ISFC Plenary - Michael Halliday

The 37th International Systemic Functional Congress was hosted by Geoff Williams at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada in July 2010.

Thanks to Geoff and the team at UBC, we can all see the videos of the plenary sessions, as well as downloading the presentations slides. (During the conference, they also set up chat rooms for remote participation in the sessions.)

This talk is by the 'father' of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) - Michael Halliday (see de Beaugrande's extensive description). Halliday focuses on the way that SFL includes, quite naturally, an evolutionary perspective.



Michael Halliday - Language Evolving: Some systemic functional reflections on the history of meaning
Talk given at 37th ISFC, UBC, Vancouver, 19 July 2010

This talk is fascinating in that it covers not only major aspects of SFL theory and application to evolutionary theory, including language viewed from ontogenetic, phylogenetic and logogenetic perspectives, but also anecdotes, asides and insights from Halliday himself.