The Martin Centre’s No. 131 Seminar (Linguistic Science and its Appliability) was held offline on May 7 in Meeting Room 225, School of Foreign Languages, SJTU.

Ms Wang Dongyan from the Martin Centre presented a talk on An Empirical Study of Periodicity in English Writing. First, Ms Wang pointed out many non-English major postgraduates are deficient in terms of discourse construction, discourse cohesion and coherence in their English writing. After reviewing the related theories in discourse analysis including Cohesion Theory, Thematic Progression and Periodicity, she mainly discussed the feasibility of the instruction of Periodicity in English writing. Then, Ms Wang introduced the design of her experiment. She presented the hypotheses, subjects, methods and procedures of the experiment, demonstrated discourse analysis of the model essay and students’ essays and shared her findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses. She concluded the talk by making recommendations on the application of discourse analysis theories to instructors’ teaching training and students’ writing practice.

Zhang Chunhui, a doctoral student of the Martin Center, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gave a talk entitled "Cooperation Mechanism and Interpersonal Meaning Enactment in Civil Trial". Zhang reviewed relevant studies on cooperative discourse, discussed the relations between courtroom discourse as a genre and social process, and the evolution of social process in a pattern of "conflict-accommodation-cooperation". She constructs a cooperation mechanism of court participants in civil trial from interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives of sociology, psychology, economics and cognitive science, focusing on the constituents of cooperation mechanism and its characteristics of enacting interpersonal meanings. Zhang also discusses the linguistic realizations of interpersonal meaning of cooperation in courtroom trials.