Professor ZHANG Hui from the Nanjing Normal University was invited to deliver a lecture entitled “Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Testin Cognitive Linguistics” at the National Key Research Center for Linguisticsand Applied Linguistics (CLAL) on the afternoon of May 29th 2015.The lecture was hosted by Prof. Dong Yanping and attended by faculties andgraduate students from the Center.
Professor Zhang first gave an overview of theoretical backgrounds and research methods incognitive linguistics, and demonstrated the diversity of cognitive linguisticresearch in terms of theoretical frameworks and methodologies. He also pointedout that current research methods in cognitive linguistics experienced a substantialtransition from the original introspection to a variety of empirical methodssuch as corpus linguistic method, multimodal methods, andpsycho/neurolinguistic experiments. Then, Professor Zhang demonstrated theimplementation of neurolingusitic experiments for theoretical testing in thefield of cognitive linguistics with two specific ERP studies. The first ERP studythat he introduced was an empirical test of the conceptual integration theoryin cognitive linguistics. The study recordedthe English subjects’ electrophysiologicalresponses to the sentence-final words in three conditions (literal, metaphoricand intermediate literal mapping condition) and found differences in N400 amplitudesacross the three conditions, which offered support to the conceptualintegration theory. The second ERP study, conducted by Professor Zhang, wasdesigned to investigate the effect of compositionality on the Chinese idiom processing. By manipulating the degree of compositionality of Chineseidioms, Professor Zhang detected modulation of compositionality in two ERPcomponents (N250 and N400) during the processing of Chinese idioms. He arguedthat this result was consistent with the mental space theory proposed by cognitivelinguists.
The lecturelasted about one hour and a half. Professor Zhang gave a detailed introductionto the application of neurolingustic methods in the field of cognitive linguistics,which aroused the interests of all the participants.
