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Article published In:
Language, Context and Text
Vol. 1:2 (2019) ► pp.366–387

Matthiessen on Halliday

An interview with Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen (Part I)

| The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
| Sun Yat-sen University
| Guangdong Polytechnic of Science and Technology
Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen was a long-time collaborator and close friend of M. A. K. Halliday, and has co-authored various books with him, some of which have not yet been published. In this interview, he describes Halliday’s wide-ranging linguistic interests, provides details of Halliday’s time in China, discusses the influences of J. R. Firth and Karl Marx on Halliday, reflects on the development of Halliday’s theories, and describes Halliday’s contributions to phonetics, phonology and typology.
Keywords: M. A. K. Halliday, appliable linguistics, Wang Li, J. R. Firth, Marxism, Chomskyan linguistics, phonetics, Chinese phonology, language description, typology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Halliday’s research interests and disinterests
  • 3.Halliday in China
  • 4.The Firthian tradition
  • 5.Halliday and Marxism
  • 6.Developing Halliday’s theory in tough times
  • 7.Halliday’s contributions to phonetics and phonology
  • 8.Halliday and language typology
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00015.wan
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M., Bo Wang, Yuanyi Ma & Isaac N. Mwinlaaru
2022. Systemic Functional Language Typology. In Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics [The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series, ], ► pp. 197 ff. DOI logo

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