Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was born on April 13, 1925, and died on April 15, 2018.

He was an English-born linguist.

He was the founder of the internationally influential systemic functional linguistic model of language.

Halliday’s grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar (SFG).

Halliday describes language as a semiotic system, “not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning”.

For Halliday, language is a “meaning potential”; by extension, he defines linguistics as the study of “how people exchange meanings by ‘languaging'”.

Halliday describes himself as a generalist, meaning that he has tried “to look at language from every possible vantage point”, and has described his work as “wander[ing] the highways and byways of language”.

However his claim that “to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: language as the creature and creator of human society”.

Halliday died in Sydney of natural causes on 15 April 2018.

He died at 93 years old.