Dr. LI Lan from Hong Kong Polytechnic Universitywas invited to deliver a lecture entitled “Diachronic change of the word tsunami: A case study of words as asocial enterprise” in the National Key Research Center for Linguistics andApplied Linguistics (CLAL) at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS)on the afternoon of December 17th, 2015. The lecture was chaired byProfessor XU Hai, the Deputy Director of CLAL, and attracted a large audiencefrom GDUFS and other universities.
Dr. LI Lan started off by mentioning theimportance of the study of language change and the motivations for semanticchange. She then surveyed the diachronic change of the use of tsunami in English, pinpointed thefactors relating to the sharp increase of use, and introduced the followingthree questions into the talk: How are new metaphors like tsunami developed in line with our bodily experience and socialchange? What is the relationship between cognitive process and meaninggeneration in natural and historical events? How can mega-corpora help us inreflecting and understanding linguistic and social functions of newly createdmetaphors like tsunami? Within theframeworks of Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change, two majormechanisms of semantic change (metaphor and metonym), the Conceptual MetaphorTheory and the five co-selections of corpus analysis, Dr. Li revealed theimpact of syntactic structure to the word meaning of tsunami, the target domains of tsunami,the positive and negative prosodies of tsunamiand social issues or changes relevant to tsunami.She pointed out that the meaning expansion of tsunami mainly results from abstract concept, distant and usuallyinvisible referents, social-cultural change and close conceptual or factualrelation. She also discussed whether tsunamiwill succeed with reference to the factors of FUDGE (Frequency of use,Unobstrusiveness, Diversity of users and sources, Generation of additionalforms and meanings, Endurance of the thing and the concept that the word refersto) put forward by Metcalf (2002). Dr. Li concluded the talk by remarking thathuge natural and social events brought the word tsunami to the world and the metaphorical uses of tsunami has spread in many aspects ofhuman life as a hyperbole. Tsunamimainly has negative attributes, but it also has some positive semantic prosody.However, dictionaries seem to be slow in recording this change.
The lecture lasted about one and a halfhour, ending with Dr. Li’s interaction and discussion with the audience. It skillfullyintegrated relevant theories in cognitive linguistics, social linguistics andcorpus linguistics into the study of semantic change and showed the lecturer'sprofound knowledge in linguistics.
