Patterns And Meanings Of Intensifiers In Chinese Learner Corpora

Intensification plays a major role in spoken and written interaction, enabling the writer or speaker to express different levels of commitment. This book explores the patterns and meanings of intensifiers in Chinese learner English by ways of comparison with native English. The study is conducted within the theoretical framework of Firthian contextual theory of meaning, Sinclairian model of Extended Units of Meaning (EUM) and Hunston's pattern grammar. The method of contrastive inter-language analysis (CIA) is adopted and the intensifier collocations in learner English and native English are explored by means of quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora data. This book is the first attempt to investigate the patterning and meaning features of intensifiers systematically with the corpora data in Chinese learner English. Readers will obtain a relatively complete picture of how Chinese learners use intensifiers to realize their attitudinal meanings.

Collocation is an important tool in describing lexical behaviour in language and has received increasing attention in recent years. Based on two corpora: LOCNESS (the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) and MLC (the Non-English major Mainland Chinese Learner Corpus), this book explores the features of Chinese learner English with analysis of grammatical and lexical collocations. The findings show that Chinese university students use collocations with considerably less variety and Chinese language and culture exert a substantial influence on their English writing. It also discusses ways to tackle the problems Chinese English learners face and the pedagogical implications for teaching English and learning English collocations. As one of the first systematic studies to investigate collocations in Chinese learner English based on learner corpora, this book not only analyzes how Chinese learners use collocations in their English writing, but also provides significant implications for foreign language teaching and learning.

This book reports in detail the newly developed Communicative Listening Comprehension Test (CLCT) for the National College English Test (CET) of China. Following the principles of communicative testing in general and test construction approach proposed by Bachman and Palmer (1996) in particular, the project develops CLCT for CET-4 and CET-6. The research begins with the construction of frameworks of listening task characteristics and communicative listening ability. Subsequently, based on a survey of Chinese college students' English listening needs and an analysis of listening tasks in influential English listening course books and public tests, CLCT-4 and CLCT-6 test specifications are developed. Finally, sample papers are produced and a series of posteriori studies are conducted to examine the difficulty and usefulness of the newly developed notes-completion task type in two CLCT tests. As an example of successful integration of communicative testing theories and test construction practice, this research provides valuable insights into listening test development for other large-scale tests.

This book focuses on the effects of L1 cognitive resources on L2 reading e.g. the effects of L1 reading ability, the ability in L1 mental-structure building, L1 cognitive use in L2 reading, and other related cognitive mechanisms and capacities of EFL learners in China. It integrated test-based and product-oriented as well as VPA-based (verbal protocol analysis) and process-oriented experiments to address the problems of reading in a second language. This book provides several theoretical, methodological and pedagogical insights, including the multidimensional nature of L2 reading and Vygotskyan sociocultural theory as a suitable L2 reading framework, combined approaches on L2 studies, and the rewarding active use of L1 cognitive resources in L2 learning.

This book investigates the lexico-grammatical complementarity in language in its construal of person as a semantic system. Given the vast and wide spectrum of resources for expressing distinctions in the assignment of person roles in language, this book presents person-related system networks covering a rich range of semantic features. It also studies the system of person in relation to other major semantic systems instead of regarding it as one isolated component of language parallel to gender, number, case, etc. Systemic features of person are in turn realized by lexicogrammar, whose components, lexis and grammar form a relationship of complementarity in the process of transforming human experience into meaning. Person-related meaning can be either realized by lexical means, i.e. entity, process, quality, or grammatical means, i.e. pronouns, clitics, affixes, zero forms. Besides, such meaning is also found to be realized at some indeterminate areas along the lexis-grammar continuum. A special feature of this book is that it observes the lexicalization and grammaticalization of person based on evidence from a variety of languages. Readers will be presented a comprehensive look into the meaning of person and will be encouraged to reflect on its realization in their own languages.

Public discourse constitutes the language environment of a town or a city, which forms part of the social environment of a country or a region. Based on extensive first-hand data collected from public places, mass media and the Internet, this monograph attempts critical pragmatic studies of public discourse in the contemporary Chinese context. By applying pragmatic theories and analytical instruments to the analysis of the data, including business names, advertisements, public signs and notices, and news, the book showcases such discursive practices as personalization and subjectivization and reveals such social problems as unhealthy social mentalities, “pragmatic traps”, suspect discrimination, and vulgarity. It exemplifies a way of combining the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach and the pragmatic approach with a clear focus on the pragmatic issues. This book will not only be a necessary addition to the academic discipline of pragmatics in general, and critical pragmatics in particular, but also lay bare the problems existing in the use of public discourse and suggest several ways to improve such use. While it addresses the Chinese data only, the proposed analyses may contribute to international readers’ understanding of public discourse in contemporary China and serve as a reference for similar researches worldwide.

This is the first book-length study of identity constructions in relation to English as a contact language in advertising of non-English-speaking countries through a critical and interpretive lens. Instead of simply presuming the role of the English language may have in constructing identities within the multimodal advertisement, this book aims to explore ethnographically the ideological underpinnings of identity constructions in the context of local politics of English. It studies the varying degrees of the contribution of the English language and its possible roles in bilingual advertising, unravels the ideological dimensions of the language as well as identity and explains the sociocultural forms and meanings of identity. To this end, it develops a new critical-cognitive approach, bringing together recent advances in English as a global language, critical sociolinguistics, multilingual studies and multimodal discourse analysis. By delving into the cognitive process of identity constructions, it provides an evidence-based account of the roles of English, and it illustrates the interconnections between identities and local politics of English. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars and students in bilingualism, multilingualism, discourse analysis, English as a global language, multimodality, advertising and marketing.

The book is a collection of the dialogues between Xu Jun, a well-known expert in French literary translation and eminent “Changjiang” scholar in translation studies in China, and some celebrated literary translators in contemporary China, some of whom are also literary scholars, linguists, poets, prose writers, and editors. It is a fundamental achievement of research on the literary translation in the 20th century in China, involving multiple literary types, such as novels, poetry, dramas, prose, and fairy tales; and multiple languages, such as English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Sanskrit. The dialogues are centered on fundamental issues in the theory and practice of literary translation, such as re-creation in literary translation, the relationship between form and content in literary translation, the subjectivity of literary translators, literary translation standards and principles, the gains and losses in literary translation, the principles and methods of literary criticism, and so on. Those translation experts’ experience and multiple strategies not only play an active role in guiding literary translators in practice but also benefit theoretical development in literary translation. Thus, the book will contribute to worldwide translation studies and get well recognized by translation studies students, teachers, and scholars in the world.