On Grammar Volume 1

This first volume of a ten volume series contains seventeen papers, including a new chapter entitled "A Personal Perspective", in which Halliday offers his own current perspective on language and linguistic theory. The first part of the book presents early papers (1957-66) on basic concepts such as system, structure, class, and rank. The second part highlights how, over the span of two decades (the 1960s to mid 980s), Halliday developed systemic theory to account for linguistic phenomena extending upward through the ranks from word to clause to text. The last part, "Construing and Abstracting", includes more recent work, in which Halliday discusses the issues confronting those who study linguistics, using Firth's description of linguistics-"language turned back on itself".