Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen developed the theoretical framework of lexicogrammatical cartography to map the systemic choices of language.

In his seminal work Lexicogrammatical Cartography: English Systems (1995), Matthiessen established a multidimensional mapping of language systems. Drawing from the Firthian-Hallidayan tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this framework treats grammar not as a set of syntactic rules, but as a resource for making meaning. By organizing linguistic options into systemic networks, Matthiessen provided a formal cartography that models how speakers choose specific grammatical pathways during discourse generation, bridging the gap between abstract semantic potential and concrete lexicogrammatical realization.