Hallidian scale

Hallidian scale
 

Planet hopper mentioned hallidian scale in this thread.
I had never heard that term before, and my searches only returned a reference to linguist Michael Halliday. Is hallidian a reference to one of his theories?

M.A.K Halliday was a famous scholar formulating systemics. To my humble opinion, he was rather theoretical, though something that stayed was his scales, for instance, the probability scale for modals:

It will rain (+pole)
It can't rain (-pole)

within these poles, place modal verbs such as could, might, can, may...

These scales help students to understand meaning connections within similar vocabulary groups, which is something difficult to teach.

Another scale: permission

Can I ?
Could I ?
May I ?

Sounds interesting. I should look for some of his writings to learn more. :)

http://www.isfla.org/Systemics/

That's a fairly comprehensive one on the whole theoretical frame. This guy taught Chinese in Cambridge.

Also applies to adjectives, such as silent-quiet-noisy deafening or the size scale, sth I regularly find successful

tiny-minute-small-big-huge

Also to connotations of nouns, such as noise-sound-music

Semantics and functional-conceptual grammar are starting to bury structuralism and stiff grammatical approaches, with the help of the communicative approach.

Not really my best lesson, linguistics, I take from grammar only whatever helps in the classroom. But I graduated on that, some stayed.