ABSTRACT
With the publication of Learning How to Mean in 1975, Halliday presented a case study of early child language development, integrating a developmental perspective into the broader theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). He argued there for the functional origins of the mature linguistic system, suggesting that the twin impulses of any infant – to make sense of the world and to share experience with others – explain the gradual creation and use of a language system organised on ‘metafunctional’ principles (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29). The emphasis in this and much subsequent SFL work on language development has been on the child as a learner; that is, concerned with the child’s semantic ‘strategies’ (Halliday 1993), with the trajectory of the child’s changing language system in the first years of life (Painter 2009) and with the crucial role of language in the child’s construal of reality (Halliday 1978; Painter 1999a). However, since developmental theory is firmly based on the premise that ‘as well as being a cognitive process, the learning of the mother tongue is also an interactive process’ (Halliday 1975: 140), it is equally important to attend closely to the role of the adult caregivers in the process, which will be the orientation taken in this chapter.
