Keynote Speech III The Grammar-Pragmatics Interface:A Case Study of Voice Constructions

Northeast Normal University

[Abstract]Linguistic interfaces are the significant topic of theoretical studies in post-Gricean pragmatics.The interface study is also a unified approach to the pragmatic analysis and interpretation of meaning in context.The semantics-pragmatics interface study attempts to explain the distinction between semantically encoded meanings and pragmatically implicated meanings and their interactions,but it fails to explain adequately the pragmatic distinctions among the structures or forms which have the same truth conditional propositions and as a result the grammar-pragmatics interface has increasingly attracted considerable attention.However,research on the grammar-pragmatics interface at its earlier time is limited to the pragmatic interpretations of some disparate grammatical phenomena without systematic consideration and needless to say,theoretical discussions.The present study,as one of the series of grammar-pragmatics studies,aims to analyze and explicate the interaction between grammar and pragmatics with exemplification of voice constructions based on the theoretical framework of pragmatic choice and grammatical adaptation.The analysis involves three dimensions such as pragmatic values,pragmatic effects and pragmatic implications for the purpose of opening up a new approach to the grammar-pragmatics interface and promote a new advancement in the theoretical study of pragmatics.

[Keywords]voice construction;grammar-pragmatics interface;pragmatics

Bionote

Zhang Shaojie now serves as Dean of Rutgers-Newark Institute at Northeast Normal University.He is a senior professor and doctoral supervisor in the School of Foreign Languages.He obtained his Ph.D degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1999.He was a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa,USA between 1992-1993 and at the Nottingham University,UK in 2002,and also Fulbright visiting scholar under supervision of Professor John Searle at UC Berkeley between 2005-2006.He was Dean of School of Foreign Languages between 1996-2007 and Vice President of Northeast Normal University between 2008-2013.He was also a member of Directing Committee for Foreign Language Teaching under the Ministry of Education in China from 2002 to 2018,and a deputy director of Directing Committee for English Majors from 2010 to 2018.In addition,he is currently Director of Directing Committee for English Majors of Jilin Province as well as a deputy director of China Pragmatics Association.

The areas of his academic interest include theoretical linguistics,pragmatics,and applied linguistics.Over the past 30 years,He has completed 5 projects on grammar and pragmatics,Saussurean linguistic theory,post-Gricean pragmatics,China foreign education,and grammar-pragmatics interface which are financially supported respectively by the funds of Social Sciences and Humanities of Ministry of Education and the funds of National Social Sciences of China.So far he has collaboratively or individually published nearly 100 articles which appear in both domestic and international journals in the fields of his interest.In recent years,he has been invited to deliver lectures in various universities and has actively participated in conferences as well as activities at home and abroad.