On the afternoon of April 11, Professor Huang Yan from University of Auckland, New Zealand, delivered an academic report entitled “Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Analysis of English Lexical Cloning.”

In his report, Prof. Huang Yan first introduced the world pedigrees, Chinese language pedigrees, and the major schools of linguistic research nowadays. Then, he pointed out that lexical cloning, also known as overlapping focus, mainly manifests itself in oral communication, including American English, Australian English and British English, etc. With a large number of dialogue instances, he gave an analysis of the object of lexical cloning. It can be any notional word, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc., whose major function is to emphasize, contrast, or select specially defined items. He also made a detailed analysis of the derivation of the meaning of lexical cloning under the framework of Neo-Gricean Theory. In addition, Prof. Huang gave simple and accessible answers to teachers’questions such as The anaphora of Chinese, The pragmatic calculation of anaphora, and The challenge and deficiency of AI in pragmatic research.

Speaker’s Profile:

Huang Yan is a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. from Oxford University. He is currently the only Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland. He is awarded by the Ministry of Education as “Chang Jiang Scholar”Distinguished Professor in Beijing Foreign Studies University and also an honorary visiting professor in over ten universities including Zhejiang University, Nankai University and Shandong University. He once taught linguistics at the University of Cambridge, Oxford, and Reading University in England, and was the only professor of theoretical linguistics at Reading University. During his academic sabbatical, he was invited to study and give lectures at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Melbourne and other universities. Huang Yan is one of the two co-founders of Neo-Gricean Anaphora Pragmatic Theory, and “World's Top (Theoretical) Pragmatist and Expert of Anaphora Studies”(Oxford University Press). His six books were published in English by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, including The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora(1994, 2007 reprint), Anaphora: A Cross-linguistics Study (2000), Pragmatics(first edition 2007, second Edition 2014) and The Oxford Dictionary of Pragmatics(2012/2015). The Oxford Handbook of Pragmaticsedited by him, was published in 2017. The first edition of Pragmatics has been translated into Korean, Malay and Chinese, and has been published in English as a reprint. The second edition is being translated into Czech. He has published several papers in some international top linguistic journals and has served as a member of many editorial boards of international journals of pragmatics and series. Huang Yan has also been invited to give lectures in over 130 universities and research institutes in Europe, North America, East and Southeast Asia, Australia and North Africa, many of which are international top universities and researchinstitutes.