Lecture by Professor Yang Bingjun
About the Speaker
Yang Bingjun is a Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, and Postdoctoral Co-Supervisor at Sun Yat-sen University. He has been selected successively as a New Century Excellent Talent of the Ministry of Education, a Shanghai Pujiang Talent, and a Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education. From 2005 to 2014, he served as a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at Southwest University. From 2014 to 2023, he served as a Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, and Discipline Leader at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Since 2024, he has served as Chair of the Professional Committee of English-Chinese Discourse Analysis, China Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese (CACSEC). Since 2026, he has served as one of the linguistics editors-in-chief of the Q1 journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. One of his works, Non-finiteness: A Process-Relation Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2022), received the Second Prize of the 10th Ministry of Education Award for Outstanding Scientific Research Achievements. His research interests include functional syntax, grammatical metaphor, and discourse analysis.
Lecture Time & Venue
Time: 13:30–15:30, September 28, 2026
Venue: Shanghai International Studies University, Building 5，Room 155B
Lecture Title
A Corpus-Based Study of Interdisciplinary Grammatical Metaphor
Lecture Abstract
Taking the corpus method as its empirical foundation, this lecture explores the operational mechanisms and functional features of grammatical metaphor in interdisciplinary contexts. The lecture will review the development of grammatical metaphor theory, combine authentic data from self-built corpora to analyze the distribution patterns and realization forms of grammatical metaphor in different disciplinary discourses (such as academic writing, news discourse, and scientific and technological texts), and attempt to explain its cognitive motivations and communicative functions from a process-relation perspective. The lecture will also discuss the advantages and limitations of corpus methods in grammatical metaphor research, introduce annotation frameworks, retrieval strategies, and data analysis paths, and provide operable methodological references for related research.
In terms of academic value, this lecture will help advance grammatical metaphor research from theoretical speculation to empirical description, expand the interface between systemic functional linguistics and corpus linguistics, and provide new analytical tools for interdisciplinary discourse analysis. For the School's disciplinary development, the lecture aligns with the Institute of Linguistic Sciences' construction directions in theoretical linguistics and corpus research, helps promote the deep integration of linguistic disciplines and data methods, stimulates young faculty and students' research interest in functional linguistics, discourse analysis, and other fields, and promotes the application for related projects and the production of research outputs.
