Before introducing Professor Martin, can I take a moment to acknowledge his teacher Michael Halliday and Michael’s lifelong partner Ruqaiya Hasan. Like Isaac Newton splitting light into its colours, Halliday has held a prism up to language for us. But like Newton, he could not have done so without standing on the shoulders of giants. In particular, he stood on the shoulders of his teacher J R Firth to see further than Firth could have imagined.

In the 1930s, Firth had already assembled the rudiments of systemic theory, including what we now understand as the strata of language in context, the social functions of language, the axes of systems and structures, and a cline of instantiation. Halliday assembled these components and commenced the research that led to systemic theory and his rich description of functional grammar.

Firth died suddenly in 1960 when Halliday was on his way to show him his theory. I asked Michael whether Firth would have approved of what he had done. He replied that he would have liked some aspects, but not others.

Many people have now worked with Halliday’s theory and elaborated its descriptions over the past five decades. But Jim Martin has gone much further than that. He has stood on Halliday’s shoulders to see further still.

In the 1980s and 90s Jim Martin built on Halliday and Hasan’s work on grammar and discourse, to flesh out semantics as a discourse semantic stratum, with its own metafunctional organisation. He also fleshed out the parameters of field, tenor and mode, and described the higher contextual stratum of genre.

Just as Firth would not have entirely approved of Michael Halliday’s theory, not all of Martin’s theory has always met the approval of Michael and Ruqaiya. But perhaps that is inevitable, when a student takes the master’s knowledge to show us another horizon.

Professor Martin’s work on discourse and genre has had a massive and growing impact on language and literacy teaching across the world, including Indonesia. In the 2000s, he turned his attention to other modalities of meaning, guiding his students to produce a very large and influential body of research on the semiotics of images, music, dance, movement, built environments, museums to name a few. Today he is guiding research in language and education, knowledge, justice, social theory, language typology and much more, as well as teaching graduate students all over the world.

Although he is a towering figure in language and social semiotics, Jim’s abiding characteristics are humility, generosity and a deep sense of responsibility towards his students and colleagues. As J R Firth was a founder of functional linguistics in the early 20^th century, and MAK Halliday became the leader of systemic functional linguistics the late 20^th century, we are very  fortunate to have someone with the intellectual standing of J R Martin to lead our field into this century.

鸣谢

第43届世界系统功能语言学大会上，Dr. David Rose担任Prof. Martin主旨发言的主持人， 以上文稿系Dr.David Rose的讲话内容，由上海交通大学马丁适用语言学研究中心主任王振华教沟通获得版权，冠以标题，组织文稿。本文由上海语言学通讯和马丁适用语言学中心联袂发布，以飨读者。

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