Halliday, Critical Discourse Analysis and ideology

Abstract While Halliday’s work has been a source of inspiration to the fields of Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, Halliday has never been embraced by either school. This paper reviews the engagement of CL and CDA with Halliday, examining what ideas were borrowed, and what was either rejected or modified beyond recognition. It then examines how and why the key working assumptions in Halliday’s framework — in particular, metafunction, realisation and instantiation — are essential to understanding the empiric, ideological power of language. As humanity heads deeper into its greatest crisis and challenge, a clear-sighted understanding of the power of language is more important than ever. Halliday’s attention to understanding language as a sociological phenomenon makes his theory ideal for linguistic projects trying to deconstruct and understand the force of the most consequential ideologies in human societies.