Systemic Functional Linguistics Part 1: Volume 1(Collected Works of Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen)

The Collected Works of Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen covers more than 35 years of work by one of the world's leading scholars in the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) school. It examines the nature, functions and structure of human language from a number of points of view within the framework of contemporary scientific thought. The series is organized into a number of distinct topics that reinforce each other, and together constitute a coherent, cutting-edge body of theoretical and descriptive work. VOLUME 1 provides the foundation for the whole series of collected works, and includes chapters that serve as introduction of and summaries of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is concerned with the nature of systemic functional linguistics as theory, as framework and as a school of linguistics. It includes an overview of the organization or the architecture of language according to SFL and of the lexicogrammatical subsystem of language, and of Halliday's conception of language as a resource for making meaning. It is also concerned with the history and development of SFL. A new chapter written for this volume addresses the theme underpinning all chapters in the volume: the challenge of theorizing language. It introduces the metaphor of cartography, used by Matthiessen in his work on language, as a way of mapping linguistic theory, showing how all areas relate to one another.

About the Author :
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a distinguished professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of International Business and Economics, as well as distinguished professor of linguistics at Hunan University, guest professor at Beijing Science and Technology University, and honorary professor at the Australian National University. Kazuhiro Teruya is an associate professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. Diana Slade is a professor of applied linguistics and director of the Institute for Communication in Health Care at the Australian National University.

Review :
The depth and breadth of Matthiessen's] thinking about language manifested in these contributions is exceptional, ranging from questions of the grammar and semantics of English and other languages, through issues in translation, in multimodal communication and in computational linguistics to fundamentals of linguistic and semiotic methodology. It is this breadth, together with a very consistent high level of quality, which constitutes one aspect of Matthiessen's scholarly achievements. Regrettably, too many of his ideas to date have been difficult to access, have not been placed in their most coherent thematic context or have remained unpublished altogether. This makes a representative collection of these works timely and highly welcome for the linguistic community. From the Foreword by Professor Dr. Erich Steiner, Saarland University This book and the subsequent volumes in Matthiessen’s collected works will be a key contribution to the field of SFL and linguistics more generally. The depth of the ideas and understanding presented in this volume are integral to understanding SFL; further, the breadth of scholarship and intellectual engagement within and beyond the field is truly impressive. Language, Context and Text