International Linguistic Symposium on PhD Research Training

The Hongkong-Beijing-Lancaster Symposium on Research Methodologies for PhD Studies in Linguistics (REMLing) was held online on 17 and 18 March 2022.

REMLing 2022 was jointly organised by the Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications for Language Studies (HCLS) at City University of Hong Kong, the MIIT Centre of AI-based Linguistic Information Processing (CALIP) at Beihang University, Beijing, and the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences (CASS) at Lancaster University. The event is sponsored by the Beijing-HK University Alliance, Hong Kong.

The three research centres are themselves manifestations of differing perspectives on language. HCLS is fundamentally motivated by the Hallidayan notion of language as a social phenomenon, CALIP is affiliated to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, and CASS is hallmarked by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK. All three have common grounding in corpus-based approaches to language.

The event represented a new initiative in internationally concerted PhD training in general and emphasised the importance of research methodologies. It tapped into the expertise of not only local and regional linguistic scholars but also involved European academics from CityU, Beihang University, Lancaster University, University of Birmingham, Tilburg University and Vienna University.

Four keynote talks were delivered by internationally influential scholars from Lancaster University, CityU and Beihang University. Dr Christoph A HAFNER from CityU’s Department of English, gave a keynote talk on qualitative approaches to genre analysis. PhD researchers from CityU, Beihang University, Lancaster University, University of Birmingham, Catholic University of Leuven, Fudan University, Nanyang University of Science and Technology, Xiamen University and Zhejiang Gongshang University, gave presentations at the event. Five of the PhD students from CityU presented their research and four were given Best Presentation Awards.

The symposium was envisaged as a platform for fruitful academic exchange, initially in linguistics studies but applicable to other disciplinary areas. It also drew the attention of a number of Master of Arts students who showed interest in pursuing PhD research in relevant linguistics fields. The event presented insights to corpus-based approaches to language, broadening and enriching the landscape of linguistic studies.