The Martin Centre’s No. 129 Seminar (Linguistic Science and its Appliability) was held both online and offline on April 9 in Meeting Room 225, School of Foreign Languages, SJTU.

Professor Wang Zhenhua and Ms Zhao Haiyan, a PhD student, presented their talks. Prof. Wang’s talk was about his reflections on the integration of multiple modes in courtroom discourse. He presented some video clippings of courtroom trials for discussion. He viewed the courtroom trial as an epitome of the society in which there are competitions, conflicts, claims, adaptions, assimilations and cooperations. These social processes are realized via different modes by litigants and other parties concerned in the courtroom. In the talk, theoretical frameworks such as the semogenic system and metafunctions, as well as clines such as instantiation, individuation, and ideas of coupling, and inconization were employed to build the network for integrating different modes in the courtroom. According to Prof. Wang, the multimodal integration network would help the court with conviction and punishment.

Zhao Haiyan, a doctoral student from the School of Foreign Languages in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gave a report entitled “Multimodal Discourse Construction of Lawyer Identity: Functional linguistic multimodal intersemiotic dimension”. She first defined relevant terms, including “lawyer identity” and “facts of civil law”. Then, she presented relevant researches on lawyer identity and multimodal discourse analysis of identity, introducing the theoretical basis of identity construction, identity types, gesture-paralanguage and so on. She also introduced the definition, classification, “external environment” and analytical methods of gesture-paralanguage. Her research constructed a theoretical model of lawyer identity analysis from functional linguistic multimodal intersemiotic dimension. During the presentation, she elaborated on the research design of the doctoral dissertation, including the corpus sampling process, the annotation method and the research framework of her thesis. Zhao Haiyan’s report explored the intersemiotic mechanism of the construction of lawyer identity from ideational, interpersonal and textual functions.