From June 26 to June 27, the Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics (Martin Centre) successfully held the 2022 Seminar on Systemic Functional Linguistics and its Appliability: APPRAISAL Systems. The topics of the seminar included APPRAISAL systems, technical analysis and case studies based on APPRAISAL systems, and frontiers of APPRAISAL research. The seminar was held online and nearly 50 teachers, undergraduates, postgraduates, and doctoral students from universities around China attended.

The seminar on APPRAISAL systems lasted for two days, with keynote lectures given by Professor Wang Zhenhua, the founder and Director of Martin Centre, Associate Professor Huan Changpeng, and Dr. Yang Xiran. Wang Zhenhua first gave an in-depth reading of systemic functional linguistic theory as a theory of social semiotic meaning construction, emphasizing that systemic functional linguistics as a linguistic theory focuses not only on linguistic phenomena, but also on social factors above language and meaning as social semiotics, reviewing the translation of essential terms involved in systemic functional grammar. Then Prof. Wang Zhenhua focused on the AFFECT subsystem of APPRAISAL systems, the classification of linguistic resources and their semantic effects. Finally, Professor Wang Zhenhua analysed the attitudinal meanings in a Chinese discourse example.

Prof. Wang Zhenhua, Founder and Director of Martin Centre, SJTU

In the second day of the seminar, Prof. Wang Zhenhua first introduced the two subsystems of the APPRAISAL systems: ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION, and analysed ‘dialogism’ in terms of Chinese corpus data. After that, he shared his insights of how to judge successful discourse and guided how to apply APPRAISAL systems comprehensively when producing texts. Finally, Prof. Wang introduced the theoretical and frontiers of APPRAISAL research, shared the six semantic features of ACUVIN under contextual constraints, introduced the current status and development of multimodal discourse research drawing on APPRAISAL systems, discussed the internationalization and localization of APPRAISAL systems, and emphasized that the primary goal of linguistic research is discovering the language’s contexts, meaning, as well as its social accountability. 

Associate Professor Huan Changpeng analysed the "emotionality" in news discourse through the ATTITUDE subsystem of the APPRAISAL system. He compared the attitudinal resources in the Chinese and Australian news discourse corpora and summarized the important aligned value and role of emotionality in news discourse; he compared the use of ENGAGEMENT resources in the news discourse corpora of the two countries and illustrated the value sources and social impact of ENGAGEMENT resources in news production. Finally, he demonstrated the basic rules of corpus annotation in UAM Corpus Tool, a corpus-based analysis software for APPRAISAL systems, and had a full discussion with the participating teachers and students.

Associate Professor Huan Changpeng, Martin Centre, SJTU

Dr. Yang XIran first reviewed the ‘system network’ concept in systemic functional linguistics and the basic structure of APPRAISAL systems, and introduced the multimodal discourse analysis system developed based on APPRAISAL systems. She focused on the system of interactive meanings between images-texts constructed on the basis of the APPRAISAL system, emphasizing the realization and semantic effects of the interpersonal metafunction embodied in images, and analyzed the interactive meanings in the text-image corpus data. Dr. Yang explored the functions of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION resources in elementary school textbooks to enhance readers' understanding and interaction with the texts. Finally, Dr. Yang introduced research on multiple literacies and multimodal writing, demonstrated the use of multimodal resources in teaching and its pedagogical significance, and looked forward to the application and development of APPRAISAL systems in the field of multimodal discourse analysis.

Doctor Yang Xiran, Martin Center, SJTU

The two-day seminar ended in the afternoon of June 27. The seminar was highly evaluated by the participating teachers and students. Martin Centre welcomes all teachers and students to strengthen academic communication and share research achievements in their future academic research and teaching practice through email or WeChat.