Invited by Professor Zhong Shuneng, Dean of School of Foreign Studies, Professor Klaus-Uwe Panther along with his wife gave us an academic lecture on “Motivation in Language” on Oct. 14, 2013, Professor Klaus-Uwe Panther was President of the International Cognitive Linguistic Association (ICLA) from 2005 to 2007 and President of German Cognitive Linguistic Association from 2004 to 2008. He is also a tenured professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany. The lecture was hosted by Dr. Rong Rong. Zou Hao, the Party Secretary of our school, Professor Zhong Shuneng, Professor Wu Jianguo and many other teachers and students attended the lecture.

At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Panther put forward a claim that “A reasonably clear concept of Motivation is necessary to reach explanatory adequacy in linguistic theory”. And he then proved this claim step by step. There were mainly two parts of the lecture, one was to show us the properties of motivation and the other was to further explain his claim by a case study of lexical motivation.

Professor Panther also talked about the history of motivation and distinguished Naturalism and Conventionalism. He pointed out that motivation means a non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning, and later showed us the motivation triangle put forward by Lakoff. In order to help us fully understand the motivation of language, Panther used the word “screwdriver” as a typical example to illustrate the motivation in lexicon. He first pointed out the ICM of “screwdriver” and then explained how various languages such as German, Danish, Hungarian, Dutch, Swedish, etc. select certain elements of the screwdriver ICM to name the tool “screwdriver”. That is to say, cross-linguistically, there is a marked preference for certain elements of objects’ frame, or ICM. At the end of the lecture, Professor Panther concluded that though many things are not predictable, they are motivated.