NEWS & EVENTS
Martin Centre Opening Address
by Prof. J. R. Martin
12th April, 2014
Honored guests,
To being, my sincere apologies for not being able to be with you today for this Martin Centre launch.
As you listen to this address I am in fact on a flight from Australia to South America to attend the 41st International Systemic Functional Congress there, a commitment I made many months ago. Thank-you for letting me pass on these remarks to you in my absence.
First of all let me say how proud I feel to be honored in this way by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. My sincere thanks to my colleague Wang Zhenhua and to Dean Hu Kaibo for all of their efforts in getting this project off the ground. It is a tremendously exciting development for me, for my linguistics colleagues, for the School of Foreign Languages and Literature Studies and for SJTU. Given the quality of staff already appointed to the Centre, I feel confident we can create the most productive centre for research and training in functional linguistics in the world.
As I have stressed to Wang and Hu from the beginning of our discussions, it is very important that this Centre be more than a nameplate on a door. And we have agreed that it will be well staffed, including SJTU colleagues, visiting fellows, postdoctoral fellows and doctoral students.
I have also stressed that the Center needs to be a high level training centre as well as a research institute. To this end each year we are organizing three weeks of intensive coursework in SFL for SJTU doctoral students and their peers in related programs around China.
In choosing a name for the Centre I was mindful of the important role that applications have played in the development of SFL around the world. To emphasise the dialectic of theory and practice that I envisage for the Centre we have adopted Michael Halliday's term 'appliable linguistics'. To begin the Centre will foreground three areas of application – educational linguistics, language typology and forensic linguistics, and begin organizing an annual forum focusing each year on one of these. This year's forum will focus on academic discourse. The goal of these forums will be to establish a forward looking research agenda for Center staff and students, at the cutting edge of knowledge, with a view to future developments.
As a closing comment let me acknowledge that the Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics will of course be a SJTU center of excellence, and a center of excellence for China as a whole. But it will also be an international centre, look outwards from China's proud intellectual history to the heritage of neighbours and beyond. What better place to pursue a vision of this kind than SJTU, situated as it is near the eastern edge of China, and thus near the western edge of the rest of the world.
Once again, my sincere regrets for not being with you today. But I will be visiting you several times later on this year… and for many years to come.
J. R. Martin
