding climate change, renewable energy, wildlife conservation and extinction, and economic inequality. We also pay attention to texts likely to be influential in the life of children and their gradual construal of their own world views with associated value systems (cf. Matthiessen, 2015).