Coloquio Permanente con Jing Hao

El día jueves 10 de junio, a las 17:00 horas, se relizará la charla “Nominal group realisations of activities: a case study of Mandarin Chinese” con la Dra. Jing Hao (Letras UC), como parte del Coloquio Permanente de Lingüística y Traducción. Invita y organiza: Programa de Posgrado en Lingüística. Actividad abierta y gratuita vía Zoom.

Inscripciones en el correo electrónico: coloquiopermanente2021@gmail.com

Nominal group realisations of activities: a case study of Mandarin Chinese: This presentation reports the work-in-progress in a research project that compares language features in specialised academic texts and non-specialised texts, both in English and Mandarin Chinese. The research is informed primarily by the systemic functional linguistic theory. In this presentation, I focus particularly on discussing linguistic features of nominal groups in Mandarin Chinese, and I question how the Chinese nominal group structures in the academic discourse have different functional potential from those in the non-academic one. I draw on data from a Chinese history textbook at the tertiary level.

I will first introduce a linguistic phenomenon in academic discourse across languages, known as ‘grammatical metaphor’. I will illustrate that grammatical metaphor enables activities to be realised through nominal groups, providing an important way of both condensing and organising information in the academic text. I will then show that although the nominal group structures realising activities have some similar features with the typical nominal groups realising things, there are several other features that have not been accounted for in the previous descriptions. In this discussion, I aim to demonstrate a way of identifying grammatical functions by considering the discourse of the text; to raise a question about register variations in language description work; and to open up the discussion about the significance of such description and its application in language education.

Dr Jing Hao is an Assistant Professor at Facultad de Letras, PUC. Previously she worked as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at PUC and at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, following her doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include knowledge building through English and Mandarin Chinese, the interaction of language with other semiotic modes, and the application of linguistic descriptions to education. Her publications appear in journals such as Functions of Language, Text & Talk, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, and Journal of Pragmatics. Her monograph Analysing Scientific Discourse from a Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective is published by Routledge (2020).