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Rather than a “prescriptive, normative” view, Halliday’s was a “descriptive-ethnographic” one, “concerned with meaning in relation to rhetorical function.”²⁵

With Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures,^§MS3.1.2f rhetoric had been thrown out of linguistics. Halliday puts this down to Chomsky’s “violent polemic … [N]ever before in the history of ideas about language have the two views, of language as resource and language as rule, been made to seem so incompatible. The difference between the two was presented as an opposition between a concern with language as system and a concern with language as behaviour … It gradually became clear that the price to be paid for the Chomskyan type of formalism was too high; it required a degree of idealization so great as to reduce natural language back to the status of an artificial syntax.”²⁶ “Instrumental rationality,” Habermas might have called this kind of thinking,^§AS2.0a blind to variable lifeworld interests, we would add.

In his Sydney years, Halliday went on to elaborate a linguistics that conceived language as a “functional grammar of rhetoric” where language is deployed as a “resource for meaning.”²⁷ His was an ethnographic view of language in the context of culture.^§AS1.1.3b

“It’s about me, of me,” Theaetetus had replied to the Sophist-Visitor’s question. Not only is this an old discussion in the West, but also in Indian^§MS3.3d and Arabic^§MS3c philosophies of meaning.

In the context of culture, language strives to mean – as do images, objects, spaces, gestures, and soundings. Meaning is an appeal from person to person via things or media. It is a negotiation of interests. Rhetoric is the appeal of interest, to interest.

However, even when the words and the syntax seem formally the same, the interests of persons always differ. Participation in meaning occurs at the intersection of interests. Complementary differences meet in the moment of participation or, as it may transpire, interests that prove conflicting and perhaps irresolvably so.

Whatever the nature of agreement or the extent of disagreement, interest is uniquely configured in every situation. Meanings are situation-specific, and situations are endlessly varied.

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²² Plato, c.399–347 BCE [1997], “Sophist,” in Complete Works, edited by J.M. Cooper, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 263a, 262e, 262d.

²³ M.A.K. Halliday, 1977 [2003], “Ideas About Language,” pp. 92–115 in On Language and Linguistics, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 3, edited by J.J. Webster, London: Continuum, p. 95.

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 96–98.

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 99–100.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 110.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 95.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 196–198. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Plato’s “Sophist” §AS2b