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Australia has increasingly dependent on China for economic prosperity, but the formidable resources China has brought in its engagement with Australia have been discursively constructed as a threat. Past studies have observed a conventional and often oversimplified binary perception of China–Australia relations (i.e. China opportunity or China threat). Premised on corpus evidences concerning the representation of China in Australian media discourses from 2009 to 2019, this article has shown China threat is considerably more complex than previously observed. China was not only constructed as a security threat but also an economic threat. Australian media contemporary imaginaries of China threat were related to continued fears of "Yellow Peril" and "Red Peril", which spread from the US and reinforced Australia's tendency to dependency. There is a danger of China threat dominating public perceptions of China, drifting into populism of offering simplistic solutions to complex issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes and compares the news values constructed in the English news reporting from Chinese and US mainstream media around events concerning maritime security, revealing how the related events have been packaged and sold differently in the two societies, uncovering the discrepancies in Chinese and US social visions on maritime security, and exploring the social attitudes underpinning the constant conflicts between the two countries in the marine sphere. Adopting corpus linguistic methods and the discursive news values analysis (DNVA) framework, this study examines news values through keywords, naming strategies, and images contained in Chinese and US mainstream English news outlets. The results show that Chinese media established the news values of Positivity and Proximity prominently through both textual and visual reporting, by emphasizing common international interests, advocating diplomatic joint cooperation and demonstrating optimistic attitudes towards the future of marine environment. By contrast, US media keenly construed Negativity and Eliteness, by highlighting the exclusive national interests/security of the US, dwelling on threats from other countries and distinctly demonstrating worries, fears, anger and violence. The differences in newsworthiness reflect that maritime security has been constructed in discrepant ways in Chinese and US society: as international joint security with optimistic perspective in China, and as exclusive national security with pessimistic perspective in US. This study has improved and supplemented the results of the previous China-US marine policy studies by the findings of the social emotions/cognition towards maritime policy revealed through newsworthiness analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the rationale for and design of a new multimodal corpus of L2 academic English from a Sino-British university in China: the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (cawse). The unique context for this corpus provides language samples from Chinese students who use English as a second language (L2) in a preliminary-year programme, which prepares students for academic studies at university level, at a campus where English is used as the Medium of Instruction (emi). Data were collected from a variety of settings, including written (i.e., exam scripts and essays) and spoken assessments (i.e., interviews and presentations), covering the full range of grades awarded to those language samples, as well as from student group interactions during teaching and learning activities. The multimodal nature of the corpus is realised through the availability of selected audio/video recordings accompanied by the orthographically transcribed text. This open-access corpus is designed to help shed light on Chinese students' academic L2 English language use in a variety of written, spoken and multimodal discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, English agricultural science research articles (RA) Introductions published in China and internationally have been examined in order to discover, whether the presence of move/step in each context are similar or different. The two corpora, comprising of 45 English Introductions, published in China and 45 international Introductions in agricultural science were analyzed using Kanoksilapatham's (2005) model as the analytical tool, revealing that both sets of RAs were similar in their presence of move, namely 3 moves for each. However, due to a number of factors, discrepancies between the two corpora have given rise to the choices of steps. Perhaps, the presence of step within Move2 is the most striking difference between the two corpora. For example, the two groups of writers shared the step of indicating a research gap, but the Chinese researchers used the additional step of research problem and their international counterparts used the additional step of making a hypothesis. The finding of the present study can provide much insight into the rhetorical structure of RAs in this particular field and help those novice researchers, particularly Chinese novice researchers, who want to write for international publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the global interconnectedness, it becomes essential to critically assess how global events are portrayed in the media, as this could influence public understanding, stoke sentiments, and potentially impact international relations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the portrayal of China's response by the American media became a topic of interest and contention. However, A noticeable gap remains in understanding this portrayal across different pandemic stages. This article examines how American mainstream news media has characterised China's efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic over time through a corpus-based discourse analysis. The study employs the analytical methods of ngram, keyword, and concordance lines in corpus linguistics to investigate the frequency and salience of discourse surrounding COVID-19 in China within American media. The results indicate shifting narratives in portraying China's pandemic response over time, with a noticeable trend towards negative representations. The negative representations are characterised by three themes: the stigmatisation of China, the undermining of China's achievements in combating the pandemic, and the politicisation of the pandemic. The article also indicates the perceived challenges in collaboration between America, China, and the WHO in addressing the pandemic, leading to disagreements and conflicts and impacting global mitigation efforts. This study highlights the critical role media plays in shaping public perceptions and international cooperation during global crises. Additionally, it is important for media outlets, policymakers, and stakeholders to reflect thoughtfully on their narratives, avoiding stereotypical beliefs while taking into account their effects on international relations and global collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fight metaphors discussed in this article are linguistic expressions of physical conflict, a revolutionary legacy that still lingers in contemporary Chinese political discourse. This article takes a critical cognitive-linguistic approach to fight metaphors in translation, analysing a dataset comprising the Chinese governmental and Communist Party of China's congressional reports and their official English-language translations from 2004 to 2020. The discussion highlights conceptual metaphor's representational role and its ideological potential in discourse, and operationalises the English-based metaphor identification procedure (Steen et al. 2010) for Mandarin texts. Drawing on corpus-based evidence, the article argues that fight metaphors in the source texts (STs) legitimise and consolidate Beijing's dominance of domestic power by generating positive representations and reproducing patriotic ideology. The translations of those metaphors transform Beijing's image, assertive in the STs, into a non-aggressive one for the international readership. The target texts (TTs) also reproduce favourable representations from the STs to justify China's unique political system and to satisfy a pragmatic need – that of constructing positive images for the Chinese authority and China internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the DMC Corpus – a newly collected dataset of 150 mundane cell phone calls from Mainland China in Mandarin Chinese (audio and detailed transcripts) – which is now publicly available for use in research and teaching. In this report, we first describe the constitution and current contents of the DMC Corpus, as well as instructions for access. Additional calls will be added periodically to the Corpus, and so the quantitative overview presented here should be considered conservative. We then provide concrete examples of the sorts of phenomena that might be explored with these new data, underscoring how the Corpus offers researchers the ability to build systematic collections for analysis – no matter whether researchers prefer to begin with 'forms' (e.g., utterance-final particles), with 'functions' (e.g., complaining), and/or with the temporal organization of interaction itself (e.g., preference organization, repair). The paper concludes with an explicit call for increased research on Mandarin conversation, to which we hope the materials in the DMC Corpus will contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary China, sexual minorities (SMs) are still a marginalized community. Prior studies have accorded SMs a great deal of attention, but little research has been conducted on the representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people in Chinese English-language news media. This article uses corpus linguistic tools to examine popular views on SMs in a larger corpus of 354 news articles, filling the gap in research. Based on data collected from four English-language newspapers in mainland China and informed by discursive strategies, the article concludes that Chinese SMs are prominently represented as unhealthy individuals, but also victims and progressionists. The findings also indicate that conservative and liberal perspectives on SMs co-exist in the English-language newspapers. In addition, potential contributing factors to these representations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compared three-word move-specific lexical bundles (MLBs) in dissertation abstracts authored by linguistics doctoral students from China and the United States. Two separate corpora were constructed for analysis: (1) The China Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (CLC), consisting of 700 abstracts totaling 613,713 words generated by doctoral students from China specializing in linguistics, and (2) the America Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (ALC), comprising 700 abstracts totaling 247,359 words written by American doctoral students in linguistics. The identification of MLBs was based on log-likelihood values, indicating a notably higher number of instances within a specific move in contrast to the overall corpus. The study then proceeded to compare the structures, functions, and communicative purposes of MLBs in the two corpora. The findings of the analysis are as follows: (1) Chinese students employed a higher percentage of NP- and PP-based MLBs but a lower proportion of VP-based MLBs, and both groups used different words within similar structures; (2) Chinese students employed a higher percentage of research- and participant-oriented MLBs but a lower proportion of text-oriented MLBs, and the two groups used dissimilar MLBs to fulfill similar functions; and (3) the two groups employed distinct MLBs to achieve identical communicative purposes, with Chinese students utilizing MLBs specific to the CLC corpus. These findings highlight the pedagogical significance of MLBs and underscore the importance of corpus linguistics in identifying and teaching essential move-specific vocabulary to second/foreign language learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since critical discourse analysis (CDA) was introduced to China in 1990s, it has developed into an influential and thriving field. This article reviews the development of CDA in China from 2011 to 2021, during which CDA had thrived to be a productive field in terms of the in-depth theoretical and methodological explorations and the overwhelming majority of empirical studies which considerably expanded its scope to a much wider range of discourses. It also came to involve a broader array of disciplines including corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, multimodality, translation studies, and eco-linguistics. It can be found that while keeping pace with the international CDA studies, Chinese scholars consistently gear CDA to China's social, political, and cultural contexts and strive to use CDA to deliberate on and solve social problems in contemporary Chinese society. This brief review endeavors to communicate with the international academia regarding the latest developments of CDA in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the guidance of constructivist teaching theories, the present study proposes a learner-centered teaching model for the translation of discourse with Chinese characteristics based on two self-built corpora: the Chinese-English parallel corpus and the learner parallel corpus of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Taking Don Kiraly's constructivist translation teaching principles and Li Zhihou's scaffolding teaching mode as references, the article constructs a corpusbased six-stage teaching model for the translation of discourse with Chinese characteristics, which can be broken into nine steps, with the dual aim of enhancing the students' competence of translating contemporary discourse with Chinese characteristics and cultivating patriotism among the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the language difficulty of the original version and rewritten version of The Time Machine from the perspective of lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and semantic complexity. We aim to answer the following two research questions: (1) Is there a significant difference between the language difficulty of the original version and rewritten version of The Time Machine? If yes, in what ways? (2) Is the rewritten version well-targeted at its intended readers? The data consisted of three corpora, the original version of The Time Machine, the rewritten version, and passages from English subjects in the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) of China. The results demonstrate a significant difference between the original and rewritten versions on most measures of language difficulty, but in many respects, the rewritten version still leaves much to work on before becoming suitable reading material for its target readers. With such analysis carried out, we seek to offer some pedagogical implications to better facilitate English learning in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the technological turn of applied research in translation, increasing attention has been paid to the teaching of translation technology. This article addresses two important questions in this regard: how to independently develop Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) translation teaching resources with ethnic minority characteristics and how to use information technology to carry out Tibet-related computer-assisted translation (CAT) teaching. This article discusses the background, structure, and functions of the International Publicity Translation Corpus (IPT Corpus) for Tibetan Areas of China through empirical research, combining theory with practice, and validates the translation teaching mode through case study to better train translators and interpreters working on content related to Tibetan culture. Through teaching practice since 2017, the MTI translation workshop based on the IPT Corpus has proven to be an effective teaching mode that is worthy of further improvement and extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study has conducted a diachronic analysis of law and order metaphors in a self-compiled corpus of China's Government Work Reports (CGWR) over a span of 22 years (2000–2021). By mapping target domains with source domains, we categorized four major types of legal metaphors, including building, physical object, journey, and living being, among which physical object was overwhelmingly predominant. Our analysis suggests metaphorical expressions that highlight physicality more than specificity will constantly remain in use because the stability and universality of such metaphors are conducive to the dissemination and reinforcement of legal thoughts. Additionally, there is a direct correlation between legal metaphors and the government's economic, political, and social concerns, as evidenced by increasing attention paid to various security issues and new challenges in China. Given that the rule of law with Chinese characteristics becomes more institutionally recognized and systematically theorized, legal metaphors are implemented in a top-down manner to justify the exercise of power in CGWRs, making Chinese people identified with the governing philosophy and further contributing to the ideological construction of discourse. This study is thus conducive to a general but insightful understanding of how political stances are embodied and reinforced persuasively in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares press coverage of climate change in the US, the UK and China from a longitudinal perspective, through a combination of computer-assisted quantitative linguistic analysis and critical discourse analysis. Specifically, we examine the extent to which these three countries portray climate change similarly or differently, and further explore how moral reasoning – a growing area of research in climate change communication – may shape media portrayal of the issue across different cultures. There have been few scholarly inquiries examining how moral reasoning is deployed in media discourse around climate change. This study aims to address this gap with a comparative analysis of moral reasoning in news about climate change in leading national newspapers from three countries over a 6-year period. The findings suggest that while US and UK newspapers tended to frame climate change coverage as a domestic issue, Chinese media tended to frame it as a global issue that the world community needs to tackle. Moreover, US and UK newspapers often adopted the balanced reporting norm in communicating uncertainty and controversy, in contrast to the climate consensus that was firmly embedded in Chinese media discourse. Overall, the findings show mixed support for East and West differences in the moral rhetoric underpinning their climate change press coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corpus, being an effective tool, is utilized in multiple fields. One of them is the Translation. However, this resource isn't used frequently in translation studies when one of the languages in question is classical chinese (written language used anciently in China). And when it comes to an ad hoc parallel corpus, the steps of how to create it are usually omitted by researchers who make such investigations. The objective of this article is to present how to elaborate a classic Chinese-Spanish parallel corpus taking as example the historic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and its two translations into Spanish. To reach the objective, we have described the problem of creation and exploitation of this type of corpus, following the order of the phases of the process. We've found that some of the phases are universal while other phases are unique for old languages and for the linguistic combination Chinese-other language. And in this latter case, there's a lack of effective applications. With the current work, we hope to offer useful information to those scholars who are willing to carry out their own investigations based on self-built parallel corpus and at the same time related to the classic Chinese works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phonetic conversion technology is crucial in the resource construction of Russian phonetic information processing. This paper explains how to build a corpus and the key algorithms that are used, as well as how to design auxiliary translation software and implement the key algorithms. This paper focuses on the "parallel corpus" method of problem solving and the indispensable role of a parallel corpus in Russian learning. This paper examines the foundations, motivations, and methods for using parallel corpora in translation instruction. The main way of using a parallel corpus in the classroom environment is to present data, so that learners can be exposed to a large amount of easily screened bilingual data, and translation skills and specific language item translation can be taught in a concentrated and focused manner. Among them, the creation of a large-scale Russian-Chinese parallel corpus will play an important role not only in improving the translation quality of Russian-Chinese machine translation systems but also in Chinese and Russian teaching as well as other branches of linguistics and translation studies, all of which should be given sufficient attention. This paper proposes the use of automatic speech analysis technology to assist Russian pronunciation learning and designs a Russian word pronunciation learning assistant system with demonstration, scoring, and feedback functions, in response to the shortcomings of pronunciation teaching in Russian teaching in China. It can provide corpus support for gathering a large number of parallel corpora and, in the future, enabling online translation. This system is used for corpus automatic construction, and future corpus automatic construction systems could be built on top of it. The proper application of parallel corpus data will aid in the development of a high-quality autonomous learning and translation teaching environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with the vital role China has played in global climate governance in recent years, it is rare to see the research on its foreign-language media representation of this issue. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this study examines how China's flagship English-language newspaper China Daily communicates climate change (2010–2019) to international audiences and how it represents China and the US as well as China–US relations regarding climate issues. Results show that through the use of specific modalities and other collocates of China and the US, the newspaper constructs China as a responsible major country and the US as a capricious and self-centered nation while emphasizing the importance of their cooperation on climate actions. The ways it represents this issue can be interpreted with regard to pragmatism and the China Dream of national rejuvenation endorsed by the Chinese government. To have a stable environment for sustainable development of China and the whole world, China is willing to avoid confrontation and work together with the US and other countries in combating climate change though competition may remain in such related fields as green energy, as indicated by China Daily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a classification and clustering based study to account for the differences among five Chinese light verbs (congshi, gao, jiayi, jinxing, and zuo) as well as their variations in Mainland China Mandarin (ML) and Taiwan Mandarin (TW). Based on 13 linguistic features, both competition and co-development of these light verbs are studied in terms of their distinct and shared collocates. The proposed method discovers significant new grammatical differences in addition to confirming previously reported ones. Most significant discoveries include selectional restrictions differentiating deverbal nominals and event nouns, and degrees of transitivity of VO compounds. We also find that most variations between Mainland China Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin are in fact differences in tendencies or preferences in contexts of usage of shared grammatical rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The holistic view (or systematic thinking) of the Yijing (here Yijing refers to the original text in the ancient Chinese Daoist work The Book of Changes) is representative of the philosophical worldview in ancient China, which can reveal the interactive relationship between space, time and number. This study attempts to analyze and summarize human spatial, temporal and numeral processing from the aspects of the linguistic and cultural quantitative system for the three domains, contributing an original cognitive linguistic perspective on the holistic thinking typifying the worldview in ancient China and laying a foundation for further research. It argues that SPACE, TIME and NUMBER are not separated, but a holistic unity (or wholeness), they can be considered as one single domain. In ancient Chinese culture, the three domains cannot be separate, they should be integrated into the "growth of life experience", which is based on the MOTION metaphor and LIFE metaphor of the Yijing. The results of the corpus study of the Yijing text indicate that in this particular context of the Yijing, concepts in the domains of SPACE, TIME and NUMBER are schematized on the basis of further metaphorical extensions of concepts from the source of LIFE and MOTION. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies trade negotiation discourses during the US-China tariff truce, aiming at investigating the difference of ideologies of the U.S. and China journalists towards trade negotiation. Through integration of theories and methods of corpus linguistics and critical discourse studies and the use of the corpus linguistic software, the study finds that U.S. reports to some extent make itself appear as a victim of the trade, and hope to end unfair trade practices and reduce the chronic trade deficit, while China press focuses more on the harm of raising tariffs not just to each other but the global economy, through communication and dialogue rather than unilateral measures to peacefully resolve trade tensions. Perceived differences in culture have an important influence in the theoretical formation of the differences. The article concludes that the discourse patterns of the coverage imply a rising China and a new level of equilibrium in international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a study of shell nouns (SNs) complemented by appositive that-clauses observed in a two-million-word corpus of media English by British and Chinese writers. The grammatical metaphor theory was applied to the data in the light of a novel proposal that the metaphorical forms of SN+that constructions, in their contextual semantic settings, serve to re-construe various transitivity processes. The study produced significant findings, including: (1) the two writer groups demonstrate significantly different preferences for SN types but the British and the Chinese uses are instantiated from a common core set; (2) the Chinese group prefers the re-construal of Identifying Relational processes of facts and evidence as markers of neutral and impersonal discourse; (3) British writers favour the re-construal of Verbal processes of assertion and stance and tend to re-construe Attributive Relational processes with varying degrees of commitment to the encapsulated propositional truth; (4) both groups are inclined towards the re-construal of Mental processes of cognition with a common preference for the re-construal of the experience of knowing, believing and thinking. The findings above lend important empirical support to systemic functional theories and suggest further research in the future regarding SNs as indicators of disparate construals in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The daily language in mainland China has experienced a shift from traditional Chinese language to modern mandarin Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Chinese poetry 'revolution'started in the 1910s is considered as a turning point in the Chinese poetry evolution process due to the novel applications of the modern Chinese language. Many temporal poetic studies consider the poems written in traditional Chinese and modern Chinese as two different genres. The two genres are saliently different in rhyme, meter, theme, etc. We aim to detect the specific properties of the evolution process of Chinese poetry in terms of the word categories' distribution patterns. For the purpose, a corpus with 438 randomly selected traditional and modern Chinese poems is built, and some quantitative language indicators (entropy, relative entropy, repeat rate) and some exploratory statistical analysis techniques applicable in corpus linguistics and quantitative linguistics (one-way ANOVA test, cluster analysis) 1 are used to abstract and analyze language data from the corpus. It is concluded that the word categories are distributed significantly differently in traditional poetry and modern poetry. The sound reasons would be that (1) traditional Chinese poetry is more likely to focus on the application of some specific content word categories, for example, nouns, but not auxiliary words and (2) modern poems tend to choose more categories of words. From the perspective of word class distribution patterns, we suppose that the birth of modern Chinese poetry in the 1910s is a sharp change to Chinese poetry production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has regularly claimed to have been intentionally and systematically misrepresented by Western media. That said, their general characterization of China is said to see improvement with the initial impetus coming from Beijing's hosting of Olympic Games in 2008. China's representation in Western media has now entered what many observers considered to be an 'age of uncertainty', and it differs greatly from China's projected self-image. This study examines US, UK versus Chinese media coverage of 'China's rise' from 2009 to 2017. Our analysis entails a 2.2 million-word corpus of news texts retrieved from six leading national newspapers. A combination of computer-assisted corpus linguistics methods with critical discourse analysis was used to identify and compare linguistic elements as well as the structural dimensions that denote the journalistic positioning across large corpora. We argue that the globalist positioning stands in a dialectical relationship to the nationalist positioning. Globalism may be used to frame press narratives when it is viewed as suiting national interest, and this dynamic differs between the United States, the United Kingdom and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the data from our corpus and survey, this paper aims to analyse a series of Chinese grammatical errors frequently made by Spanish students, in the light of theories of contrastive analysis and error analysis. We focus our analysis on the errors of six categories (polysemic correspondence, omission, order, collocation, classifier and deixis), and try to identify their possible causes. Lastly, we also offer some strategies in the hope of facilitating the Chinese learning in Spanish-speaking countries, as well as shedding some lights on the Chinese teaching and investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Chinese Dream" has become a dominant discourse held by the current Chinese political leadership. By drawing on the methodological synergy of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), Corpus Linguistic methods and Framing analysis, this study addresses "Chinese Dream" discourse in its sociohistorical context by examining its discursive construction in speeches and in media representations in three English-language newspapers: China Daily, South China Morning Post and The New York Times. The analysis identifies that (1) the sociohistorical context of contemporary China is absorbed into "Chinese Dream" and thus provides a common ground for its discursive formation; (2) the "Chinese Dream" discourse fundamentally promotes Chinese nationalism, the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) consolidation of legitimacy, and President Xi Jinping's authority; (3) transiting from original political speeches to global media representation, the three media adopt different news frames to shape "Chinese Dream", namely: China Daily's China-centric frame, South China Morning Post's multiculturalist-oriented frame and The New York Times' American-centric "othering" frame. These news frames (and related narratives) form the ground for variation of sociopolitical-ideological perspectives. It is hoped that the critical analysis of "Chinese Dream" can contribute to critically understanding contemporary Chinese political discourse in presidential speeches and media reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corpus approaches underpin a range of postgraduate studies and professional work in language, linguistics, translation and beyond. Awareness of the influences of contextual features on language choice is important for many activities: exploring new text varieties; finding relationships between social factors and language patterning; considering choices for post-editing machine translation; and understanding the very nature of language. Work on register relies on corpus methods, but more support and direction could be offered to help undergraduates gain earlier insights into the power of such corpus analysis. This paper introduces some ways register differences can be revealed through The Prime Machine corpus tool (Jeaco 2017a) and describes the design of a practically-oriented undergraduate module which uses this concordancer. Software features include the organization of texts and presentation of source information for readymade corpora, and methods which can be used to reveal useful starting points for register analysis of do-it-yourself corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By employing discourse-historical approach and corpus linguistics, this paper examines media reports to analyze the Chinese official discourse in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. The results demonstrate that a paradox of globalism and nationalism has been simultaneously reflected when reporting the global pandemic. Based on a polarizing discursive construction of positive "self" and negative "others," on many occasions, the globalist and nationalist arguments have been closely intertwined and complement each other to reinforce the legitimacy of the ruling party at home and the international reputation of China under the leadership of the ruling party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to explore to what extent syntactic complexity predicts holistic scores generated by China's two prominent automated writing evaluation systems—pigai and iWrite, the results of which will have some implications for the validity of these two systems. In the meanwhile, this study targets how syntactic complexity differs across writing tasks—between- and within- discourse mode as well as the effects of topic on the use of syntactic measures. To these ends, we examined a corpus of 445 writing samples with 4 prompts on two discourse modes (argumentative and expository) written by Chinese freshmen. These samples were analyzed for the sensitivity of China's AES-generated scores to syntactic complexity, effects of topic and discourse-mode. Results indicated that there were no relationships between the variations of syntactic measures and the computer-generated scores. Strong topic effects were found within the same discourse mode, but no significant changes were observed in the use of syntactic measures across discourse modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the importance of stance expression in the writing of abstracts, this study adopted a corpus-based comparative approach to investigate the stance expression in abstracts of the Translation Practice Report (TPR) and the Interpretation Practice Report (IPR), which are two newly emerging reporting genres in Master of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) in China. Based on a set of corpora composed with 30 TPR abstracts (8,738 tokens) and 30 IPR abstracts (8,699 tokens) collected from 30 universities located in 16 provinces in China, the stance expression was examined in terms of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention by employing the stance framework in Hyland's (2005) interactional model. The findings revealed a genre-specific convention in utilizing the four categories of stance in both the TPR abstracts and the IPR abstracts, which is different from that in the abstracts of the empirical studies. The analysis also found discipline-specific variations of stance expression between the two corpora due to different disciplinary conventions and practice of the two subdisciplines. Then, the interviews with the insider informants were conducted to clarify and to enrich the research findings. The results in the study may be taken as a useful reference to expressing attitude in writing the abstracts in the MTI field of China, and possibly in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Synergies Chine is the property of GERFLINT (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches pour le Francais Langue Internationale) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper proposes a robust text classification and correspondence analysis approach to identification of similar languages. In particular, we propose to use the readily available information of clauses and word length distribution to model similar languages. The modeling and classification are based on the hypothesis that languages are self-adaptive complex systems and hence can be classified by dynamic features describing the system, especially in terms of distributional relations of constituents of a system. For similar languages whose grammatical differences are often subtle, classification based on dynamic system features should be more effective. To test this hypothesis, we considered both regional and genre varieties of Mandarin Chinese for classification. The data are extracted from two comparable balanced corpora to minimize possible confounding factors. The two corpora are the Sinica Corpus from Taiwan and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese from Mainland China, and the two genres are reportage and review. Our text classification and correspondence analysis results show that the linguistically felicitous two-level constituency model combining power functions between word and clauses effectively classifies the two varieties of Chinese for both genres. In addition, we found that genres do have compounding effect on classification of regional varieties. In particular, reportage in two varieties is more likely to be classified than review, corroborating the complex system view of language variations. That is, language variations and changes typically do not take place evenly across the board for the complete language system. This further enhances our hypothesis that dynamic complex system features, such as the power functions captured by the Menzerath–Altmann law, provide effective models in classifications of similar languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focuses on defining specifics of the language policy and planning in the Russian Federation, the USA, and China within the modern political discourse of the 21st century by means of exploring materials from Russian, American and Chinese media. The empirical base of the study included statistical and sociological data describing the sociolinguistic situation in the studied countries as well as materials from the latest Russian-language and English-language media which served as a source of factual and linguistic data. The authors investigated electronic publications of the following newspapers and their applications published from 2005 to April 2020: "Arguments and Facts", "Vedomosti", "Izvestia", "Kommersant", "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" (835 extended contexts) in the Russian Federation, "The Washington Post", "The New York Times" (998 extended contexts) in the USA, "News.cn", "Shanghai Daily", "China Daily" (846 extended contexts) in China. The examination of data was carried out using corpus linguistics methods (context selection, concordance analysis and frequency study) and lexical-semantic analysis as well as contextual (distribution) method, content analysis, indicative method, BIG DATA analysis, CAWI method. Furthermore, the study employed such analysis tools as Time Traveler, Google trends, etc. The study reports current trends in the development of language policy and planning in Russia, the USA and China in the 21st century. The analysis of media content allows to outline the prospects for mutual enrichment through integrating the latest positive trends in the development of language policy for a globalizing world while preserving and maintaining the orientation towards self-identity of every country, every language and every culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'leftover women', commonly referring to single women older than 27, has been in popular use in Chinese media since 2007. This study investigates how leftover women are linguistically represented in the English-language news media in China by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis. A specialised corpus of 303 English news articles (i.e. 236,254 words), covering the years between 2007 and 2017, was built for this purpose. Corpus linguistics techniques were employed to quantify the meaning shift units (MSUs) of the lemma leftover WOMAN, and van Leeuwen's 'social actors and actions theory' was applied to inform the classification of MSUs in context. These findings shed light on media representations of leftover women, the contested ideologies emerging from these representations, and how shifting gender politics and identity shapes and is shaped by media in the world's most populous nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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English abstracts of technical papers plays a key role in promoting the research finds and academic exchange. Based on the self-made corpus on research article abstracts, we attempt to explore the lexical and syntactic features of the China-based research article abstracts. The results show that these abstracts enjoy characteristics of higher lexical density, lower STTR, higher repetition of high frequency words and more frequent use of nominalization structure. From the aspect of syntactic features, English abstracts in Chinese scientific journals tend to use more compound sentences and passive voice structures with shorter average sentence length. These stylistic features are not consistent with the established writing norm. Chinese researchers are suggested to follow the current established norms of academic papers for a better communication with their western peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian environmentalism (AE) in China is embedded in the historical evolution of political centralization and has obvious path dependence; however, its effectiveness lacks empirical evidence. In the light of the cognitive motivation theory and the corpus linguistics, this study uses the multigrain Chinese word segmentation algorithm to construct the will index of provincial and central governments' environmental governance. With this will index and the provincial panel data in China from 2004 to 2017, this paper systematically examines the effectiveness and spatial heterogeneity of AE with the System GMM method. First, there is a negative correlation between the central government's will for environmental governance and environmental quality in provincial administrative regions, and top–down AE, characterized by political centralization, is less effective in China. However, the interaction term coefficients between the central and provincial governments are significantly positive for environmental governance. Second, from the perspective of sub-regions, effectiveness shows spatial heterogeneity across Eastern, Central, and Western China. Third, in Chinese-style AE, the public's environmental appeal has not received sufficient attention, and people's participation in environmental governance is limited. Finally, this study discusses ways to improve Chinese-style AE in China's institutional context and political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This corpus-based study compares L1-English and L1-Chinese undergraduate students' use of lexical bundles in English argumentative essays, and identifies the most common bundle misuses in L2 student writing. Data consist of two corpora of student-produced argumentative essays: 101 high-rated essays written by L1-English students and 105 high-rated essays written by L1-Chinese students. Using Biber's (Biber et al., 1999; Biber et al., 2004) structural and functional taxonomy, we compared the forms and functions of four-word bundles used by L1-English and L1-Chinese university students. Findings indicate that L2 students not only use substantially more bundle types and tokens than L1 writers, but the structural and functional patterns of bundles also differ. While L1 writers' bundles consist of mostly noun and preposition phrases, L2 students use significantly more verb phrase (clausal) bundles. Results also show that L2 student writers use significantly more stance bundles than L1 writers. In addition, most of the misused bundles in the L2 writers' essays pertain to grammatical mistakes, particularly with articles and prepositions. We conclude with some pedagogical implications for ESL composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on the appraisal framework, investigates the ways in which Chinese and Australian journalists strategically mobilize and mediate emotions in hard news reporting on risk events that disturb social order. Drawing on a newly built comparable corpus of Chinese and Australian hard news reporting on risk events, the study found that both Chinese and Australian journalists endeavour to reconstruct social order in the face of risk events mainly through building a shared feeling community. However, Chinese and Australian journalists strategically communicate emotions to construct different centres of social values. In Australian hard news, the centre of social values holding the nation together is construed through ordinary citizens, whereas in the Chinese context the centre is construed through power elites. The article argues that such different strategic rituals of emotionality are conditioned by the press conditions (e.g. tightening media budget, increasing press competition, and rising broadloidization), and that they reflect divergent stances undertaken by Chinese and Australian journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By examining the types and frequencies of non-renditions in a 100-hour corpus of court interpreting records from Hong Kong, this study demonstrated that court interpreters actively coordinate communication when carrying out their interpreting duties. Non-renditions are interpreters' utterances that do not have a corresponding counterpart in the source language, and such renditions are ordinarily used to coordinate interpreter-mediated exchanges. This analysis revealed that in the Hong Kong court setting, non-renditions were less common in English (the court language) than in Cantonese (the main language of the witnesses and defendants). In the Cantonese subsample, interactional nonrenditions were more common than textual non-renditions, and most of these utterances were self-initiated rather than prompted by others. In the English subsample, textual non-renditions were more common than interactional nonrenditions, and most of them were other-prompted. The skewed distribution of non-renditions, and particularly the tendency to address non-renditions to the lay participants, suggests that court interpreters may not be absolutely impartial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the ESP classroom. By qualitatively coding data from the Wellington Corpora of Spoken and Written New Zealand English and analyzing the results statistically, this study gives a detailed account of the usage patterns of the form, meaning and position of linking adverbials in news, which informs ESP English syllabus and teaching materials design. Suggestions for journalism teachers, as well as students and learners of English for general purposes in an EFL context, were made. An example of teaching materials design based on the corpus findings is also given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of newspaper reporting on the topic of energy security in eight countries – four from the global North (France, Germany, the UK, and the United States) and four from the global South (China, India, Brazil, and South Africa) – produces no support for the thesis that news is disseminated from core countries to the periphery and semi-periphery. There is an important difference between China and the other three fast-developing countries and a highly asymmetric flow of news not aligned to old core-periphery boundaries. In general, energy security is mainly covered in trade and business outlets and less in newspapers with mass circulation, indicating that the topic is still an elite concern. In some instances, attention has surged at the same time in different countries. But very few of these instances show a homogenous coverage across countries. Despite increasingly globalised media, news is created and consumed at a national level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses corpus-assisted discourse studies to examine the discursive construction of collective identity in the Hong Kong press, particularly with regard to its relationship with mainland China. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and collective identity theory, it develops a set of analytical techniques amenable to quantification, and applies it to a corpus of newspaper coverage of the 2005 Hong Kong Chief Executive election. The article uses these techniques not only to develop a representative description and interpretation of discursive patterns, but also to offer an explanatory account of the discursive construction of Hong Kong identity. It shows that the discursive patterns vary systematically depending on newspaper ownership, commercial imperatives, and newspaper type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present corpus-based study deals with attribution in court judgments from three perspectives: the forms of appellate judgments, authorial voices in appellate judgments, and attribution to the sources of law. The results in the study are threefold. First, all the appellate judgments from mainland China and Taiwan are the judgment of the court; both single-opinion judgments and multiple-opinion judgments are found in the appellate judgments from Hong Kong. Secondly, only institutional self-references are found in the appellate judgments of mainland China and Taiwan. Thirdly, more divergent forms in terms of sources of law are found in Hong Kong in contrast with mainland China and Taiwan. Through the analysis of the results obtained in this study, the author argues that in Hong Kong the individual judge's power is foregrounded, and what is backgrounded is the court. In contrast, in the mainland China and Taiwan judgments, one can only hear the voices of the court rather than those of the individual judge. The discursive presentation of focusing on different power agents can find its root in social construction, because the discursive structure is constrained by and representative of social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper reports on the findings of a preliminary study of written Chinese, using the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC, McEnery & Xiao 2004). The first part of the paper introduces the stylistic features, and briefly describes the distributional patterns of these features across the selected written registers. Then, using a multi-feature, multi-dimensional framework (Biber 1988) and the data reduction method of correspondence analysis, three dimensions are identified and interpreted. The study reveals extensive linguistic variation across written Chinese registers, thus complementing previous observations about stylistic differences between spoken and written Chinese. Finally, issues concerning feature selection and dimension interpretation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes ESA, a new unsupervised approach to word segmentation. ESA is an iterative process consisting of three phases: Evaluation, Selection, and Adjustment. In Evaluation, both the certainty and uncertainty of character sequence co-occurrence in corpora are considered as statistical evidence supporting goodness measurement. Additionally, the statistical data of character sequences with various lengths become comparable with each other by using a simple process called Balancing. In Selection, a local maximum strategy is adopted without thresholds, and the strategy can be implemented with dynamic programming. In Adjustment, a part of the statistical data is updated to improve successive results. In our experiment, ESA was evaluated on the SIGHAN Bakeoff-2 data set. The results suggest that ESA is effective on Chinese corpora. It is noteworthy that the F-measures of the results are basically monotone increasing and can rapidly converge to relatively high values. Furthermore, empirical formulae based on the results can be used to predict the parameter in ESA to avoid parameter estimation that is usually time-consuming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the features of translated text and non-translated texts through analyzing the sentence length and constituent format in Chinese to Japanese and Japanese to Chinese translation. It uses a corpus-based methodology and sets up a model to describe translators' linguistic choice patterns. The small-scaled bi-directional, comparable and parallel corpus is constructed to facilitate a detailed investigation into the relationship between language usage of SL and TL. This study concludes that translators tend to avoid complex and unique linguistic features in SL and TL and tend to accept features of source texts with the condition that the rules of TL will not be violated. This paper intends not only to contribute to the theoretical consideration of specific features of translation, but also offer insight into translation pedagogy and practices between Japanese and Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of corpus study offers a brand-new perspective to "English as a Foreign Language" (EFL) teaching and learning. Up until now, corpus-based studies focus mainly on the contrastive study between native language and interlanguage, or the error analysis of the interlanguage, but the application of corpus in EFL writing course is rarely covered. This essay intends to do some initial probing into the ways of incorporating corpora into the EFL writing course, based on the current problems of EFL writing courses in Chinese foreign language curricula in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the change in the representation of human rights issues in a corpus containing over 5,000 articles collected from a leading English newspaper in Hong Kong in two periods before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997 using Sinclair's (Textus 9: 75-106, 1996, Trust the text, Routledge, 2004) lexical item. The analysis of instances of the phrase 'human rights' in the corpus as a lexical item shows that the newspaper in question has changed its representation of human rights issues, particularly in China and Hong Kong, over the decade. This reflects an ideological shift in the newspaper's stance in response to the current situations in both local and world politics, and that human rights concerns are not merely a nationalistic, but also a culturally dynamic phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Expressions of gratitude often occur as functional lexical chunks such as thanks and thank you (). In this paper, I will focus on the use of such units and longer formulaic sequences of gratitude such as thanks a lot and thank you very much, relying on data from the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-HK). The results show that Hong Kong speakers of English do not employ the wide variety of thanking strategies that has been investigated in previous literature. Their expressions of gratitude are usually brief, with thanks and thank you being the commonest forms of gratitude expression. These forms are frequently used as closing signals; they often constitute a complete turn. Repetitive gratitude formulae and expressions of appreciation of the interlocutors (both in a single turn and across turns) are exceedingly rare, which suggests that the Chinese may be too reserved to express their gratitude openly and explicitly. Responses to an act of thanking seem to be infrequent in ICE-HK and only a few strategies are represented. The paper also considers the pedagogical implications of the way this function can be acquired in a second/foreign language with the help of the corpus findings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]