Previous Events 2011

Date : 7 November 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

In this seminar, I will present a platform for annotating multilayered functional structure and discourse structure with a collaborative interface built on a cloud-based infrastructure. The purpose of the research is to provide a visually structured, interactive annotation framework for exploring the semantics, function and discourse structure of language data otherwise invisible or difficult to access. Through the innovative visualization/annotation platform, we introduce a number of contributions to the study and analysis of language. Our platform introduces immediate, interactive visualization of metafunctions, allowing users to explore and manipulate multi-layered semantic and functional information more effectively. The platform visualizes the complex interrelations of discourse structures at various levels, a process expected to help researchers keep track of structural development and explore how different components relate to make meaning.

We demonstrate that a collaborative cloud-based annotation platform can facilitate cooperation and Computer Assisted Language Learning. Linguistic data are stored in a cloud-based platform for universal retrieval, exchange and collaboration. Researchers simultaneously work on the same text/corpus, collaborating on a designated visualization/annotation task. Linguistic experts can thus provide grammar and discourse illustrations to language learners and assess students' understanding of the text.

Although developed with SFL in mind, the generic object-oriented database architecture and data processing model on which the platform is built provide convenient interfacing to other visualization models. Initial experiments find very promising results with Rhetorical Structure Theory, a general framework for analyzing complex structural relations in texts.

Mr Victor Hengbin Yan received the B.A. degree in Advanced Translation and the M.A. degree in Computational Linguistics from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangdong, China, in 2008 and 2010 respectively. He is currently pursuing the PhD degree at City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. He is a Research Assistant at The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies, City University of Hong Kong. He had been a Research Engineer at a Singaporebased company working on a robotics-related dialog system. His research interests include Computer Assisted Language Learning, corpus linguistics, data visualization and automatic linguistic annotation.

Date : 31 October 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

In linguistics, prosody generally refers to the rhythm, stress and intonation of the speech that are suprasegmental features that operate over long stretches of the utterance. In systemic functional linguistics, the term prosody has been extended to grammar and semantics to refer to "the interpersonal mode of syntagmatic organization" (Matthiessen et al. 2010:166).

Inspired by Pike's conceptualization of language as particle, wave and field, Halliday (1979) suggests that experiential meaning is associated with particulate structure, interpersonal meaning with prosodic structure, and textual meaning with periodic structure. Interpersonal meanings are the speaker's ongoing interference in the speech event. This ongoing distribution of interpersonal meanings throughout the clause and segments of discourse is prosody-like. The effect is non-discrete and then cumulative. Martin (1995, 1996) takes the further step of elaborating on manifestations of prosodic structure at the clause and text level. Martin (2004) notes that prosody is manifested in the systems of modality, polarity, attitude, mood, and honorification, and an array of strategies can be deployed to construct prosodic realization.

Modality is a major semantic resource construing the interpersonal meaning of language. Its typical realization in Chinese clauses is in a prosodic fashion. Modal auxiliaries can occur at the beginning of the clause complex as thematized comment, dominating meanings expressed in the dependent clause. They can also be used successively in the clause to amplify the modal meaning. Modals can even appear at the end of the clause as information focus, enabling a prosodic flow of the modal meaning retrospectively from the New to the rest of the clause.

Ms Yang Shu is currently a joint PhD student between Sun Yat-sen University and City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie in systemic functional linguistics and discourse analysis. She has published several articles on public service advertising discourse. Her recent research has concentrated on modality in Modern Chinese drawing on a systemic functional approach.

Date : 24 October 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL) boasts a long tradition in its fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue with Bernstein's sociology of education. Martin (2011) outlines four phases of interaction between SFL and Berstein's theory. The first revolves around the theme of semantic variation, providing linguistic evidence for coding orientation. The second phase is concerned with the development of the Sydney School genre-based literacy using Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse. The third shifts to a focus on understanding knowledge structures through field analysis. The fourth comes back to concerns with users of language, examining the issues of identity and community. Drawing on the second and third phases of the interdisciplinary dialogue, this presentation discusses Bernsteinian influence on the development of the Reading to Learn program, a Sydney School approach to genre pedagogy. It reviews research on the use of Bernstein's theory to support the development of the program and examines issues related to attributes of horizontal and vertical discourses and the bridging of the two discourses in the Reading to Learn classroom practice.

Reference: Martin, J. R. (2001). Bridging troubled waters: interdisciplinarity and what makes it stick. In F. Christie & K. Maton (Eds.), Disciplinarity:Functional and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum. 35-61

Prof Liu Yi is Professor of English in the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. He has published on a range of topics including genre theory, language teaching and curriculum design. He also serves on the editorial board of Annual Review of Functional Linguistics.

Date : 17 October 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

Verbal group of most languages, if not all, is potentially the most important element in the environment of clause, as it is packed with different layers of meaning. Bajjika, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the northern province of Bihar in India, is no different in this respect; rather Bajjika is even more prominent than many other (Indo-Aryan) languages in that it uses the verbal group as the most radiant category to express a number of experiential and interpersonal features. For example, the verb agreement, often taken to be a crucial determining grammatical character to ascertain the interpersonal Subject, at least in the Indo-Aryan languages, has many more functions than identifying the Subject: the "multiple" agreement marking in Bajjika is anchored in the "social position" of interactants.

In this talk I will show the experiential and interpersonal shades of meaning encoded in the verbal group with special focus on the meanings encoded in the "multiple" agreement marking in the verbal group of Bajjika.

Dr Abhishek Kumar is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has described Bajjika, an undocumented Indo-Aryan lanaguage spoken India, in systemic functional terms, and is currently working on the "Semantics of Indian English" as his postdoctoral project. His area of interest is lexicogrammar, sociolinguistics, language typology, and world Englishes.

Date : 17 October 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

This paper presents part of the on-going research on English language writing produced by second language learners at tertiary level in Hong Kong from a Discourse Semantics perspective. To facilitate comparison among students' texts, this study profiles the "preferred" genre of technical report in the field of computational linguistics with Periodicity, Abstract Entities, and Ideation (nuclearity) (Martin & Rose 2007; Martin 2010), and attempts to model the patterns of texture with these tools. Through mapping the "preferred" genre with students' text, the possible ontogenetic development in students' writing is explored.

Reference:
Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. (2007). Working with Discourse: Meaning beyond the Clause. London, New York: Continuum.
Martin, J.R. (2010). Discourse Semantics. Vol. 2 in the Collected Works of J R Martin (Wang Zhenhua Ed.). Shanghai: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press.

Ms. Cecilia FK Pun is a co-tutelle PhD student in the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics in the City University of Hong Kong, and the Department of Linguistics in the University of Sydney. She is currently working on the development of academic writing in tertiary settings. Her research interest includes Systemic Functional Linguistics, text analysis, corpus linguistics and academic writing.

Date : 26 September 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

National vertebration is widely recognized as one of the key problems Spain has had for over one hundred years. The country's profound decentralization in recent years has by no means toned down the identity debate in Spanish society (Moreno, 2001). On the contrary, Linz's description of Spain as "an State for all Spaniards, a Nation-State for a large part of the population and only an State but not a nation for important minorities" continues to apply today (Linz, 1979). This paper analyzes the competing narratives of El País and El Mundo, Spain most popular newspapers, over a period of twelve years (1996-2007). A comparison will be made on how the concept of nation is discursively constructed in a corpus of 36,145 news articles totalling over 20 million tokens. While illustrating the great potential offered by corpus-based discourse studies in social research, conclusions are also drawn on the lack of consensus on national vertebration in Spanish society and on the problematic nature of objectivity in news-making.

Keywords: Spanish national identity, corpus-based discourse studies.

Reference:
Linz, Juan (1973): "Early state-building and late peripheral nationalism against the state: The case of Spain". In Eisentadt, S.N. and Rokkan, S. (eds.), Building state and nations. Vol II, London. Beverley Hills.
Moreno, Luis (2001): The Federalization of Spain. London; Portland, OR: F. Cass.

Mr Angel Garralda Ortega is a teaching fellow at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches Spanish language and culture. Angel's main work has been in the field of language education, where he has co-authored several course books, websites and some research articles. He is currently a PhD. candidate at the Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham. His main research area is the Construction of Spanish identity in the Press, where he uses a Discourse-Historical Approach combined with Corpus Linguistics Tools.

Date : 19 September 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

This presentation explores the complex relationship between World Englishes and academic writing in the context of tertiary education. In this paper, we will first explore the relationship and politics of 'user'-oriented research in World Englishes and the 'uses' of language in academic settings, which serve as a gateway to discourses of power. Drawing on a systemic-functional understanding of language, the presentation will then examine texts written by users of World Englishes and demonstrate how texts valued in academic disciplines make use of comparable linguistic resources regardless of the national/linguistic origin of the authors. Equipped with this linguistic analysis of texts written by students from Outer circle countries, the paper will discuss some pedagogical practices (and educational material) adopted in teaching English as a second/foreign language and investigate hidden agendas that arguably limit the potential social and economical mobility of many of the learners (rather than enhancing it).

Dr. Ahmar Mahboob is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He has published on a range of topics including language teaching, teacher education, language policy, educational linguistics, and World Englishes. He is the co-editor of Questioning Linguistics with Naomi Knight (2008), Studies in Applied Linguistics and Language Learning with Caroline Lipovsky (2009), The NNEST Lens: Nonnative English Speakers in TESOL (2010), and Appliable Linguistics (2010) with Naomi Knight. Dr. Mahboob also serves as the Associate Editor of Linguistics and the Human Sciences.

Ms. Cecilia FK Pun is a co-tutelle PhD student in the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics in the City University of Hong Kong, and the Department of Linguistics in the University of Sydney. She is currently working on the development of academic writing in tertiary settings. Her research interest includes Systemic Functional Linguistics, text analysis, corpus linguistics and academic writing.

Date : 5 September 2011
Time : 6pm -- 7:30pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

This research case study explores the multimodal and multisemiotic literacy and numeracy social practices of ten first year Master of Commerce accounting international students, divided into three groups, who worked on a key topic in the Principles of Finance foundation module, capital budgeting management report: Abdulhadi, Saud, Jim and Cathy (Group 1), Abdulrahman and Jiang (Group 2), and Ibrahim, Hasan, Sharon, and Tracey (Group 3). This study is of interest as most international ESL/EFL students in Australia and elsewhere are enrolled in business programs (Alyousef and Picard 2011). It is underpinned by the proposed new multidimensional framework for the investigation of academic literacies, which is framed by Halliday's (1985; Halliday and Martin 1993) systemic functional linguistics and by O'Halloran's (1999, 2000) multisemiotic framework for the analysis of mathematical symbolism. The study aims to provide an account of the multimodal and multisemiotic meanings that are construed in capital budgeting management reports. It aims to describe the epistemologies of management reports and to provide an account of participants' actual practices and experiences, in addition to presenting a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of students' texts. Theoretical and pedagogical implications for ESP tutors at English-medium universities are also presented.

Mr Hesham Suleiman Alyousef is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literature at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He completed his MA degree in Applied Linguistics at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he graduated with a high distinction in 2007. By the end of 2012, he expects to complete his PhD dissertation, entitled "Investigating international postgraduate students' EAL literacy and numeracy practices: A multidimensional exploration". His research interests include systemic functional linguistics, academic literacies, metadiscourse, reading comprehension, syllabus design, multimodal discourse analysis and the use of Web 2.0 technology in tertiary education.

Date : 4 March 2011
Time : 4:30pm -- 6pm
Venue : B7603, 7/F Lift 3, Blue Zone, Academic 1, City University of Hong Kong

This lecture will demonstrate the enormous amount of common ground thatis shared between the Sydney and the Cardiff Models of language (the result of Halliday's five great insights of the 1960s/70s), while also pointing out some of the main developments in the Cardiff Model that have been steadily being introduced since the 1970s. In the final phase of the lecture we shall, together, demonstrate a 'microgrammar' version of the full Cardiff Grammar - with you making the choices in the system network - as we see (i) how the components of a SFG work together to generate text-sentences, and (ii) how certain important developments from the COMMUNAL Project in the use of probabilities help us to generate 'better' text-sentences.

Prof Robin Fawcett is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and the former Director of the Computational Linguistics Unit in the Centre for Language and Communication, Cardiff University. His research interests embrace linguistic theory, systemic functional linguistics in a cognitive-interactive framework, the computer modelling of language in both generation and understanding, and the description of English and other languages for these two purposes and for the analysis of texts. His work with his colleagues (Tucker, Lin, Tench, Young, Huang, Neale, Castel and others, including his many research students) builds on developments in linguistics of the 1990s, and it has led to the emergence of what is now recognized as an alternative version of SFL to that of Halliday: the 'Cardiff Grammar' (Butler 2003). 2008 was a landmark, in that it saw the publication of his Invitation to Systemic Functional Linguistics in English, Chinese and Spanish. Altogether, he has published ten books, over sixty papers in journals or as book chapters, and around seventy research reports, reviews and interviews. He is currently working on three major books. He is a frequent speaker and lecturer at overseas conferences and universities, having lectured in 26 different counties. He is on the Editorial Board of the journal Functions of Language; he is a series editor for Equinox; and he holds guest professorships in three universities in China, where he is a particularly frequent visitor.