On the afternoon of October 28, 2019, Professor Javier Perez-Guerra at University of Vigo, Spain, delivered the first of a series of lectures at School of Foreign Languages. He is giving lectures from October 28 to November 8, 2019. His first lecture “Comparative variation in World Englishes: new, (more) newer determinants” was hosted by Prof. Yang Chaojun, Dean of School of Foreign Languages.Over 100 postgraduates, faculty members sat in the lecture with interest and excitement.
At the beginning, a brief introduction to ancient Vigo University and beautiful Vigo city was made by Prof Javier with vivid pictures.Then he outlined his own teaching syllabus of this lecture series based on his personal research with his colleague in LVTC(Language Variation and Textual Categorization). Prof. Javier explained his empirical approaches like corpus linguistics to diachronic and diatopic variations of language, using linguistic theories like Systemic Functional Grammar. For a better illustration, he cited a large number of daily-used sentences like “Laurel is fatter than Hardy. Laurel is more fat than Hardy. Laurel is more fatter than Hardy. ” to provide food for thought. His question about whether double comparative is grammatically acceptable aroused debate among students. In order to explore the answers to the question, Prof. Javier reviewed the development of English in history and showed his empirical and diachronic analysis on English inflections through a comparative study of corpora like ARCHE in 18thcentury, CONCE and BNC in 19th century. Statistics show that English inflections gradually reduced in the course of language evolution. He emphasized that although prescriptive grammar rules out the possibility of double comparatives, they can still be found in corpora and even used by a singer Lady Gaga. In the end, he ended the lecture with two conflicting hypotheses:multiple comparatives are more frequent in L2s; multiple comparatives are less frequent in L2s, which he will further explore the test of those hypotheses.
Prof Javier’s thought-provoking lecture offers deep insight in the language variations and profound enlightenment over linguistic research. Students are encouraged to observe ordinary linguistic phenomena, form hypotheses of their own and test them through empirical methods like corpus linguistics.
With a PhD in English linguistics on thematic variation in English, Prof. Javier is now a professor, journal reviewer and supervisor of the doctoral students at University of Vigo, where he coordinates the research group Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LATC). He has received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Javier’s main areas of specialization are word order and information packaging in the clause; multidimensional model of register analysis as applied to earlier periods of English; the study of grammatical variation between Early Modern and Present-day English by means of computational techniques; and the impact of performance preferences and ease of processing on the design of grammars. (authors: Li Pandeng, Yang Qing, Liu Congcong)
