News & Events

19 February 2024

Prof Shengqing Liao has just completed his visit to HCLS. As Dean of Journalism at Yunnan University and Professor of Communication at Fudan University, he held fruitful discussions with some of the key members of the centre for interdisciplinary collaborations across corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, neurolinguistics and communication studies. During his visit, he gave a talk on the topic of the audience perception and assessment of news credibility during the 2nd International Halliday Forum on Media Discourse Analysis. He played an instrumental role in the Centre's 2024 CRF grant application in fake news detection involving investigators from Beihang University, City University of Hong Kong, Fudan University, Hong Kong University, Lancaster University, and Yunnan University. During his visit, he participated in two rounds of discussions with Prof Niels Schiller and Prof Alex Fang for cross-institutional and cross-departmental collaborations between Yunnan University, Dept of Linguistics and Translation and the Halliday Centre. The discussions covered matters related to student exchange as well as joint research and the organisation of academic conferences.

1 February 2024

Professor Niels Olaf Schiller has joined the Centre as Core Member. Niels has been appointed by CityU as Professor and HoD of the Department of Linguistics and Translation. He has been Professor of Psycho- and Neurolinguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and a member of the management board of Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) since 1 July 2006. His research areas include psycho- and neurolinguistics, in particular syntactic, morphological, and phonological processes in language production and reading aloud. He is further interested in articulatory-motor processes during speech production, language processing in neurologically impaired patients, and forensic phonetics. He is Associate Editor of Psychological Research and Frontiers in Psychology and editorial board member of Journal of Cognition and Biological Psychology. He is Academic Editor of PLoS ONE. His latest journal publications include the following: Tabassi Mofrad F. & Schiller N.O. (2023), Connectivity profile of middle inferior parietal cortex confirms the hypothesis about modulating cortical areas, Neuroscience 519: 1-9. Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn S., Gupta A., Pablos L. & Schiller N.O. (2023), When left is right: the role of typological similarity in multilinguals’ inhibitory control performance, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 26(1): 165-178. Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn S., Pablos Robles L. & Schiller N.O. (2022), Does your native language matter?: Neural correlates of typological similarity in non-native production, Lingue e Linguaggio 2022(1): 143-169. Tabassi Mofrad F. & Schiller N.O. (2022), Mapping caudal inferior parietal cortex supports the hypothesis about a modulating cortical area, NeuroImage 259: 119441. Niels's expertise and research interests will broaden the scope and profile of the research that HCLS embodies.

22 January 2024

The 2nd International Halliday Forum, on the theme of journalistic discourse, was held on Monday 22 January 2024. The talks explored the following topics: Measuring reader assessment of news credibility, by Shengqing Liao (Fudan and Yunnan Universities). Crisis management strategies, by Christine Huang (CityU). Multi-dimensional annotation of engagement in journalistic discourse, by Min Dong (BeihangU) and Alex Fang (CityU). ISO semantic annotation schemes, by Harry Bunt (Tilburg University). Social actor analysis applied to the Gladstone corpus, by Tony McEnery (Lancaster University).

19 January 2024

Prof Shengqing Liao has just joined the Centre as Visiting Professor. He is professor at Fudan University in Shanghai and Yunnan University in Kunming, where he serves as Dean of the School of Journalism, also known as College of International Communication of South and Southeast Asia. He was vice chairman of the Chinese Association of Ethnic Journalism & Communication as well as head of Department of Communication Studies, School of Journalism, at Fudan University. His visit will greatly strengthen the ongoing corpus-based research in journalistic discourse at HCLS.

8 December 2023

The Halliday Forum 2023 on Intelligent Applications of Languages Studies was held on 8 Dec. Centre director Prof Alex Fang opened the forum. Prof Kiyong Lee and Prof Jae Woong Choe, both of Korea Unviersity, were invited to deliver keynote talks. The core members of the Centre gave presentations on their latest research, touching on a variety of different topics, methodologies and thought-provoking findings. Research collaborators and associated PhD students attended the forum. The Centre director wishes to thank all the participants and looks forward to a future edition of greater and broader participation.

15-18 March 2022

REMLing 2022. A Hongkong-Beijing-Lancaster Symposium on Research Methodologies for PhD Studies in Linguistics.

7 September 2021

Elena Semino joined the Halliday Centre as Affiliated Member. She is Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art and Director of ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University.

22 August 2021

The Steering Committee of HCLS met and heard the Director's report on the latest developments. The committee endorsed the Centre's latest efforts to build a critical mass of expertise of core and affiliated members, grant applications to BHUA and SPPR, and international collaborations and fund raising activities. The committee endorsed healthcare language and communication as a strategic area of development for the centre and advised on imminent funding opportunities. The Steering Committee is chaired by Christine (CityU) and convened by Alex with Gerhard (Vienna) and Harry (Tilburg) as members. Jonathan as the Centre Advisor was also present at the meeting and spoke on strategic developments.

18 August 2021

Alex met with Prof Elena Semino, Director of the ESRC Center for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences of Lancaster University, UK. Prof Jonathan Culpeper (HoD of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster), Prof Richard Walker (Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, CityU) and Prof Christine Huang (Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, CityU) were also at the meeting to discuss collaborations between the two research centres.

12 August 2021

Christoph Hafner joined the Halliday Centre as Core Member. He is Associate Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong.

26 July 2021

Ji Won Kim joined the Halliday Centre as Core Member. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong.

23 July 2021

Christine Yi-Hui Huang joined the Halliday Centre as Core Member. Christine is Chair Professor of Communication and Media and Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong.

22 July 2021

Tony Mcenery joined the Halliday Centre as Affiliated Member. He is Distinguished Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University.

21 July 2021

Qingpeng Zhang joined the Halliday Centre as Core Member. He is Associate Professor at School of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong.

19 July 2021

Christian Matthiessen joined the Centre as Affiliated Member. A leading figure in systemic functional linguistics, he is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Hunan University, Guest Professor at Beijing University of Science and Technology and Honorary Professor at the Australian University.

2 July 2021

Michaela Mahlberg joined the Centre as Affiliated Member. She is Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Corpus Research at the University of Birmingham.

1 July 2021

• Alex Fang was appointed by the President of CityU as Director of the Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies.
• Christine Huang was appointed by Dean of CLASS as Chair of the Steering Committee of the Centre. She is Associate Dean of CLASS for research and Chair Professor of Communication and Media (COM).
• Gerhard Budin was nominated as Steering Committee Member of the Centre. He is Professor for translational terminology and translation technology, Centre of Translation Studies, Vienna University, Austria.
• Harry Bunt was nominated as Steering Committee Member of the Centre. He is Professor of Language and Artificial Intelligence, School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
• Jonathan Webster was appointed as Centre Advisor.

30 June 2021

Jonathan Webster retired as Director of the Halliday Centre of Intelligent Applications of Language Studies. He founded the Centre fifteen years ago in April 2006.

18 June 2021

Alex Fang was invited by Shandong University and gave a talk entitled From London School of Linguistics to Corpora of Spoken Chinese. The talk, addressing the emergent issue of speech understanding, reviews the traditional emphasis on speech in British corpus linguistics and traces the intrinsic connection between MAK Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics to the London School represented by JR Firth.

7 June 2021

The Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, organised a special Retirement Seminar for Jonathan Webser. The seminar presented the following talks:

• Jonathan Webster: Where is the Art in ‘Verbal Art’? – Seeking a Linguistic Explanation.
• David Butt of Macquarie Universit: The Latent Grammar of Subjectivity – The meaning of the represents test from William James (1902) to Halliday and Webster (2014).
• Annabel Lukin of Macquarie University: Halliday on Ideology.

9 April 2021

Fang, A.C. and Dong, M. (2021). Shell nouns as register-specific discourse devices. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19059.fan

6 April 2021

Alex Fang was invited by Donghua University and gave a talk on the topic of Language, Corpora and AI. The talk addressed the contribution of corpus linguistics to the rapid development of AI and illustrated the fundamentals of AI to an audience of research students in linguistics. Donghua University is situated in Shanghai and, most notably, is the exclusive designer and provider of space suits for China’s space station project.