From environmental thinking to ‘con-vironmental’ awareness A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (1925 - 2018) Alwin Fill Michael A.K. Halliday became famous for creating Systemic-Functional Linguistics. For the author of this paper, however, Halliday is particularly important for addressing the role of language for the relation between humans and the socalled environment. For Halliday, language creates discontinuity between humans and the rest of creation, because many words (e.g. think and act) are reserved for humans, which makes us perceive Nature not as an active, but as a passive entity. Halliday’s critique induced the present author to create the word “con-vironment” to stress the togetherness of humans and Nature. Halliday was particularly critical of ‘growthism’ and pointed out that it is language which makes us think that growing, being large, fast etc. are better than staying the same, being small and slow. Thus, he was one of the first ‘peace linguists’, criticizing a thinking which leads to wanting to be larger than one’s neighbor, and thus to conflict and, as concerns nations, to war. Especially with his 1990 talk, he demonstrated that problems of our time such as classism and destruction of species are also topics for linguistics. 1. Introduction This paper is a tribute to Michael Halliday, who died in 2018 aged 93. Michael Halliday was born in April, 1925, in Leeds (GB). He studied Chinese at London University and spent three years in China, where he studied at Peking University and at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He became AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0022 Alwin Fill 240 lecturer in Chinese at Cambridge University, in Edinburgh and also at Indiana University and the University of Illinois. In 1976, he moved to Australia, where he founded the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He was awarded six honorary doctorates, among others from the Universities of Athens, Birmingham and Beijing Normal University. He died in Sydney on 15 April 2018 at the age of 93. 2. Systemic-Functional Linguistics Halliday’s greatest achievement in linguistics is his creation of Systemic- Functional Linguistics, which he founded in 1973 with his book Explorations in the Functions of Language and explained in more detail 12 years later in An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985). In his view, language should be regarded as a social-semiotic approach to the world. “In a functional grammar [1985: xiv], a language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized.” In this “systemic functionalism”, three (meta-)functions of language are distinguished: the ideational one, which construes experience of the outer and the inner world (1973: 37-41), the interpersonal one, which brings about social relations (1973: 41 f.), and the textual one, which creates spoken or written texts, whose structural elements are ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ (Halliday 1973: 42; see also Fill 2010: 23-26). Some of his work was written together with his wife Ruqaia Hasan or in partnership with the Swedish linguist C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, who showed how to construe a linguistic approach to cognition without invoking prelinguistic mentalism (see Halliday & Mathiessen 2000). Following Sapir, Whorf, Hjelmslev and Firth, Halliday presented his own form of linguistic constructivism, which he described as follows (2001: 179): It is the grammar - but now in the sense of lexicogrammar, the grammar plus the vocabulary, with no real distinction between the two - that shapes experience and transforms our perceptions into meanings. The categories and concepts of our material existence are not ‘given’ to us prior to their expression in language. Rather, they are construed by language, at the intersection of the material with the symbolic. Grammar, in the sense of the syntax and vocabulary of a natural language, is thus a theory of human experience. Halliday also demonstrates how the language system construes certain ideologies, such as speciesism and racism. As will be shown, Halliday thus became one of the founders of a certain school of ‘Ecolinguistics’, but he also contributed to the rise of what is now called peace linguistics. A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday 241 3. Halliday and Ecolinguistics This tribute will not do justice to all of Halliday’s ideas and his achievements in linguistics. Rather, it will show a side of Halliday which is overlooked by most of his ‘adherents’: his contribution to creating an awareness that language is in part responsible for the climate change, for the diminution of the earth’s species and our wasting of resources. Halliday (2001) wrote about what language does to humans, animals and plants (all living beings): it separates humans from the rest of creation and it separates what is useful for humans from what is useful for other living beings. Thus, we talk about herbs (useful) and weeds (harmful), and our language ‘tells us’ that as humans we live in what is called our environment, i.e. we are surrounded by Nature, we are not part of it. The following paragraphs present some of Halliday’s theses, which he expressed in 1990 in a talk given at the Ninth World Congress of Applied Linguistics held in Thessaloniki (Greece), This talk was published several times; here it is quoted as Halliday (2001).  “Our grammar (though not the grammar of human language as such) construes air and water and soil, and also coal and iron and oil as ‘unbounded’ - that is, as existing without limit. In the horizons of the first farmers, and the first miners, they did. We know that such resources are finite.” (Halliday 2001: 194)  Language creates discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation, also because many words are reserved for humans, such as think, act and do. Through this, Nature appears as passive (cf. Halliday, 2001: 194 f.). Language “imposes a strict discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation, with ‘ourselves’ including a select band of other creatures that are in some semantic contexts allowed in” (2001: 195).  Useful and harmful - these are two contrasting words or opposites, as we call them. Halliday (2001: 194) showed that all opposites have a negative and a positive pole.  “The quality of a thing means either ‘how good or bad it is’ or ‘the fact that it is good’, but never ‘the fact that it is bad’.” Similarly, size means both ‘how big’ and ‘being big’. “The grammar of ‘big’ is the grammar of ‘good’, while the grammar of ‘small’ is the grammar of ‘bad’. The motif ‘bigger and better’ is engraved into our consciousness by virtue of their line-up in the grammar.” (2001: 194). Halliday calls this “the ideology of growth or growthism” (2001: 196; see also Stibbe 2015: 83 f.). His critique of growthism is one of the most important activities of peace linguistics, as will be explained later. Alwin Fill 242 Quite generally, Halliday says (following Whorf 1957): “Language does not passively reflect reality; language actively creates reality.” (2001: 179). 4. Michael Halliday and Overshootday In 2019, an investigation was carried out which showed that some countries, particularly some Arabian countries, but also the U.S.A., had already used up their natural resources in March, 2019. July 29 th , 2019, was world exhaustion day, or ‘Overshootday’, as it was also called. On this day, the whole Earth had exhausted its resources. In other words, we would need almost two planets to yield enough resources for humans. (The word resources is of course anthropocentric, because it sums up all things useful for humans in one word.) The danger of unlimited human growth was noticed even before ecolinguistics turned up:  In 1962, Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, in which she particularly turned against insecticides, which make our cereal crop larger - at the cost of killing animals. This is why she called them ‘biocides’ (killing life).  1970 was declared European Conservation Year.  In April 1970, America celebrated its first Earth day. This had something to do with the first landing of humans on the moon in 1969. One of the astronauts, William Anders, took pictures of the earth from the moon, which showed the earth “as a violable body” surrounded by a very thin atmosphere and flying alone through the universe. These pictures - one of them was called “earthrise” - were an early initiation to thinking of the earth as something special, which had to be protected.  In 1968, the Club of Rome was founded, which in 1972 published the book The Limits of Growth (authors: Dennis and Donella Meadows); this book already shows the dangers of unlimited growth. However, it concentrates chiefly on economic aspects. In all these initiatives and publications, important as they were, the role of language was not yet highlighted. But then Michael Halliday, in his 1990 talk at Thessaloniki, said that our world view is constructed by expressions such as “unmatched growth rates”, “traffic is expected to grow”, “output fell sharply” (2001: 193). Whatever we say, growing, becoming faster and getting higher are associated with GOOD, and falling, being lower and slower with BAD. Halliday even writes (ibid.): “should we not exploit the power of words by making shrink the positive term and labelling ‘growth’ very simply as negative A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday 243 shrinkage? This would be using the power of grammar.” Halliday here follows two philosophers, who also took position against ‘growthism’: Ernst Friedrich Schumacher with his book Small is beautiful (1973) and the Austrian Leopold Kohr with Das Ende der Großen (1986). Schumacher (1973: 29) quotes Mahatma Gandhi, who said that the earth offers enough for our needs, but does not satisfy our greed. Growth to a limited aim is possible, but there should not be an unlimited general growth. Kohr (1986: 15) writes that the main problem of our time is not ideological, but “dimensional”. He quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who when living today would not say “to be or not to be” but “to be small or not to be at all, that is the question”. At the time of the corona crisis (March to July, 2020), many people have seen that our unlimited growth has led to great problems. Suddenly, it was impossible to uphold our faith in permanent economic growth, and many entrepreneurs had to find out how their businesses could survive when staying the same or even shrinking. The historian Philipp Blom said in an interview (Profil, April 8 th , 2020, Fill’s translation): “Suddenly we are influenced by a virus which we do not see nor taste nor smell, but which can nevertheless kill us. We are no longer sublime above Nature, but we are in the middle of it.” This means that the coronavirus has brought about a different thinking about Nature in us and has justified Halliday’s critique of growthism. 5. Halliday and Ecolinguistics 1990 - 2020 Perhaps as a result of Halliday’s talk, but perhaps also independently of it, in several countries nearly at the same time, the importance of language concerning our ‘environment’ and the climate change (originally called Global Warming) began to be realized. Denmark, Austria, Germany, Australia, Spain, Portugal and Brazil were among the countries in which almost simultaneously the importance of language for creating an awareness of this dangerous evolution became a research topic, and the importance of language for stopping this development began to be seen. Great Britain, Italy and China followed a little later. Halliday says (2001: 195) that language “imposes a strict discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation,” and thus Nature is called our environment (in German Umwelt). This word suggests that we are in the centre, and all other living and non-living beings are around us, so that we can use them. Following Halliday’s ideas, one could put forward the suggestion that we should no longer talk about our environment, but about our con-vironment (in German “Mitwelt”, cf. Meyer-Abich 1990), a word which shows that all living and non-living beings together make up what we call Nature. Admittedly, we are the part of this con-vironment which is Alwin Fill 244 most responsible for the survival of its members, but this is all we can say in our favour. 6. The Future of Ecolinguistics As Halliday wrote, language creates discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation. An awareness of this takes us beyond the traditional topics of ecolinguistics. Peter Finke writes (2018: 411) that “only transdisciplinary linguistics will succeed in playing a formative role in the future.” Ecolinguistics will therefore abandon the ivory tower of disciplines, as the quotation from Halliday at the end of this paper will show. Ecolinguistics will become a science which will deal with the climate change, but also with war and peace. I hope that this tribute to Michael Halliday will contribute to widening the concept of ecolinguistics. Peter Mühlhäusler, who quotes Halliday in his co-authored book Greenspeak (Harré, Brockmeier & Mühlhäusler 1999), and also several times in his Course in Ecolinguistics (2003), adds several topics to future ecolinguistic research, which, as he writes (2020: 8) have been “routinely excluded, for whatever reasons, from ecolinguistic inquiry”. Among these are:  The negative effects of tourism, including eco-tourism  Migration of human, plant and animal populations - their negative impact on endemic cultures and natural kinds  Ecological changes of all sorts brought into existence by digital technology  Military expenditure and conflict The most interesting of these topics concerning Halliday is the last one, which refers to ecolinguistics’ contribution to avoiding war and creating peace on this Earth. To conclude, an awareness of certain linguistic phenomena, which Halliday discussed for the first time (growthism, opposites, the discontinuity language creates between ourselves and the rest of creation) would help to ‘produce’ and maintain peace - not because language is responsible for causing war, but because language mirrors thinking, and becoming aware of these mirrored phenomena could avoid war. I would like to finish with the last sentence of Halliday’s article “New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics” (2001: 199) 1 . Classism, growthism, destruction of species, pollution [and even war] - are not just problems for the biologists, physicists [and sociologists]. They are problems 1 The words in brackets have been added by the author. A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday 245 for the applied linguistic community as well. I do not suggest for one moment that we hold the key. But we ought to be able to write the instructions for its use. References Blom, Philipp (2020). “Wir erleben gerade eine Gesellschaft, wie sie vor 100 Jahren bestand.” Interview with Robert Treichler in Profil, April 8, 2020. Carson, Rachel (1962). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Fill, Alwin (2010). The Language Impact. Evolution - System - Discourse. London, Oakville: equinox. Fill, Alwin & Peter Mühlhäusler (Eds.) (2001). The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London/ New York: Continuum. Fill, Alwin & Hermine Penz (Eds.) (2018). The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. New York/ London: Routledge. Finke, Peter (2018). “Transdisciplinary Linguistics: Ecolinguistics as a Pacemaker into a New Scientific Age”. In: Alwin Fill & Hermine Penz (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. New York/ London: Routledge. 406-419. Halliday, Michael (1973). Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Arnold. Halliday, Michael (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold. Halliday, Michael (2001). “New Ways of Meaning. The Challenge to Applied Linguistics”. In: Fill, Alwin & Peter Mühlhäusler (Eds.). The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London/ New York: Continuum. 175-202. Halliday, Michael & Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3 rd ed. London: Arnold. Harré, Rom, Jens Brockmeier & Peter Mühlhäusler (1999). Greenspeak. A Study of Environmental Discourse. Thousand Oaks/ London/ New Delhi: Sage. Kohr, Leopold (1986). Das Ende der Großen. Zurück zum menschlichen Maß. Trans. by Edgar Th. Portisch. Vienna: ORAC Verlag. Meadows, Dennis & Donella Meadows (1972). The Limits of Growth. New York: Universe Books. Meyer-Abich, Klaus Michael (1990). Aufstand für die Natur. Von der Umwelt zur Mitwelt. München: Hanser. Mühlhäusler, Peter (2003). Language and Environment. Environment of Language. A Course in Ecolinguistics. London: Battlebridge. Mühlhäusler, Peter (2020). “Quo vadis Ecolinguistics? ”. Ecolinguistica. Revista de Ecologia e Linguagem 6 (1). 5-23. Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich (1973). Small is Beautiful. Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper. Stibbe, Arran (2015). Ecolinguistics. Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Whorf, Benjamin L. (1957). Language, Thought and Reality. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Alwin Fill English Department University of Graz