The first international academic week on linguistics at School of Foreign Languagesbeganon the morning of November 11, 2019. Martin Hilpert and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza, the two prestigious linguists in the field of cognitive linguistics from Spain have been invited to jointly deliver 10 lectures on construction grammar, conceptual metaphors and basic and non-basic figures of speech etc. fromNovember 11toNovember 15.
As the first speaker, Professor Martin Hilpert at University of Neuchâtel, Spain, gave his lecture entitled“Construction Grammar and the Analysis of Spoken Language”after a general introduction by Yang Chaojun, the dean of School of Foreign Languages. Over 100 postgraduates, faculty members sat in the lecture with interest and enthusiasm.
At the beginning, Martin raised a previously-untouched topic: how to approach a messy conversation, which is full of errors, interruptions and irregular rules from the perspective of construction grammar by citing a transcribed conversation and its recording. Then he elaborated his own approaches to constructions in spoken language from four aspects: overcoming written language bias, on-line syntax, emergent constructions, and using constructions in spoken language. During the lecture, he distinguished two terms, namely,“sentence”and“utterance”, and advocated that the written language bias:“viewing language metaphorically as a static object”should be overcome by focusing on temporal aspects of language: transitoriness, irreversibility, synchronization. Then a syntactical analysis of several conversations was conducted by the scholar to clarify three conversational characteristics:projection, expansion and retraction. Later, after specifying two features of Hopper’s emergent grammar: grammar is shaped by discourse and grammar is not a prerequisite for discourse, Martin asserted that patterns in discourse, which do not reflect existing schemas, are rendered by temporality and interpersonal quality of language use. In the end, two examples such as WH-clefts and collaborative insubordination are presented to demonstrate the use of constructions in language.
Martin’s two-hour-and-a-half speech won students’roaring applause and sparked audience’s interest in constructions of spoken English. His fundamental introduction to the cognitive analysis of conversation from a new perspective paves the way for a successful international academic week.
Martin Hilpert is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel. He is also an editor ofFunctions of Languageand associate editor ofCognitive Linguistics.
With a PhD from Rice University, he did postdoctoral research at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. His major interests incorporate cognitive linguistics, language change, construction grammar, and corpus linguistics. He has published many academic works as follows:Germanic Future Constructions(2008, John Benjamins),Constructional Change in English(2013, Cambridge University Press), and "Construction Grammar and its Application to English"(2014, Edinburgh University Press).( author: Li Pandeng)
