Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University.
He has degrees in linguistics from Lund University (BA), where he also studied Arabic and philosophy, and from UCLA (MA, PhD), and has previously held positions at USC/ Information Sciences Institute, Sydney University, and Macquarie University, and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has held visiting appointments at e.g. the University of Hamburg and the Brain Science Division of the RIKEN Institute in Tokyo. He is Honorary Professor, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, the Australian National University, Canberra, and Guest Professor, University of Science and Technology, Beijing.
Matthiessen has been involved in major text-based research projects informed by systemic functional linguistics since 1980, starting with the Penman project at USC/Information Sciences Institute, which produced a large-scale systemic functional grammar of English (the Nigel grammar). His research has covered a wide range of areas, including analysis of many kinds of discourse, corpus compilation and corpus-based studies, register analysis and context-based text typology, the development of Rhetorical Structure Theory (jointly with Bill Mann and Sandy Thompson), the description of English and other languages spoken around the world, language typology and comparison, translation studies, multisemiotic studies, institutional linguistics, computational linguistics, the evolution of language, and systemic functional theory.
Matthiessen is working on medical discourse/ health communication (including projects undertaken by members of research projects organized by Hedra), language across the curriculum, L2 writing development (with Winfred Xuan) and other aspects of educational linguistics, multilingual studies (language comparison and typology, translation studies and second/foreign language education), language arts, and the language of space.
Matthiessen has lectured and given courses around the world, including in China, Japan, S. Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Greece, Germany, Denmark and the UK, Lebanon, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and he is involved in a number of international research networks.
Matthiessen’s books include Systemic linguistics and text generation: experiences from Japanese and English (with John Bateman, 1991), Lexicogrammatical cartography: English systems (1995), Working with functional grammar (with J.R. Martin and Clare Painter, 1997), Construing experience: a language-based approach to cognition (with M.A.K. Halliday, 1999), Halliday’s Introduction to functional grammar (revised version of Halliday’s book, with M.A.K. Halliday, 2014), Functional typology (edited, with Alice Caffarel and J.R. Martin).
Recent books include the 1st volume of his Collected Works, "Systemic Functional Linguistics, Part I", edited by Kazuhiro Teruya, Wu Canzhong and Di Slade, with Equinox (2021); "System in Systemic Functional Linguistics: a system-based theory of language", with Equinox (in press); "Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics", with Wang Bo, Yuanyi Ma & Isaac N. Mwinlaaru, with Springer (in press).
less