Biography:
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Humanities and
Languages & Advisor SFL Lab at Sona College of Technology.
Abstract:
It has been 35 years since Michael Halliday gave a talk in Vietnam concerned with the systemic functional modelling of context — extended along the cline of instantiation from the potential pole: context of culture, through the region intermediate between potential and instance: institutions/ situation types, to the instance pole: (context of) situations (Halliday, 1991), and we now have a great opportunity to revisit his much-cited contribution — noting that we are in the same neighbourhood as we come together for the first ISFC hosted in Hong Kong. A quarter of a century into the 21st century, I would like to take stock of engagements with contexts in SFL and compatible currents in linguistics and other disciplines — in the transdisciplinary spirit of Wegener et al. (2026), and also look ahead, taking into consideration new technological opportunities of modelling and empirical investigation that have been introduced.
This talk has three broad aims. First, I revisit the development of the notion of context in systemic functional linguistics, beginning with Halliday's reinterpretation of context as a semiotic system and tracing subsequent theoretical developments. Second, I propose that the context of culture can be explored through a cartography of institutions and situation types interpreted in terms of the contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode — informed by interpretations of findings from a range of disciplines. Third, I outline a research programme in which large corpora of culturally significant texts can be analysed computationally in order to reconstruct aspects of the contextual organization of cultures. The second two aims are crucial if we are to develop descriptions of context as a semiotic resource for communities that have the degree of coverage needed to serve as “reference descriptions” (cf. Hall & Trager, 1953, in the US American anthropological tradition; and, 70 years later, Slingerland et al., 2020, on cultural databases) and for many applications SFL has been involved in, and is likely to engage with in future. In short, the magnitude of the task is daunting.
While context has always been part of the Malinowski-Firth tradition within which the origins of SFL can be located, Halliday's (1978) move to theorize context semiotically as patterns of meaning was a significant reconceptualization, and it opened the way for all the subsequent developments. And Halliday (1991) showed that context — and language in context — can be productively interpreted two-dimensionally in terms of the cline of instantiation and the hierarchy of stratification (in a sense, in terms of an epistemological cline embodying the observer perspective and an ontological one embodying the inherent organization of semiotic systems[1]), and he further elaborated his account in terms of his stratification-instantiation matrix in Halliday (2002). The focus on the cline of instantiation also made it possible to specify different semogenetic timeframes (Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999/ 2006): phylogenesis, ontogenesis, and logogenesis.
With the development of the ordered typology of systems operating in different phenomenal realms — physical < biological [+life] < social [+value] < semiotic [+meaning] (e.g. Halliday, 1996, 2005; Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999/ 2006; Matthiessen & Teruya, 2024), it becomes possible to take account of the manifestation of context as a semiotic system within lower orders: how it is enacted socially (in groups of persons in different roles in diverse role networks), embodied biologically (in ecosystems of organisms) and manifested physically (cf. Hasan, 1981, and Bowcher, 2018, on Hasan's “material situational setting”).
Systemic functional linguists have contributed to theoretical and descriptive insights into context since the 1960s — drawing on parallel work in other disciplines like Basil Bernstein's sociology, as brought out by overviews provided by Martin (1992), Ghadessy (1999), Butt & Wegener (2007), Hasan (2009), Bowcher (2010, 2019), Wegener (2011), Bartlett (2017), Bartlett & Bowcher (2021). There is productive theoretical and descriptive variation among systemic functional accounts of context (cf. Matthiessen & Teruya, 2024: Section 3.1.2), including the complementarity of systemicized descriptions and discursive ones (e.g. Butt, 2004) and the division of labour in accounting for context between the hierarchy of stratification and the cline of instantiation (cf. Matthiessen, 2015b).
In particular, in the “Genre Model” developed by J.R. Martin and his colleagues as part of what has become known as the “Sydney School” (even though it represents only one group of the systemic functional linguists in and around Sydney), originally to serve needs in education (cf. Martin, 1998) but later extended to many other areas, context was stratified into two strata (genre > register [in their sense rather than in Halliday's, e.g. 1978]) or three (ideology > genre > “register”) — initially without emphasis on the cline of instantiation (e.g. Martin, 1992), but later with this cline incorporated (together with individuation, e.g. Martin, 2010).
In their recent proposal for “rethinking context”, Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024) suggest that “there is little consensus in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) about how context should be modelled and how language and context are related”. But we can celebrate this exploratory rich diversity: against the background of the variants, we can still locate such alternative models within the overall metatheoretical space of SFL, and show how they remain largely inter-translatable as far as descriptions are concerned. For example, the genres within the “Genre Model” can all be interpreted in terms of and classified under the fields of activity presented in e.g. Matthiessen (2015a,b); and their “cline of individuation” can alternatively be explored in terms of a rich conception of tenor that includes semiotic and social role networks.
Doran, Martin & Herrington's (2024) proposal for field, tenor and mode is, in a sense, a minimalist one specifically within their contextual stratum of “register” (in Martin's, 1992, sense of the lowest of strata within context, very roughly comparable to situation type), narrowing down these contextual parameters so that they make connection with the metafunctional view “from below”, from the vantage point of language. Other functional aspects are characterized by reference to the cline of instantiation across the three metafunctions of language (“mass: technicality, iconization, aggregation” [Martin, 2017], “association [status/ contact]: participation, accord, coordination”, and “presence: iconicity, negotiability, implicitness”) and the “scale of individuation”.
In contrast, I have pursued what might be called a maximalist interpretation of the contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode, extended along the cline of instantiation from culture (potential) via institutions and situation types to situations (instance). Rather than treating them primarily as interface concepts linking context to language, I treat them as organizing principles for modelling the internal differentiation of the context itself as a semiotic resource for a community extended along the cline of instantiation — as a semiotic environment for all semiotic systems and for lower-order systems as well. In this view, field, tenor and mode have a great deal of theoretical and descriptive work to do (“to do all the heavy lifting”, as Doran, Martin & Herrington, 2024: 212, put it) — their task being expanded from just the interface with language.
Based on the theory of context articulated by Halliday (1991), I will also report on our registerial cartography programme (e.g. Matthiessen, 2015a,b). Since I felt registers in the original sense of functional varieties of language needed to be given more attention within SFL, I characterized this programme “from below”, from the vantage point of language; but if we shunt upwards along the hierarchy of stratification to context, we can adopt the complementary view “from above” of contextual cartography (with its different phases along the cline of instantiation: cultural cartography, institutional cartogram). To take this further, I will and sketch a research plan for the development of accounts of contexts — appliable accounts that can serve as resources in varied institutional settings, including ones located within linguistics (prominently language description) and ones in dialogue with other disciplines and institutions outside academia such as institutions of education, of healthcare, of translation, of administration, of justice.
In my exploration, I see our account context as having the overarching responsibility for providing the semiotic environment not only for language and other (denotative) semiotic systems but also for systems of the lower orders — for social systems of behaving in the first instance, but also for biological systems, where the studies by Joseph Henrich (e.g. Henrich, 2015) and other evolutionary scientists have convincingly shown us (or at least me!) that the human deep history involves (in systemic functional terms) an interplay between semiotic evolution (the evolution of “linguacultures”) and biological evolution (with social evolution mediating) — adding to hypotheses about the co-evolution of language and the brain by Gerald Edelman, Terrence Deacon and other neuroscientists (for some discussion, see Halliday, 1995; Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999/ 2006; and Matthiessen, 2025).
Here, Halliday's (1978) distinction between first and second order field and tenor is essential, with mode being inherently a second order contextual parameter; first-order categories are at least analytically independent of language and other semiotics systems whereas second-order ones emerge with language and other (denotative) semiotic systems. If we retain this holistic understanding of field, tenor and mode, we can see that they are not actually posited only to make sense of language: field is much more than a “resource for construing phenomena” and tenor much more than a “resource for negotiation social relations”, in the account of context offered by Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024). In fact, I hope to show that the functional parameters of field, tenor and mode provide a powerful framework for interpreting contributions from other disciplines where scholars have studied cultures, institutions and situation types. In this way, contribution from anthropology (e.g. Bronisɫaw Malinowski, Mary Douglas), functional sociology (e.g. Jonathan Turner, and to some extent Talcott Parsons [who may have taken Malinowski's insights from the field chair to the academic's arm chair too far without renewal of connection with empirical studies]), social psychology (e.g. Michael Argyle, Harry Triandis), cultural comparative studies (e.g. John Lewis, Geert Hofstede), AI (e.g. Roger Schank).
The contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode can be viewed from different vantage points, focussing variably along the cline of instantiation on culture at the potential pole of the cline — the institutions constituting cultural sub-domains — the situation types constituting institutional sub-domains — and contexts of situation at the instance pole of the cline. As part of the cultural cartography, we can recognize institutions identified across different cultures (and here producing at least “etic” inventories can serve as a helpful cartographic starting point: e.g. family/ kinship, friendship/ peer sociability, education/ cultural transmission, healthcare/ medicine, law/ justice, polity/ government/ administration, economy/ market/ work, religion/ ritual, science/ scholarship, media/ journalism, military/ security, art/ cultural production, sport/ recreation), noting the considerably variation across cultures in their institutional composition, and the numerous situation types that make up any given institution.
Thus one particularly productive way of approaching the context of culture is through institutions, as recommended by Malinowski (1944), who characterized institutions as “the real isolates of cultural analysis” (p. 54), and developed further e.g. by Turner (1997, 2003). Institutions organize recurrent patterns of social activity (field) and social roles & relations (tenor) and therefore provide natural entry points for describing the situation types and registers that make up the cultural meaning potential of a community. By focussing on institutions and their constitutive situation types, we can manage the complexity taking on the awesome task of describing cultures.
The overview I have indicated is a kind of meta-analysis of cultural descriptions from diverse disciplinary sources — an interpretation of second-order data. But the plan for contextual cartography must obviously also include primary data. Here I will touch on the possibilities opened up by the new generation of computational tools such as ChatGPT and its competing cousins. They enable us not only to conduct the meta-analysis just referred to, including relevant databases surveyed by Slingerland et al. (2020), but also to follow up on Benjamin Colby's vision of deriving accounts of parts of a culture through the computational analysis of culturally significant texts such as narratives Colby, 1966a,b)[2]. Colby's vision makes excellent systemic functional sense, and in the half century since his exploratory studies, computational advances in storage and data (big data — large language models), forms of representation (neural networks), and techniques (machine or deep learning) have made large-scale projects quite feasible. Thus Michel et al.'s (2011) notion of “culturomics” can be taken further than when they first formulated their framework 15 years ago.
The current turn is part of what has been characterized as the 4th industrial revolution (e.g. Schaub, 2016) — which is centrally a revolution based on the move up the ordered typology of systems from material ones (although we need to note that biological advances are still central drivers of this phase of industrial revolution) to semiotic ones (captured in wordings such as “information age”, “knowledge industry and society”, “knowledge hubs”) has tended to have a tenuous relation to linguistics — in part, arguably because Chomsky's generative linguistic theory has no way of relating technological advances based on the probabilistic nature of language to his theoretical conception of language[3], but in sharp contrast, SFL can provide a great deal of guidance in future endeavours, not only because it embodies a conception of language as a probabilistic system but also because this conception is just one part of a holistic theory of language in context.
Rounding off my talk, I will outline a research methodology for illuminating part of the context of culture of a community through large-scale analysis of texts sampled from different registers embedded in different situation types within institutions. These computational developments make it increasingly feasible to analyse large corpora of culturally significant texts (cf. Colby, 1966a,b) in order to infer contextual patterns across institutions and situation types. In this way, the study I envisage points toward a programme of contextual cartography in which cultures can be explored through systematic analysis of the texts that instantiate their institutional registers.
References
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[1] I say this partly to guard against the temptation to reify the cline of instantiation as another hierarchy — a problem explored by Chris Cleirigh on sysfling. Adding the spectrum of functional diversification, we can of course note that three global dimensions are involved.
[2] There is an important connection here to systemic functional research: Nick Colby invited Michael Halliday to UC Irvine in the first half of 1980 to give a ten-week course on SFL (which I was fortunate enough to attend), but also to develop a version of his systemic functional grammar of English that was explicit enough to be modelled and implemented computationally. Colby's research vision was of a systemic functional grammar that could be used to parse culturally significant texts — further developing his vision from the mid 1960s. Halliday worked with a computational researcher, Mark James, to produce this grammar. While it didn't become part of the kind of system Colby had envisaged, it became the foundation of the Nigel grammar of the text generation project directed by William C. Mann at the Information Sciences Institute starting in 1980, with Michael Halliday as a consultant and me as a research linguist: see e.g. Matthiessen & Bateman (1991), Matthiessen (2005).
[3] For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBdZi_JtV4c;
