History of the Department

The University of Sydney was home to many of the pioneers of linguistic research in Australia, well before the founding of the Department of Linguistics. Arthur Capell (appointed to the Anthropology Department in 1944) extensively investigated Australian Aboriginal and Pacific languages. Stephen Wurm was briefly a colleague of his (1954-1956), before he went on to the Australian National University where he later established the Department of Linguistics in the Research School of Pacific Studies. The early work of Geoffrey N. O'Grady was done here (BA Hons, 1959). In the English Department, Professor A. G. Mitchell dominated the early development of a systematic account of Australian English pronunciation, with The Pronunciation of English in Australia (1946) becoming the standard account. Work with and by colleagues such as John R.L. Bernard, Robert Eagleson, and John Gunn explored not only pronunciation but the lexicon of Australian English, partly through the work of the Australian Language Research Centre, located now in the Department of English.

Their work laid the foundation for the establishment of the Department of Linguistics. In 1975, the University appointed as its foundation chair one of the world's most prominent linguists, M.A.K. (Michael) Halliday, who had earlier held professorships at London, Essex, and Chicago. Halliday is best known for the development of Systemic Functional Grammar, and Sydney became the centre for the development of the theory. His colleague at Sydney, J. R. (Jim) Martin extended Systemic Functional Grammar by developing a theory of text based on the concept of 'genre'. The other significant strand of work in the early years of the department was a major contribution to variation theory by Barbara Horvath, presented in her book Variation in Australian English (1985).

In 1988, Halliday was followed as chair by William (Bill) Foley. Foley is one of the two developers of the syntactic framework Role and Reference Grammar, has worked extensively on Papuan languages, and also on anthropological linguistics. While preserving its traditional strengths in systemic functional grammar and applied linguistics, this has led in recent years to the department developing new strengths and interests in formal generative linguistics, Lexical Functional Grammar, and in the typology of the indigenous languages of Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.