NEWS & EVENTS
Lectures： Jonathan Webster
Bio-statement：
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.
Lecture Ⅰ
Title: Making meaningful choices with whatever the grammar will allow
Time: 13:30, 26 Sep, 2016
Venue: #214, School of Foreign Languages
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).
Lecture Ⅱ
Title: Exploring ‘the adjacent possible’ in verbal art and verbal science
Time: 13:30, 27 Sep, 2016
Venue: #214, School of Foreign Languages
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’.
