On the evening of June 13, 2025, SFS successfully hosted the Lecture 287 of the Foreign Language and Culture Forum and the 30th session of the Corpus Linguistics International Expert Masterclass Series.
Initiated by Prof. Tony McEnery, the lecture series features in-depth interviews with leading international scholars in corpus linguistics. Since 2021, 30 sessions have been held with renowned experts invited from the UK, US, Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic, etc. Among them, there are 3 Fellows of the British Academy, 1 Humboldt Research Award recipient, 1 winner of The UK Future Leaders Programme, 2 leaders for linguistics discipline development, and 3 mainstream corpus software developers. The series has benefited thousands of faculty and students from XJTU and partner institutions.
Prof. Luke Harding (Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University), Prof. Tony McEnery (Distinguished Professor of Lancaster University), Chen Xiangjing (Dean of SFS), and Cheng Bing (Vice Dean of SFS) attended the celebration, with SFS's Professor Sang Zhonggang (a winner of XJTU's Young Top-notch Talent Program) serving as the chair.
Prof. Harding spoke highly of the masterclass series, sent his congratulation to SFS, and expressed anticipation for deeper collaboration between the two institutions. Chen Xiangjing thanked Prof. Tony McEnery for his strong support, congratulated Prof. Harding on leading the new departmental team, and emphasized the desire to strengthen exchanges and expand cooperation areas.
Following the celebration, the forum officially commenced. Titled "Variational Pragmatics: (Im)politeness and the Corpus-based Approach", the lecture had Prof. Jonathan Culpeper, former Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, as the speaker. During the interview session, Prof. Culpeper and Prof. McEnery discussed the evolution of quantitative and qualitative analysis in corpus studies, as well as corpus research across different contexts. Prof. Culpeper then shared insights into (im)politeness research from a variational pragmatics perspective. With in-depth analysis of usage differences between northern and southern regions of the UK, he highlighted prospects and basic methods for cross-cultural pragmatic comparative studies. The lecture concluded with a Q&A session.
