Language and Linguistics Seminar | Unravelling the Language Paradigm: When Language meets Culture and Religion (A case study in social pragmatics)
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Language and Linguistics Seminar | Unravelling the Language Paradigm: When Language meets Culture and Religion (A case study in social pragmatics)
12
May
The Language and Linguistics Seminar: “Unravelling the Language Paradigm: When Language meets Culture and Religion (A case study in social pragmatics)”, organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, will be held on May 12.
ABOUT THE LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS SEMINAR SERIES:
Language maketh man! The language we speak or even the way we speak it tells the world who and what we are. From the ancient days, when the Greeks used to call barbarians those who did not speak Greek to more recent times when territory claims are made on the basis that the majority of the people there speak Russian and not Ukrainian, language has served to identify individuals as members of a group. Indeed, what we speak can tell where we are from, what we do, our sex and age, or even which part of town we live in.
Language as a major factor in our personal and collective identity shapes to a great extent our linguistic interactions and things such as nationality or sex, social background, or religion affect many of our language use choices.
Problems such as the use of which pronoun or why to adjust our speech will be some of the topics in this cycle of four conferences which will look at how what we speak determines what we are and vice-versa.
ABOUT THE SEMINAR:
Unravelling the Language Paradigm: When Language meets Culture and Religion (A case study in social pragmatics)
It is a commonly heard adage that language, culture and religion are intertwined, it is as though they are three strands of a communal rope. If this is so, then it is a given that what is expressed in a particular community of people will be reflected in their language.
This talk will use a language case study to illustrate how a particular language resolves the complex issues around the expression of culture and religion for the society in which it persists. It will consider what are religious and cultural expressions in speech and the socio-pragmatic function of these expressions in discourse and the strategies used in the formation of appropriate ways of resolving complex lexical and discourse issues.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Duncan Miers MA Ling. (HKU) and MSc (Waik.) was educated in Hong Kong, India, New Zealand and Australia; studying Linguistics, Asian languages, Intercultural Studies and Environmental Science. He has spent nearly 20 years immersed in a variety of Asian contexts. Presently, he is the Director of the English Language Centre (ELC) at USJ, Macau teaching courses in Language and Education.
Details:
Date: Friday, 12 May 2023
Time: 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m (Macau)
Location: Media Lab (USJ 604), USJ Ilha Verde Campus
Organised by: Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FAH/USJ)
Moderated by: Prof. Tânia Ribeiro Marques
*Free event, open to the general public
*Sessions will be conducted in English