Esther Pascual, the doctorate in linguistics of VU University Amsterdam, and the expert of the "Hundred Talents Program" of School of Foreign Language, Zhejiang University, on the evening of May 15th, gave an academic report entitled "How semantics emerge from dialogues in interactive scenes" at the Yanta Campus of Shaanxi Normal University. As the "68th one of lecture series by famous scholars", this report was chaired by Prof. Zhang Ren, Director of the Institute of “Language and Cognition”, School of Foreign Languages, and participated by some young teachers and masters and doctors of School of foreign Languages.
The biggest feature of this report is the richness of the corpus. It involves many languages and their applications, and by abundant corpus, fully proves that fictive interaction is prevalent in all existing languages, even in sign language, which is decided by the universal cognitive mechanism of mankind and affected by the social environment. Fictive interaction is the conceptual processing of a speaker’ s brain in which the speaker uses the dialog framework to conceptualize the reality or construct some ideas. To explain fictive interaction, Pascual cited Kwaza's corpus: bwa- da mỹ-Ø- tsε ("I want to run out!", it [the cigarette lighter] says') which states that the gas in the lighter is about to run out, a real scene in reality, and in which the lighter is a fictive speaker.This phenomenon also exists in book, "Zhuangzi"：Why it is or is not? It has a reason.) Zhuangzi imagines another himself sitting opposite, and expresses Taoist philosophies with the way of one question and one answer. Through the analysis of corpus data, Pascual pointed out a fact that fictive interaction exists in many languages, to which the most powerful explanation is that human beings have a common cognitive mechanism. Language is a direct reflection of human cognition, but human language expression will continue to be affected by its social environment. Finally, Pascual pointed out that fictive interaction was not only a daily and efficient expression but also the expression commonly used by children suffering from autism disorder (ASD), namely repeating each other's words directly in communication, (A: Do you want a drink of water? B: You want a drink of water). This study has a certain theoretical and practical value.
After the report, Pascual communicated with teachers and students on fictive interaction. For example, Prof. Zhang Ren pointed out that fictive interaction and virtual reality proposed by Langacker were similar, but the fictive interactive of this report was so broad that partial rhetorical phenomenons were also included. Pascual agreed with Prof. Zhang Ren, and he pointed out that the theoretical basis of fictive reality and virtual interaction is the cognitive ability of mankind. He also pointed out that at present the research object of fictive interaction is mainly limited to the corpus including dialogue frame, for example, I have the ring of "I am going to get Married ", and its intersection with rhetoric is a direction for this theory worth further development. In addition, for the questions frome some teachers about the data analysis in this report, Pascual pointed out that all the data analysis are sampling, part of the data reflects the overall fact, and it is possible to do further researches for all the facts. (Contribution: Liu Mingshuang)
(Translated by Li Erjing)
