LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

M. A. K. HALLIDAY, Learning how to mean: explorations in the development of

language. (Explorations in Language Study Series, edited by Peter Doughty
and Geoffrey Thornton). London: Edward Arnold, 1975. Pp. x+164.

Learning how to mean is an amazing tour de force. Halliday approaches the prob-
lem of language learning with a stock of refreshing insights and a daringly
original perspective. The book, to my knowledge, provides the first detailed
model for a prospective 'developmental sociolinguistics'. It is most successful as a
description of the development of language functions and as an explanation of
the relations in ontogenesis between language know-how and the dynamics of
social interaction It is somewhat less successful, or at least puzzling, in support-
ing some basic claims; for example, that 'the internal organization of the gram-
matical system is also functional in character' (16). Despite the exceptional
clear-headedness of his arguments and exposition, it is ultimately difficult to
determine what Halliday intends to account for by such claims. This may be
due merely to the novelty of his terminology, especially in contrast to the
'structural' terminology of American developmental psycholinguistics. The work
is very British - it extends the Malinowski-Firth-Halliday-Bernstein scientific
tradition to the domain of early language learning; and as such it is in a sense
historically overdue and surely most welcome. In reading the book it is quite
important (and not entirely easy) to bear in mind that, as Halliday periodically
repeats, his sociological approach is meant to complement and not to contradict
psycholinguistic approaches. In this review I will attempt to locate the work in
relation to structural frameworks for describing child language and try to indicate
its limitations as a new paradigm.
In his introductory remark Halliday claims that the fundamental question is
'how does the child learn language?' The question focuses on the processes of
learning as distinct from the child's cognitive representation of grammatical
knowledge; and for Halliday the processes are social-interactional in nature.
He suggests that what is needed to answer the question is 'a functional hypothesis
which is not just a list of uses of language but a system of developmental functions
from each of which a range of meanings, or "meaning potential", is derived'
(4). And indeed he proposes several fruitful hypotheses to this end. However,
they succeed in supplying an answer to a somewhat less ambitious question,
namely 'what has the child learnt to do by means of language?' (6).
In order to appreciate fully Halliday's theoretical orientation and empirical
findings, it is helpful to begin by making a few terminological clarifications. First,
he distinguishes between two senses of the term 'functions'. There are 'functions
in structure' - Agent, Process, Goal, Location, etc. - which appear to be
essentially the same as the grammatical cases or propositional roles of more
structurally oriented theories. Then there are 'functions of language' such as
'the interpretation of experience of the external world' or the 'regulation of the

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behavior of others'. Halliday assumes that the former 'functional roles that com-
bine to make up linguistic structure . . . reflect the particular function of language
[i.e. the latter] that the structure has evolved to serve' (5). (That language
functions determine (case-like) structures is a familiar axiom of functional
theories; unfortunately Halliday does not actually demonstrate it here in the
context of child language.) He also distinguishes the 'function' of language'
('components of the linguistic system') from the 'use of language' ('the extra-
linguistic factors determining how the resources of the linguistic system are
brought into play' (35)). Function here refers to a restricted set of functional-
semantic categories, while use refers to the potentially infinite influences on
linguistic performances. It is not surprising then that Halliday finds that func-
tion and use are indistinguishable in initial language, since function is central to
what must be learned.
A more crucial clarification concerns what is meant by the term 'semantic'.
For the infant first learning language, it does not refer to the lexical meaning of
words nor to the lexicogrammatical meaning of structures. Rather, it refers to
'the totality of meaning in language'; to 'meaningful actions' such as ordering
people about and demanding objects; to 'generalized social contexts of language
use'; in short, to knowing how vs. knowing that. From structural viewpoints
these have often been called 'pragmatic' as distinct from semantic (or proposi-
tional) meanings. And, whereas for structuralists it is at least problematic whether
or not pragmatic meaning is part of linguistic knowledge (whether it is to be
represented in the 'grammar'), for Halliday there need be no principled distinction
between grammatical knowledge and sociolinguistic action. Although this
distinction could be a vacuous dichotomy fostered by structuralisms, nothing in
Halliday's theory requires that it be so.
The functional notion of meaning pervades the work. It permits a particular
definition of language which gives the work its considerable coherence and
persuasiveness, yet at the same time isolates the work from the rest of the field.
It makes possible, for instance, the otherwise incomprehensible claim that the
infant 'learns to mean long before he adopts the lexical mode for the realization of
meaning' (p. 9). Linguistic structure, then, rather than being autonomously
known cognitive entities, is merely the realization of previously known functions.
The data for the study come from a longitudinal observation of one boy's
development, from his ninth month to about the middle of his third year.
Halliday noted, with pencil and notebook, any meaningful expression occurring
for the first time and then subsequently noted them at 'frequent intervals' in a
variety of situations. At six-week intervals he interpreted these notes into
'descriptions of the system'; these are in no sense 'grammars' since 'the one
level that is totally absent from the child's linguistic system at this period is that
that we know as grammar: it has neither structure nor vocabulary in it' (li).
Phase I of Nigel's Language (NL) consists of seven descriptions, from NL 0 at

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nine months to NL 6 at 18 months. Phase II, a transitional period to the adult

language, begins during NL 6 and runs to about the end of Nigel's second year.
Phase III is the beginnings of adult language. Consider then these methodological
facts: the study is of only one child; it did not receive the benefit of audiovisual
technology; the meanings of Nigel's initial 'content-expression pairs' cannot
'be glossed in terms of the adult language'; the International Phonetic Alphabet
is not appropriate for transcribing Phase I prelexical sounds; and Halliday, who
was often a participant, had to note the phonology and function of each expres-
sion immediately after it occurred. In view of these facts it seems to me that
Halliday's virtuosity as a linguist contributed in large part to the success of this
enterprise.
Not only are a host of methodological problems adequately handled, but their
solutions contribute neatly to the support of many theoretical claims. Consider
the problem of transcription. Halliday uses 'postural notations' for both the
expression and the content of NL. Prosodic notation best represents Nigel's
early 'vocal postures' which owe nothing to the 'specific bundles of contrastive
phonetic features' of the adult language. Similarly, a postural notation of content
consists of a functional representation of meaning - content 'has to be specified
in relation to the functions of language' (13). Each content-expression pair
postulated by Halliday exhibited at least two properties: systematicity refers to
the constant relation between content and expression; functionality refers to the
necessity that utterances be interpretable in terms of a set of language functions.
An example: the vocalization nananana 'always means something like "I want
that thing now"; and when he expresses the meaning "I want that thing now"
by means of a vocal symbol, he always does so by saying nananana' (14); its
function is instrumental, it serves to satisfy the child's material needs, and it
is the earliest appearing function in NL. In general, despite ostensible methodo-
logical drawbacks, Halliday's criteria (and some hypotheses) are easily testable.
To find the isomorphism between expression and function, which is required
by the systematicity criterion, at so early an age is rather startling. I suspect
that other investigators have not been able to find it precisely because they have
not employed a tonal notation as elaborate as Halliday's and at the same time had
an independently motivated set of functions. It is with such apparatus that
Halliday has been able to provide a stage theory which allows for the identifi-
cation of communicative functions before words and which accounts for the
developmental continuity from these to adult functions by means of successive
reorganizations of the functional system. Along with the instrumental function,
the Phase I child exhibits a regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imagi-
native and informative function; for Nigel they appeared in the order listed, the
last being 'significantly last'.
When words appear in Phase II this is viewed as the new level of 'form'
which mediates between the expression and content of earlier language functions
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and which expands the meaning potential of these functions. In early Phase II
there is also a reorganization of functions into two 'macro-functions' or two
'modes of meaning': the pragmatic, the doing of things with language, especially
manipulating others, serving the 'intruder' functions; and the mathetic, the learn-
ing about things with language, especially about the self and the non-self,
serving the 'observer' functions of language. Nigel initially used rising tone to
express pragmatic meanings and falling tone for mathetic meanings; and, with
respect to dialogue, pragmatic utterances required a response while mathetic
ones did not. Toward the end of Phase II the first appearance of lexicogram-
matical structures makes it possible for the child to combine the two meaning
modes in a single utterance. By Phase III the child's utterances begin to be
interpretable in terms of the adult functions of the ideational, interpersonal and
textual, with most structurally complex utterances manifesting all three functions
at once.
Thus, for Halliday, learning language is primarily a matter of integrating
previously separate functions with structures, resulting in a constant expansion of
meaning potential and functional complexity. Always form follows function.
For example, in acquiring the rudiments of dialogue during Phase II the child
learns to take and assign communicative roles - that is, social roles such as
speaker, addressee, persuader, etc. which depend upon language for their exis-
tence. And Halliday assumes that this role-playing 'calls for further resources
in the grammar, e.g. a set of options in mood..." (56).
Remarks such as these conflict with structural accounts of the same pheno-
mena, and they indicate the limitations of Halliday's theory. Grammatical moods
can equally well be described as universal properties of sentence types. And the
fact of communicative continuity from prelexical vocalizations to adult language
functions does not exclude this possibility, since grammatical representation
need not be directly related to successful communication. In this regard func-
tionalist hypotheses for explaining the acquisition of structure have been no
more adequately demonstrated than nativist hypotheses. More fundamentally,
although it is clear that Halliday describes how the functional system changes,
it cannot be as confidently stated that he explains why it does or why the gram-
mar should have the form it does. The child's achievement of greater meaning
potential no more explains the change than does the structuralist argument about
disambiguation explain the change from one-word to syntactic utterances.
There also seems to be some paradox in Halliday's scheme. Recall that even
before the child engages in dialogue the functional meanings attributed to his
utterances are interactionally based. That is, since meanings are sets of 'general-
ized social contexts of language use', meaning is always defined interactionally.
The earliest systematic utterances of Phase I - instrumental, regulatory and
interactional utterances - mean what they mean because the adult takes them
to mean that. And later appearing mathetic vocalizations are deemed as

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meaningful on the basis of adults' interpretations of the child's recognition
of the salient features of the environment. As Halliday points out, adults
have to have some theory (or set) of functions in mind in order to interpret
the child's vocalizations in a consistent way. In light of the adult's considerable
contribution to the child's meaning, then, it seems paradoxical to maintain that
the child creates his own language system. Rather, one would expect that,
given the social view of development, in a profound sense parent and child
create the language together. Also puzzling is that Halliday does not explicitly
incorporate adult reactions to the child's utterances into his validation of the
functions postulated for the child's system.
The paradox is highlighted by Halliday's glossing practices. Every theory of
language relies on the glossing of meanings, but theoretical motivation for the
glosses varies widely. Halliday's glossing reflects, to use Roger Brown's phrase, a
very 'rich interpretation'. For example, in response to the adult's statement
'You went on a train yesterday', Nigel replies 'train. . .bye-bye'; and this is
glossed as 'yes, I went on a train, and then (when I got off) the train went away'
(49). Since adults so clearly invest the child's utterances with functional and
propositional values, it seems odd to claim that the child's meanings cannot be
interpreted in terms of the adult's meanings. Several related problems need to be
addressed by this functionalist paradigm: how does one in principle distinguish
between adult interpretations and children's intentions?; what constrains adult
overinterpretations?; if an adult attributes a different set of functions to a child's
speech, does the child learn different language functions?; what if different
adults attribute different functions to the same utterances? Fortunately, many of
these problems are amenable to experimentation; one can, for instance, deliber-
ately misconstrue a child's vocalization and observe his reaction.
Moreover, to address these issues Halliday has a ready source to consult, the
culture. Although I have focused on the intra-linguistic relations between
function and structure, Halliday treats these as part of a larger framework
concerning the cultural determinants of language learning. It is especially in
this regard that the book provides seminal principles for a fruitful paradigm.
It asks the novel question of 'how the child constructs his social reality' through
his use of language. And Halliday's proposals about the relations between the
linguistic system and the situation-types in which it is deployed offer exciting
first answers to this ambitious question.

Reviewed by JOHN DORE

Psychology Laboratory
The Rockefeller University
(Received 25 February 1976) New York, New York 10021