Chomsky's Universal Grammar and Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics: An Appraisal and a Compromise.

Abstract

Recent developments in theories of language (grammars) seem to share a number of tenets which mark a drastic shift from traditional disentangled descriptions of language: emphasis on a big number of discrete grammatical rules or a corpus of structure patterns has given way to a more unitary, explanatory powerful description of language informed by a sound theory of language acquisition, on the one hand, and verified/refuted by observations on samples of language use, on the other. Two widely welcome of such theories are Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. These two theories have been initiated and developed almost independently and each has been successful in accounting for aspects of language from a particular perspective. However, they seem to stand more in a complementary position with respect to each other than in a confronting stance against one another. This article aims at providing evidence for such a claim to support the argue that not only aren’t these two theories mutually exclusive but they are rather mutually dependent; there is a sense in which each needs to internalize and incorporate aspects of the other if a fully-fledged account of language is to be achieved.

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