On February 27, Prof. Xu Shenghuan, famous linguist in China, Professor and PhD. supervisor from Henan University, gave an academic lecture entitled Recent Development of Psychological Philosophy and Linguistic Studies.

Present at the lecture were Prof. Zhong Shuneng, dean of SFL, Prof. Wu Gang along with a large number of teachers and postgraduates.  

At the beginning of the speech, Prof. Wu expressed his honor to have Prof. Xu here as the first guest and speaker to our lecture series.

Prof. Xu started his lecture from the recent development of psychological philosophy in China, and further explained it with numerous examples from the perspectives of consciousness, intention, computation and emergence. The topics of the examples vary from literature to translation and from daily English to official documents. Concerning the interrelationships between psychological philosophy and linguistics, Prof. Xu put forwards the following hypotheses: a. The most important property of language is that it is based on psychology. b. Language is expressed on the basis of perception. c. What is expressed by language is not necessarily what is directly sensed by human organs, but rather a reflection on the incident. At the end of the lecture, Prof. Xu summarized the steps to conduct linguistic research: a. Pick out the essential register variables. b. Construct a model. c. Interpret with graphs. d. Encode graphs.

After the lecture, Prof. Xu answered the questions asked by the audience. Approaching the end, he left us a question: Why was Zhou Cang dissatisfied with the antithetical couplet “面赤心尤赤，须长义更长”? (Tips: refer to The Intentional Explanation of Discourse Understanding )(By Rui Yan ,Minqiao Li and Jiawei Li)