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马丁中心特邀国际著名专家Jonathan Webster教授来交大做系列学术报告

 

报告人:Jonathan Webster, Director of The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies, City University of Hong Kong.

地点:上海交通大学杨咏曼楼214室

时间:2016年9月26-27日

联系人:王振华

联系方式:021-34205735

马丁适用语言学中心同仁愿与大家一起追随学术大家,把握学术前沿讯息,共同学习,共同进步。期待各位的加入! 

 

报告人简介:

For more than ten years, Professor Jonathan Webster headed up the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong.  He is currently Director of The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies, which has the unique advantage of being the only research centre worldwide bearing the name of this distinguished, globally renowned scholar in linguistics, M.A.K. Halliday.  

Professor Webster is the Editor of the Collected Works of several leading scholars, including M.A.K Halliday (Emeritus Professor of University of Sydney; founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics), Ruqaiya Hasan (Emeritus Professor, Macquarie University, Sydney), Sydney Lamb (Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Rice University, Houston, Texas; founder of Stratificational Linguistics), and Braj B. Kachru (Emeritus Professor in Linguistics, University of Illinois; who pioneered development of the field of World Englishes).    

He recently authored the book Understanding Verbal Art: A Functional Linguistic Approach, published by Springer; and co-authored (with M.A.K. Halliday) Text Linguistics: The how and why of meaning, published by Equinox UK. 

In addition, He is the founding Editor of Linguistics and the Human Sciences, an ESCI indexed journal devoted to exploring the relationships between linguistics and other areas of scholarly concern, including but not limited to history, sociology, politics, archaeology, religious studies, translation, and the study of art.  The first issue appeared in July 2005, published by Equinox (UK).  He is also one of the founding Editors – along with Professor Huang Guowen (Sun Yat-sen University) and Professor He Wei (University of Science and Technology, Beijing) – of the new Journal of World Languages, published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis; and is the Managing Editor of the journal WORD, the journal of the International Linguistics Association, headquartered in New York.  


讲座一:
Title: Making meaningful choices with whatever the grammar will allow

Abstract: M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory (SFL) describes language as a resource for making meaning.  We make meaning to construe the phenomena of experience; to enact social relationships; and to create discourse.  Language provides the grammatical resources necessary for not only for talking about our experience of the world around us and what is going on inside us, but also for communicating our attitudes toward and expectations of those with whom we are interacting. By means of my “text”, no matter whether it be long or short, spoken or written, literary or conversational, I participate in an act of interpersonal exchange, communicating my sense of my own identity, my world view, my interpretation of experience. What enables this meaning-making potential in language is the grammar, which is characterized by both functional diversity and a stratal organization.   Halliday's Systemic Functional Theory, which prioritizes the study of function over form, provides the theoretical and methodological basis for investigating ‘the aesthetic and functional values that differentiate one text from another, or one voice from another within the frontiers of the same text’ (Halliday Collected Works, Vol. 2, chapter 6, p.187). 

地点:上海交通大学杨咏曼楼214室

时间:2016年9月26日下午1:30

 

 

讲座二:
Title: Exploring ‘the adjacent possible’ in verbal art and verbal science


Abstract: 
Whether it is the “art” in verbal art, or the “science” in verbal science, what is being crafted through the metaphor-making potential available in language are hypotheses or models about the world experienced around us and in us.  Such is the semogenic power of grammar, that it enables us to define ‘the basic experience of being human’.  Hasan refers to the hypotheses articulated in verbal art as themes about some aspect of social life achieved through second order semiosis – a kind of double articulation – ‘so that one order of meaning acts as metaphor for second order of meaning’ (Hasan 1985:100).   Scientific theorizing likewise would not be possible except by means of the semogenic potential in language to reconstrue our commonsense view of experience as the interplay between happenings and entities into a metaphorical world of things which can be observed, investigated and explained.   Historically speaking, this metaphor-making potential has been achieved over ‘three successive waves of theoretical energy’ – generalization, abstractness, metaphor – each taking us ‘one step further away from ordinary experience’, but at the same time each step may be thought of as having ‘enlarged the meaning potential by adding a new dimension to the total model’.  Over the course of history, as the need arose for new ways to theorize the human experience, humankind has relied on the power of language ‘to reconstrue commonsense reality into one that imposed regularities on experience and brought the environment more within our power to control’.

地点:上海交通大学杨咏曼楼214室

时间:2016年9月27日下午1:30