Language and languages a quarter of a century into the 21st century: taking stock and looking ahead

讲座信息

报告时间：2024年6月14日13:30

讲座地点：法国文化中心

主讲人：Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen

主办单位：长春师范大学外国语学院，科研处

主讲人介绍

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is Distinguished Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, and Department of Linguistics, UIBE, and Professor, Department of English Studies, Complutense University. He has degrees in linguistics from Lund University (BA), where he also studied English, Arabic and philosophy, and in linguistics from UCLA (MA, PhD), and has previously held positions at USC/ Information Sciences Institute, Sydney University, Macquarie University, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

With researchers around the world, he is working on multilingual studies — including description of particular languages, translation studies, comparative and typological studies; health communication, aspects of educational linguistics, language description, registerial cartography, language arts, the language of space, and the development of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory.

Matthiessen has authored and co-authored over 15 books and 170 book chapters and journal articles. The most recent books are Matthiessen (2021), Systemic Functional Linguistics, Part I, edited by K. Teruya; Matthiessen, Wang, Ma & Mwinlaaru (2022), Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics. Matthiessen & Teruya (2024), Systemic Functional Linguistics: a complete guide (Routledge), Matthiessen (2023), System in Systemic Functional Linguistics: a system-based theory of language. Wang & Ma (2023), Theorizing and Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics Developments by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, provides an overview of some domains of his work.

讲座内容

Language is central to human existence — to our experience and our interaction. The particular languages still spoken around the world are pervasive in their communities of speakers, providing them with the resources for making meaning in all the diverse roles they play in all the institutions they operate in. As Anatomically Modern Humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) emerged on the order of 150 to 250 years ago, they were most likely also Linguistically Modern Humans: they spoke modern language as opposed to archaic language (and by another step, protolanguage); and their brains had reached the kind of complexity that can only be explained by language and the brain co-evolved.

Since the emergence of modern language in Africa, many particular languages have evolved and spread around the world as our ancestors migrated out of Africa and gradually reached all inhabitable continents. These languages must have been “small” ones with at most a few thousand speakers, and many or most speakers must have been multilingual. The languages increased in number; but as agriculture began to sustain larger communities of speakers starting in a few places around 10 K years ago, we have been losing an increasing number of languages, and now we are losing languages at an increasing rate — devastating for the communities of their speakers and also a huge loss of our common heritage and semodiversity (diversity of modes of meaning characteristic of different languages).

It is possible — and desirable — to supplement mainstream deep (or “big”) histories of human evolution with a linguistic, more broadly semiotic, interpretation. Building on existing studies of major moments in this semiotic history (semohistory) — the development of writing systems and of written language in a few places, the invention of printing, the emergence of standard languages, and of international languages and today’s global language of English, we can envisage a human semohistory — a history of meaning evolving through language(s) and other semiotic systems.

However, after merely sketching this background, in this talk, I will focus on the trajectory of evolution, focussing on the current period and the challenges we face like the fragmentation and unequal distribution of “knowledge”, the difficulty of assessing the quality of growing volumes of text. I will discuss ways of trying to understand what is happening now based on language and languages — for example, in terms of the notion of the 4th industrial revolution, arguing that it is the first that makes meaning most prominent, reflected in characterizations like the “information age”, “knowledge society”, “knowledge industry”, “noosphere”. But also in the gradual understanding after the dominance for half a century or more of mainstream cognitive science that language plays a central role — a constructivist interpretation of “knowledge” as meaning, enabling us to make sense of “dialogic cognition”, “collective cognition”, “social minds”, intersubjectivity and other departures from the mainstream conception of individual, self-contained, disembodied minds. So it makes sense to ask: “as language students, how can we understand, manage and contribute to the development of our current age where meaning is the most important commodity and semiotic services are increasingly prominent — an age of semo-technology [technology concerned with meaning]?” Since this is the age of meaning (“knowledge”, “information”), language students should have a very important role to play.