The Martin Centre’s No. 130 Seminar (Linguistic Science and its Appliability) was held offline on April 23 in Meeting Room 225, School of Foreign Languages, SJTU.

Dr. Yang Xiran from the Martin Centre presented a talk on popularizing legal knowledge via two-dimensional materials. After introducing a few newly published materials on legal knowledge containing multimodal components, Dr. Yang talked about how visual narratives are presented in these materials and how the readers acquire legal knowledge from these materials employing frameworks of cognitive linguistics. Dr. Yang also talked about how the time frames of semogenic processes could help explain different stages of popularizing legal knowledge on a more macroscopic scale. She concluded the talk by sharing some thoughts on interpersonal meaning realization in the context of multimodal materials on legal knowledge.

Zhang Biao, PhD candidate from Martin Center , gave a talk about textual semantic mechanism of attitudinal meaning directivity in Chinese civil judgments. He introduced the significance of his study, reviewed the current research of attitudinal meaning of judgments, and pointed out the existing problems of the language application in judgments. He also reviewed the approaches of attitude research from the perspective of social psychology and discourse semantics. He built a corpus of cases of medical service contract dispute, and discussed the semantic features of structural distribution of attitudinal evaluation resources, and the semantic mechanism of attitudinal meaning in civil judgments from the perspective of the directional characteristics of interpersonal interaction between patients, doctors and judges. In the Q&A session, Zhang Biao discussed with the audience about the determination of semantic parameters of judgment of APPRAISAL and the division of semantic boundary of evaluation in judicial discourse.