i've been asked to circulate this announcement for a talk in linguistics.

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Good afternoon,

We are thrilled to announce that the McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will include a talk co-hosted with the Department of East Asian Studies. The talk will be given by Jie Li from Shantou University on Friday, September 15th at 3:30 pm in room 433 of the Education Building.

The title of the talk is "Grammatical Metaphor Theory in Pursuit of Metaphorical Competence". Please find the abstract at the end of this message. All are welcome to attend!

For more information on upcoming events in the McGill Linguistics department, please see our website (http://www.mcgill.ca/linguistics/events). unsubscribe Sincerely, Jeffrey Lamontagne On behalf of the McGill Colloquium Committee

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Grammatical Metaphor Theory in Pursuit of Metaphorical Competence

Abstract: Grammatical Metaphor is one of the important concepts in Systemic-Functional Grammar. Halliday (1994) took grammatical metaphor as a linguistic strategy for variation in the expression of a meaning. The language system provides language users with a system of meaning potential, from which language users make a series of choices to realize a certain semantic function. The relation between the chosen linguistic structure and the meaning expressed can be either congruent or incongruent/ metaphorical. Children gradually learn to speak metaphorically, and the emergence of more metaphorical expressions is an important feature of adult language. Denesi (1993) claimed that speaking metaphorically is a basic characteristic of native speakers linguistic competence. In other words, the ability of understand and use metaphors can be taken as an important symbol for the good mastery of a language. Therefore, it is both necessary and important to value metaphorical competence in language education. With the guidelines of the grammatical metaphor theory, this talk is going to analyze the nature, the complexity and the functions of metaphorical forms so as to help language learners with their knowledge and mastery of the metaphorical phenomena in their target language, and finally reach the goal of improving their linguistic competence by enhancing their ability to understand and use metaphors.