The Essential Halliday contains selected articles by M A K Halliday on the core areas of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Presenting a thorough survey of Halliday's published work across five decades, the reader includes discussion of function, metafunction, grammar, metaphor, learning and teaching language, child language, computational linguistics, semantics, social semiotics and discourse analysis. Detailed cross references and suggestions for further reading guide the reader to other articles of interest.