Reflections on Multilingual Grammatical Description: An Interview with J. R. Martin on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday

Abstract

In this interview, after briefly summarising his contributions to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) up to this point in his career, Martin addresses key issues in relation to multilingual grammatical description and functional language typology. He reviews some prominent features of the grammatical descriptive work he is engaged in, elaborates on the notion of defeasible language typology, discusses key hierarchies and complementarities in SFL, comments on recent developments in multilingual grammatical description, and anticipates applications informed by robust functional accounts of diverse languages.

Keywords

• systemic functional linguistics
• multilingual language description
• functional language typology
• hierarchies
• complementarities