Abstract
This chapter briefly sketches Christian Matthiessen’s life and work since the late 1970s. We first introduce the training that Christian Matthiessen has received at Lund University in Sweden. Then we report on his experiences of studying linguistics at University of California, Los Angeles. His Ph.D. thesis on text generation and the influences on him by West Coast Functionalism are also related. Finally, we present some background information on his work experience at the University of Sydney and later at Macquarie University.
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Notes
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See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilert_Ekwall and Lund Studies in English, established by Svartvik in 1933.
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It was a truly miserable experience. Listening to the officers in charge of our basic training, I remember thinking “if these are the values they embrace and spout, what is it that we are expected to defend?”; a very real-life illustration of the significance of the tenor parameter of context—power play, put downs, misogyny ... well, all the expected stereotypes. One lieutenant explained to us that Sweden was a neutral, non-aligned country; but we should understand where the actual threat came from: The Soviet Union. He also noted that there was no way that we could overcome the might of their military, but our task was to hold out for two weeks or so, making the prospect of attacking Sweden as uncomfortable and unpalatable for them as possible. A few years later I hiked down and up the Grand Canyon in one day with a former Israeli paratrooper—who showed no signs of fatigue after we’d returned to the top, and I realized what a picnic in the park my military service had been in comparison. Since then I’ve met men who’ve served in similarly awful environments, all in the name of patriotism. So I became aware of hideously twisted value systems early on. On the day I took the train from my hometown to report for duty at the air force base I had been assigned to, I felt miserable and sorry for myself. My mother’s elder sister, Aunt Inga, happened to be on a visit from Germany, where she had been born in 1903 and spent all her life. She told me not to feel sorry for myself. She had lived through two world wars, and lost a son on the Eastern Front in The Soviet Union, as well as her husband. Somehow her words didn’t comfort me!—I have thought of Aunt Inga in the context of your interview. When she was in her 60s, she told me that she had wanted to write her autobiography, just for the family, chronicling her own life through a period of dramatic terrible European history. But, she said to me, when she had mentioned this idea to her daughter Christa, her daughter had said—“Why, who would be interested?”; so my aunt abandoned her idea, which I think is very sad.
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It still exists today: https://www.hermods.se.
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Michael and I both loved plays and the experience of going to the theatre, and we discussed the staging of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle. Once he had had an opportunity to visit it, he laughed and said that it was of course nothing like what Hamlet’s castle would have been like—which is absolutely accurate, historically. Still, it must have been a great setting for the play, and years later after WWII, Hamlet was again staged at “his” castle in Elsinore.
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This is, incidentally, one of the public places where my father’s work is on prominent display in the upper foyer of the Malmö Stadsteater (now Opera)—a wall of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. See e.g., https://www.malmoopera.se/en-midsommarnattsdrom-pa-malmo-opera.
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I never studied there, but I knew it was an interesting productive department. A fellow linguistics PhD student, Filippo Beghelli, once took me there and introduced me to the great Alonzo Church (1903–1995), the inventor of lambda calculus. I was impressed—I knew that this calculus could be used in providing a formal semantic analysis of relative clauses. Filippo was a wonderful friend, and I was always amazed at how easily he mastered the representational system of formal semantics. I still remember one occasion vividly. Ed lived in Venice Beach, and Filippo had driven to his place to pick him up to go to the airport, with me tagging along—Ed was off somewhere, maybe to Israel, where he also had an academic position (until, as I recall, he was disinvited because he’d spoken up in support of the Palestinians). Filippo’s little car was full of animated linguistics discussion, and he dashed across an intersection although the light had turned red. Ed pointed this out to him, and Filippo stopped and began to apologize profusely. Ed grinned jovially, and said: “I didn’t mean for you to stop—just honk!”.
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I undertook my study before I had learned about Michael Halliday’s account of grammatical metaphor, which provides additional insights into process nominalizations (cf. Matthiessen 1989).
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In this context, it is helpful to draw attention to Halliday’s (1961: 254) observation that language is “patterned activity”, e.g., “The unit being the category of pattern-carrier, what is the nature of the patterns it carries? In terms once again of language as activity, and therefore in linear progression, the patterns take the form of the repetition of like events.” He argued against the “bricks and mortar” conception of structure. This insight has guided systemic functional work since then.
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There are many instances of this throughout linguistics since the 1960s; here is just one fairly recent example provided by de Bot (2015: 58): “On the basis of comments made by the informants, a spectacular growth of SFG in AL (applied linguistics) is not expected, though Tim McNamara feels that the United States is ready for SFG. William Grabe disagrees: “SFG is not the solution. There is not enough empirical evidence. The theory is arcane, the terminology complex and the texts are often painful to read.” When asked why Halliday never took off in the United States, he remarked jokingly: ‘Because he moved to Australia!’” The remark about Halliday’s move to Australia is, of course, quite revealing.
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I remember one of the occasions when he discussed his plans. We were on one of our hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains, and Michael told me hopefully he thought Jim Martin had a very good chance of succeeding him.
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Matthiessen, C.M., Wang, B., Ma, Y., Mwinlaaru, I.N. (2022). Life and Work of Christian Matthiessen (Part I). In: Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8713-6_2
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