Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday (born 1925) is a linguist who developed a grammar model, the systemic functional grammar, originally by studing Chinese. His work was an elaboration of the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth[?]. His seminal paper on this model was published in 1961. The model has been applied to other languages as well as Chinese. It is especially useful for describing non-Indo-European languages.

He received the status of emeritus professor of the University of Sydney and the Macquarie University in 1987.

References:

• Introduction into systemic functional grammar (http://minerva.ling.mq.edu.au/Resources/VirtuallLibrary/Publications/sfg_firststep/SFG%20intro%20New.html)
• Systemic functional linguistics (http://www.wagsoft.com/Systemics/index.html)