Hallidayan Approach and Categorisation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Hallidayan Approach and Categorisation - Essay Example Halliday has tended to describe grammar from the perspective of a combination of systems and not rules. The basic contention is that any grammatical structure being studied will reveal the use of different choices from a discernible set of choices. If this approach is taken further, language can be seen as relying on meaning potential. Halliday argues that a grammatical system is closed since it is composed of a finite set of choices. However, a lexical system is open because various new additions are constantly taking place in language. Halliday also claims that language is organised in a meta-functional manner indicating that it is composed of different grammatical systems that aid to provide different kinds of meaning. He attaches the real reason behind language to providing meaning in social life and thus argues that all forms of languages are based on three semantic components. The first semantic component is ideational and works as a resource for interpreting human experience. This component tends to reveal the contextual value of a field in grammar. This indicates that it allows the exploration of the social processes through which the particular use of language in some fashion is being implicated. The second semantic component is interpersonal and serves to perform various functions (which may be simple or complex) that define social relationships. This component is in itself composed of the personas of the writer or the speaker, the social distance between interacting parties and the relative social status difference between the interacting parties. The last semantic component is textual and it aids in combining the two semantic components presented above. This combination allows both forms of meanings to come together in a coherent fashion through textual means. Using the textual meta-function allows an exploration of how coherent a piece of text is which in turn allows discerning the credibility of the subject text. The various forms of grammatical s ystems that are proposed by Halliday are in turn related to these meta-functions that serve to compose them. Comparison of Selected Texts At first glance, it seems obvious that the selected texts are geared to serve different purposes. The first text (extracted from a seller’s website) is designed to sell a product related to the medical condition being discussed. In stark contrast, the second text (extracted from a medical help website) is designed to help understand the medical condition and its progression and growth. This significant difference helps to explain the fact that the first text is more suggestive in nature while the second text is more declarative in nature. In addition, the first text contains little medical terminology because it is designed to appeal to the mass audience that will consume the text. This indicates that the first text is directed towards the layman who is suffering from this condition and is looking online for quick fixes to the problem.