ABSTRACT
Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen had interested in linguistics during his high school, by reading works of Otto Jespersen and Bertil Malmberg that gave him insight into European structuralism. As an undergraduate student in linguistics at Lund University, he trained in current fashion of Chomsky's version of generative linguistics, which was the Extended Standard Theory. Among the theories he encountered, there was something about systemic functional linguistics that really caught his attention; He think that the first book he read was Halliday's Explorations in the Functions of Language, published in 1973. After the publication of Halliday's Language as Social Semiotic, the notion of social semiotics became very popular and, together with Van Leeuwen and a couple of other people were involved in starting up the journal Social Semiotics in the early 1990s. Halliday has made a distinction between primary semiotic systems and higher order semiotic systems.
