“It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts, and all texts, including those prose or verse, which fall within any definition of literature and are accessible to analysis by the existing methods of linguistics.”
Source: 1950s–1960s, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, 1964, p. 1.
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Michael Halliday 23
Australian linguist 1925–2018Related quotes

Source: Essays in the Philosophy of Language, 1967, p. 20-21

“The Text is not a definitive object.”
Proposition 1
Variant translation: The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts.
From Work to Text (1971)

“All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.”
Tout ce qui n'est point prose, est vers; et tout ce qui n'est point vers, est prose.
Act II, sc. iv
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670)

“The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature,”
Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter I, The Bible And Recent Discoveries, p. 4
Context: The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature, though it is a romance of which the consequences are of vital import; and thanks to the succession of discoveries which have been made of late years, we know more about it than of the history of any other ancient book in the world.
Source: Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), Chapter: Greeks, Armenians and Jews.
“"Being" exists only as a neurological and linguistic illusion.”
Source: The Apophenion (2008), p. 18
Source: Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology (1950), Ch. 5. Conclusion