ABSTRACT
Jim R. Martin has graduated at Glendon College, at York University in Toronto. Several peoples at Glendon College were interested in applications of linguistics, and his very first job in linguistics was working on a project where he was part of a team led by Jonathan Fine; they were studying primary school language. He had always been inspired by the ideas of socially responsible linguistics, is someone who wanted to make a contribution to society through his linguistics, and Halliday's aspiration to have a socially responsible linguistics motivated him. He thought that Halliday, Kress and Hodge, and others have tried to distinguish their work from a line of European structuralist semiotics that had derived from Saussure's work. Kress and Hodge had published their social semiotics book, but their idea was to bring Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFL) into dialogue with the European, especially French, thinking at that time.
