Chen Lecture

Dr. Rong Chen

Guest Lecturer:
Dr. Rong Chen

The first lecture in the new Lectures in Language and Linguistic will be delivered by Dr. Rong Chen on October 17, 2007 at 7:00pm in the Dezember Reading Room of the Walter Stiern Library, will be on The History of Linguistics as a Discipline. Dr. Chen’s talk will start from the origin of the discipline of linguistics, commonly defined as the study of language, and then move forward through the centuries to the present day. He will first present the development of linguistics as a continuum: a particular approach or movement is often a reaction to its predecessor, which in turn leads to its successor. He will then outline major questions and assumptions of the different stages of linguistics in an effort to demonstrate that linguistics is more than the study of languages.

Dr. Chen is Professor and Chair of English at California State University, San Bernardino. He did his BA at Xi’an International Studies University, China; MA at Lancaster University, UK; and Ph.D. at Ball State University, US. He has published two books and more than twenty articles in discourse analysis, pragmatics, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, stylistics, genre analysis, and metaphor. His most recent book, English Inversion: A Ground-before-Figure Construction, was published in the Cognitive Linguistics Research series by Mouton de Gruyter, in 2003. He is currently co-editor of Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography, also by Mouton de Gruyter.”

For more details, contact Dr. Sophia Adjaye, (661) 654-2362 or sadjaye@csub.edu.

ANNOUNCING THE LECTURES IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

Beginning this fall, the Department of English is launching the Lectures in Language and Linguistics, a series to be sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta and aimed at inviting one California-based linguist or language expert every quarter to speak on a given topic. The lecture series is expected to generate student interest in linguistic studies here at CSUB by serving as a forum for linguists to report on their published works or on on-going research in all areas of linguistics, including sociolinguistics (e.g., language contact, language and gender, varieties of English, language change), psycholinguistics, historical/comparative linguistics, second language acquisition/ English as a Second Language, or language and computers (e.g., artificial intelligence).