The Martin Centre’s No. 133 Seminar (Linguistic Science and its Appliability) was held both online and offline on June 4 in Meeting Room 225, School of Foreign Languages, SJTU.

Associate Professor Lai Liangtao delivered a report entitled “Modality of legal contracts and its semantic effect”. On the basis of the modality system of systemic functional linguistics, Prof. Lai presented an in-depth analysis of the characteristic distribution of modality resources and their semantic effect in business contract discourse. He introduced the theoretical basis, corpus building process, and the analytical method, offered insightful interpretation of the characteristic distribution of modalization and modulation resources, and demonstrated that the appropriate deployment of the modality resources helps realize the binding force of the legal contracts as regards the determinate rights and obligations to be implemented by the contracting parties. The study is conducive to the comprehensive understanding of the inherent features of business contracts, and provides insights in regard to the translation of contract discourse.

Fang Shuoyu, a doctoral student of the Martin Center, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University talked about the multimodal construction of assimilation process in Chinese civil trials. In Fang’s talk, the meta-functions and multimodal theories from Systemic Functional Linguistics were deployed to build the semantic model for the assimilation process based on different interactions of litigants and other parties concerned in the courtroom. According to Fang, the process of assimilation could be facilitated by active accommodation. She presented some transcribed dialogues and screenshots of Chinese civil trials for discussion, and talked about the components of the process and multimodal characteristics of it from the paralanguage perspective. This talk offered an insight into how to use different modes to reach a consensus of opinion in civil trial.