"In this volume, Professor Halliday describes the Chinese language system in terms of categories of grammar, lexis, and phonology, in both medieval and modern Chinese, Putonghua and Cantonese. This lays the foundation of his systemic-functional framework in general linguistics. His pioneering work on probabilistics in Chinese grammar and his observation of grammatical metaphor herald the heyday of contemporary corpus linguistics and text linguistics. Michael Halliday has proved himself worthy of the honour to be recognized as one of the most influential linguists today, and to be ranked along such great names in Chinese scholarship as B. Karlgren, H. Maspero, Chao Yuenren, Luo Changpei, Wang Li, and Lu Shuxiang." Hu Zhuanglin, Tenured Professor, Peking University, China"