Book Reviews

The Bloomsbury Companion to M.A.K. Halliday, edited by Jonathan J. Webster, is one volume in a series entitled Bloomsbury Companions, and covers a wide range of topics, such as cognitive linguistics, lexicography, and syntax and discourse analysis. It focuses on Halliday as the originator of Systemic Functional Linguistics, and his powerful theory of language, which adds to our understanding of how language works (vii). Structurally, the volume is composed of four parts with a total of 19 chapters. The first is an introductory chapter presenting a brief biography of Halliday; the second part (Chapters 2 through 6) focuses on various factors that have influenced Halliday’s thinking about language; the third (Chapters 7 through 14) sets up the essential framework of Halliday’s theory; the fourth (Chapters 15 through 19) concerns the various ways in which Halliday’s idea of language has been developed. The first chapter offers a brief biography of Halliday, from which we gain a better understanding of Halliday’s life – his fascination with China and Chinese, his dedication to learning and teaching, his preoccupation with language and linguistics, and his contributions to linguistics and human sciences. The second chapter is entitled The ‘history of ideas’ and Halliday’s natural science of meaning, and primarily sets out how Halliday’s theoretical work constitutes the natural science of meaning for investigating the processes of meaning (p. 18). The author David G. Butt splits the chapter into 10 sections. While expounding the milieu of Halliday’s enquiry in section one, he gives an account of Halliday’s family background, social environment, his teacher J.R. Firth, his study of child language, and his recognition of empirical investigations. In the sections that follow (2–7), he displays evidence of the scientific value of Halliday’s studies of language by examining his approaches to language. In order to manage the complexity of languages, Halliday has proposed a system of dimensions, co-ordinates for scientific enquiries into texts and their contexts. Halliday makes his view about ‘science’ in linguistics very explicit by stating that complementarities are characteristic of the grammars of natural languages. In Section 8, the author makes it