Providing a thorough survey of five decades of M.A.K. Halliday's published work on Systemic Functional Linguistics, this is an indispensable guide for students and researchers alike. "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. This title includes detailed cross references and suggestions for further reading that guide the reader to other articles of interest. This comprehensive collection is an indispensable guide to the work of Halliday. It will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of systemic functional linguistics.