About the UK - China Seminar Series
The Confucius Institute regularly invites academics and experts worldwide to give talks at the China Seminars Series about the latest research in language studies, language teaching, international relationships and economics, and other topics.
The China Seminar Series is an annual project organised by the SCI designed to host a number of talks across the year by renowned academic and professors from around the UK and China.
The seminars cover a variety of topics, including Chinese language education, cross-cultural communication, Chinese philosophy, Chinese history and Chinese agriculture among others. In order to promote cross-cultural dialogue between our British and Chinese colleagues, the UK-China Seminar Series was created.
How Discourse Analysis Works
Presentation by Dr Lily Chen
Critical discourse analysis is a tool widely used by linguists to analyse texts and other forms of discourse to reveal hidden clues about the unconscious or unarticulated opinions/ biases or attitudes of the writer/ producer of those texts, and about their relationship with their readers/ listeners and the events and people they describe.
When done properly, it can be a hugely powerful tool for decoding what is not specifically stated.
But how do we carry out discourse analysis?
In this presentation, I will use examples from one of my own published papers to demonstrate discourse analysis in action, and to illustrate the insights that it can reveal.
Dr Lily Chen
Dr Lily Chen received her Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Durham in the UK in 1999. She was for many years a lecturer in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests included developing functional linguistic models for the analysis of written media texts. Her work has appeared in international journals including Language in Society, the International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, and the Journal of Language and Politics. Since retiring from the University of Sheffield, she has been teaching translation at the Open University.
Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis: Today and Tomorrow
Presentation by Professor Liu Dingjia
Discourse analysis (DA) is a multifaceted field that delves into the intricacies of language usage in both spoken and written contexts, encompassing a wide spectrum of restricted and diversified environments. Early DA studies centred on analysing individual texts or specific events, often relying on a limited collection of samples. However, recent advances in corpus linguistics have opened new frontiers, empowering researchers to explore vast language databases and uncover quantitative patterns that reveal the underlying meanings embedded within discourse. This shift has prompted a growing recognition among DA scholars of the valuable contributions of corpus-based methodologies, either as complementary tools or as standalone approaches. The present work aims to showcase an example of DA informed by corpus linguistics, while also discussing the advantages, disadvantages, and potential future directions of this methodology.
Professor Liu Dingjia
Liu Dingjia is a full-time research fellow at the National Research Center for Foreign Language Education and National Research Center for State Language Capacity in Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is also the council member of the Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies Committee of the China Association for the Comparative Study of English and Chinese. His main research areas are corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and database theory and practice. He has published papers in domestic and international journals indexed by CSSCI, CSCD, SCI, EI, and EBSCO, and has rich experience in corpus research. He is currently offering courses such as "Corpus Data Analysis Methods" and "Research and Discussion on Linguistics Theory and Practice".
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