Independent InnovationForum for University Students was held by the School of Foreign Studies in Room5A607 at 16:20 on September 5, 2016. The school was honored to invite tenuredProf. Zou Ke from the English Department at California State University as thespeaker. This lecture focused on the topic of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and Contrastive Study of English andChinese, which attracted manypostgraduate students and teachers for its advanced theory and great academic value. Prof. Huang Guowen, Deanof the School of ForeignStudies, presided over the lecture.

Prof.Zou made a brief introduction of the definition and principle of Chomsky’sUniversal Grammar and set forth the Minimalist Program of Linguistic Theory of Chomsky’stransformational generative grammar with examples in lecture. On this basis,Prof. Zou made a further analysis of similarities and differences in Englishand Chinese, which led to deeper understanding of these topics for teachers andstudents. Then Prof. Zou talked about artificial intelligence applications oftransformational generative grammar and its profound influence on thedevelopment of machine translation in the future. This lecture broadenedacademic horizons for teachers and students about the latest information andresearch achievements in foreign language at home and abroad. Prof. Zou’smeticulous scholarship and distinctive research perspective gave us unexpectedbenefits on linguistics research.

Afterthe speech, some teachers raised questions about linguistics and Prof. Zou cordiallyanswered them one by one. The discussion was vigorous and the audience wishedit to last longer. At last, Prof. Huang Guowen gave a summary of all thequestions and encouraged teachers and students to study from Prof. Zou and his meticulousscholarship. Moreover, he gave us valuable suggestions for academic research directions.The forum came to a successful end, closing with Prof. Huang’s witty comments.

                        (Edited by Li Zhiying,Pictures by Luo Le)