讲座题目：Language Matters

讲座人：Tony McEnery 英国兰卡斯特大学 英国社会科学院院士

讲座时间：4月23日（周日）10：30—12：30

讲座地点：外语学院329报告厅

讲座简介：

Language is a crucial factor in various contexts, and its effects can be evaluated in multiple ways. Although the study of discourse in linguistics has had limited engagement with mainstream social sciences, this lecture will demonstrate how linguists can collaborate with other fields to explore issues central to their discipline. By focusing on language mechanisms and affordances, linguists can offer unique perspectives on social issues. By using a series of case studies from research undertake at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, the talk will show how linguistics research can lead to methodological innovation and provide a spur to the critical evaluation of ‘big data’ techniques. At the heart of the examples given will be the idea that the methods we use should be the slave of, and evaluated by, the demands linguists make of them. Apparent sophistication is of limited value if it leads to poor, or unhelpful, results. However, a combination of methodological sophistication with linguistic insights is of great value. The examples given span time and social contexts, looking at language in the seventeenth century, patient feedback in the British National Health Service, and Islamophobia in the UK press. These studies will illustrate the potential of cross-disciplinary work involving linguists in various contexts and time periods. The significance of the lecture is that it shows the interaction between linguistics and other disciplines is not one-way, as linguists can also reflect on their own practices and come into contact with explanatory frameworks that socially situate linguistic phenomena.

主讲人介绍：

  英国兰卡斯特大学杰出教授，英国社会科学院院士（British Academy）、皇家艺术学院院士（Royal Academy of Arts），国际语料库语言学的领军学者，曾主持建设了英国国家语料库（BNC2014）、兰卡斯特汉语语料库（LCMC）、EMILLE Corpus等一批知名语料库。曾任英国艺术与人文科学研究委员会（AHRC）以及英国经济与社会研究委员会（ESRC）主任，创办了语料库领域国际知名期刊Corpora，现任International Journal of Corpus Linguistics等国际知名期刊编委，任我校创刊的国际期刊《语料库与中国社科研究》的名誉主编。他致力于语料库在社会科学、语用学、话语研究、语言比较与翻译研究以及语言教学等方面的应用，发表了大量高被引论文和专著，在国际语料库语言学领域影响重大。