Book: Continuing Discourse on Language
Chapter: 19. From microfunction to metaphor: learning language and learning through language
Blurb:
In presenting his ideas on a ‘language based theory of learning’, Halliday (1993) has both emphasised the interpersonal beginnings of the child’s new linguistic achievements and also proposed a three step model of human semiotic development. In this chapter we will draw on the major systemic functional case studies that have contributed to this theory to present an outline of language development as a process enabling a gradual progression to generalisation, through to abstraction and finally to (grammatical) metaphor.