Intonation and systemic functional linguistics: the way forward

The systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory of intonation in English developed by Halliday, in a series of publications in the early 1960s, presented in a monograph in 1967 and subsequently in a textbook in 1970 with accompanying sound files, is paradoxically both radical and traditional. It is traditional in the sense that it adopted the forms of traditional intonation analysis – notably, the primary nuclear tones – and chunked speech into units containing a complete intonation curve. Yet it is simultaneously radical in the sense that intonation is described in terms of abstract phonological choices that are themselves the realisation of grammatical choices.