Dec.23,2010
A research seminar was held on the afternoon of Dec. 10th at Room 225, Eastern Block 6, with a welcome speech by Deputy Director of Institute of Linguistics. It was attended by all the members of the institute and some graduates. Prof. Zhang Jianli and Dr. Yue Ming each gave a presentations on their research.
Prof. Zhang recounted his research work entitled “A Multidimensional Study on Category Expansion” that he co-conducted with his graduate student Zhu Junwei. Prof. Zhang first clarified some of the background theories on categories and categorizations and then gave a detailed discussion with vivid examples on how category expansions make it possible to create new expressions, which have a sound basis on the vocabulary in use, to denote new concepts.
Dr. Yue introduced part of her recent study on the rhetorical significance of English tenses with the speeches by 11 national leaders at Davos Winter Annual Meeting as the corpus. She tried to explore the possible relationships between the use of personal pronouns and the speakers’ attitudes in their speeches. Some interesting and profound questions were also proposed in order to further her research.
During the seminar, all the people showed great interests in the speakers’ presentations of their research work and had a heated discussion on their topics. We all agreed on the significance of that activity and more such discussions were expected so that more communications would be encouraged between the members of the institute and the students would be more deeply involved in the research work being conducted in the institute.
