On the afternoon of November 24, 2022, Professor Zhou Pin from the College of Foreign Languages was invited to give a lecture entitled Intuition, Crossing Borders and Adding Dimensions in Modern Linguistic Theory Innovation to the students and faculty of the School of English at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU).
Professor Zhou's research has been concerned with the construction and innovation of linguistic theory. She believes that theoretical originality is the shortcoming of linguistics in China, partly due to the fact that the traditional Chinese approach to natural understanding is mainly empirical and pragmatic, with a preference for a bottom-up empirical approach based on observation, and a lack of the Western approach of philosophical discernment based on axiomatic-deductive methods and abstract-mathematical thinking. As a result, linguistic research in China tends to fill in the blanks within other people's theoretical frameworks and to dabble in hot topics. In her presentation, she reflected on how to innovate linguistic theories, and suggested, based on the philosophy of science and modern scientific knowledge production methods, that theoretical research requires good intuition, avoiding shortcomings, collaborating across borders, and improving cognitive dimensions to achieve downscaling of research problems. Finally, she used the example of her research team's recent paper published in an SCI-indexed journal (a transnational and interdisciplinary collaboration) to illustrate that intuition, boundary crossing and dimensionality enhancement are necessary to generate theoretical innovations in modern linguistics.
Professor Zhou's lecture won wide acclaim and admiration from the students and faculty of SFA for its multidisciplinary perspective, profound philosophical thinking and novel methodological dimensions, and many of them were still waiting to ask questions and seek advice.
(Reported by the College of Foreign Languages office; Translated by Li Huixian)
