Vol. 1 No. 1 (2019)

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 576

The cognitive-functional properties of English WH-dialogic constructions in discourse

by Guocai Zeng

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 1-13; , 2019; 16 Views, 15 PDF Downloads

Within the theoretical frameworks of cognitive linguistics and cognitive construction grammar, this paper takes the pair of a WH-question and one of its answers in contemporary spoken English as the research object and regards such pairs as WH-dialogic constructions. In this study we construct an Event-based Schema-Instance Cognitive Model (ESI model) to analyze the cognitive-functional properties of this category of dialogic constructions. The discoursal expansion and textual cohesion in discourse achieved through the application of such dialogic constructions indicate that the usage of WH-dialogic constructions is one of the basic cognitive strategies for human beings to construe the objective world.  

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 577

Using ethnography in politeness studies: A discursiveness-based approach

by Si Qin

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 14-26; , 2019; 13 Views, 11 PDF Downloads

The current study points out the methodological limitations of contemporary discursive politeness research and suggests that in-depth ethnographic data provides a potentially crucial solution. Discursive politeness studies advocate a data-driven, bottom-up analytical approach that stresses the importance of participants’ own contextual assessments. Analysis of such kind requires the corresponding methodological design which allows researchers to obtain the defining information that can be seemingly absent in the on-going interaction. However, in the current body of literature, politeness research focuses on theoretical discussion without specifically organised consideration regarding methodology. Therefore, aiming at providing a more valid methodological approach, the current study proposes to consider ethnography as the foundational data-collection method for discursive politeness research, stressing ‘long-term’ and ‘in-depth’ as the core features in conducting fieldwork. In order to clarify this view, the current study demonstrates a case study via examining an interaction naturally occurring among several family members during dinner time in China. This interaction is examined on two levels respectively (i.e., based on demographic data and in-depth ethnographic data). This paralleled analysis reveals that in complicated real-life interactions, lacking of thorough contextual information of both cultural norms and individually shaped cognition can be misleading in analysis. Therefore, understanding (im)politeness as an interactionally situated contextual/cognitive judgement, long-term ethnography is needed and that the fieldwork should be conducted carefully and patiently in order to gain access to comparatively more solid data and achieve more valid conclusion.

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 583

A philosophical investigation of catchwords in Chinese

by Qiao Huang

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 27-39; , 2019; 12 Views, 12 PDF Downloads

Catchwords spread rapidly because of their simple form and strong replicability. New catchwords enter our daily life every once in a while. Therefore, the study of catchwords is extremely urgent, because the study of language is the study of human life. This article takes the catchword ‘wo keneng yudao le jia N’ (I might encounter fake N) as an example to discuss its internal structure (which has been largely ignored in the existing research). The focus is on the study of the adjective ‘fake’ and its combined meaning with the noun after. Based on this, the meaning generation mechanism of the catchword is analyzed, including the relationship between necessity and probability, the evolution of meaning of the catchword, and the precipitation of construction meaning. Finally, the philosophical basis of communicative mechanism of the catchword is clarified. The main line of this study is to provide philosophical foundation for the popularity of catchwords.

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 584

Translation from EFL textbook to classroom: Pedagogy semiosis and strategy

by Qu Tao

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 40-56; , 2019; 13 Views, 10 PDF Downloads

The modern semiotic world has undergone dramatic changes. Due to the development of technology, a wide range of media and mode are now available to sign makers, facilitating as well as requiring translations within and across semiotic systems. This research takes a social semiotic multimodal approach to study translation practices in educational situations in China. It explores how meaning is translated from EFL textbook to classroom teaching in Chinese universities, from the aspects of pedagogy, semiosis and effects. Focusing on translation, this article analyzes how pedagogy is redesigned in terms of situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. Based on the analysis of semiotic resources available in textbook and classrooms, this article discusses the functional loads of modes, patterns of mode combinations, translation categories, and semiotic strategies for realizing multiliteracies pedagogy. Finally, the effects of translation are explored in terms of pedagogy, sentient perception, cognitive process, physical features, and dissemination quality.

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 585

Marked causative structures of Chinese verb-resultative construction

by Xiaoxia Pan, Limin Liu

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 57-76; , 2019; 12 Views, 11 PDF Downloads

This paper aims to study the syntactic and semantic features of ‘marked VRC causative structures’, those special syntactic-semantic structures formed by verb-resultative constructions (VRCs) which violate both the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis and the Thematic Hierarchy. Their syntactic and semantic features are defined as follows: 1) VRC has a causative relation within itself; 2) the argument in the object position is the causee and the only argument of the resultative complement; 3) the causer in the subject position is any conceptual component from the cause event other than the agent of the predicate verb. This paper then attempts to propose an extended account to expound how they are formed syntactically and semantically. On this account, a marked VRC causative structure is re-causativization of a VRC when the VRC is self-causative; it enables other conceptual components of the cause event than the agent to become the causer when a VRC is not self-causative. There are some constraints on what becomes the causer of a marked VRC causative structure.

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 578

Intonational pitch features of interrogatives and declaratives in Chengdu dialect

by Hongliu Jiang

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 77-87; , 2019; 9 Views, 10 PDF Downloads

As a representative of southwestern Mandarin, the Chengdu dialect has its own distinctive pitch features in phonology of tone and intonation. Research on the pronunciation and lexical tone of the Chengdu dialect has a long history with a certain amount of theoretical results. However, research on intonation of Chengdu dialect is still rare. The writer provides an acoustic analysis of research into intonational pitch features of interrogative and declarative sentences of Chengdu dialect, discussing the F0 contour at the final syllable (character) of each sentence to find out if the statement or question mood is carried by the edge tone as well as the pitch perturbation between lexical tone and intonation on it. The results of this acoustic analysis show that there exist statement and question mood of Chengdu dialect carried by the final syllable within an intonational phrase as well as the perturbation on the final syllable (character) by the coexistence of its lexical tone and intonation.

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 579

Investigation into the research on doctoral writing: A synthesis of recent research 2010-2019

by Xia Guo

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 88-101; , 2019; 12 Views, 13 PDF Downloads

Doctoral writing has been concerned by linguistic scholars and the practitioners of English for academic purposes. This review explores the literature on doctoral writing which got published in peer-reviewed international journals of English between 2010 and 2019 to examine three questions: (1) From which perspectives do the recent researches adopt when examining doctoral writing of the ESOL students? (2) What methodology do the authors apply to research doctoral writing? (3) What kind of text or resource was analyzed by the authors? The goal of the review is to provide the pedagogical suggestions to the future teaching of doctoral writing and viable supports for the writing practice of doctoral students by a comprehensive analysis of the current research. After the overall search on Scopus, 210 titles and abstracts have been searched out through a combination of search terms. The inclusion and exclusion criteria have been used to identify the qualified articles for this study and disqualify the possibly irrelevant articles from the included. Ultimately, 82 articles have been confirmed to be further reviewed for the solution of research questions. This review indicates the relationship between doctoral writing and pedagogical and social context is complex, and thus necessary supports from inside and outside of doctoral community need to be given to improve the writing competence of doctoral students.

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 580

Revisit euphemisms from the perspective of intentionality

by Lijun Huang

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 102-111; , 2019; 12 Views, 13 PDF Downloads

This paper studies the role of intentionality in the process of generating euphemisms. Intentionality, as the key to human consciousness activities, is not only the starting point of the language user’s consciousness activity related to euphemism generation, but also functions through the whole generating process. Its functions can be specified as triggering, orientation, and selection. Collective intentionality restricts individual intentionality and has the function of identifying and integrating individual intentionality. Under the effect of collective intentionality and social environment, the euphemisms are renewed with the time and bear features unique to a particular group. 

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 581

Research on motion-emotion metaphor and its social cognitive mechanism—A case study of Chinese Mandarin Yi language and English

by Hongbo Li

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 112-122; , 2019; 11 Views,

Chinese motion-emotion metaphor and its social cognitive mechanism are explored, for the first time, with a comparison between Mandarin Chinese, the Yi language and English. The interaction between motions and emotions is the key to do the research from the perspective of cognitive functionalism. Cognitive functionalism argues that language reflects people’s consciousness, and the cognitive aspect of language interacts with the communicative function of language very well. According to this argument, motion-emotion metaphor, as a popular language phenomenon, can testify to such interactions. The comparative analysis of motion-emotion metaphors, from the perspective of cognitive functionalism, in this paper has proved to take the following aspects into consideration: the subjects’ experiences of physical motions and their effects on objects; the universality and the specificity of such experience; the emotions’ observable traits and their related motions; the common knowledge and normal beliefs among the motions’ subjects and their surrounding contexts.

Open Access

Article

Article ID: 582

Strategy instruction and transfer in the EFL classroom

by Robyn L. Najar

Forum for Linguistic Studies, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1(1), 123-133; , 2019; 13 Views, 13 PDF Downloads

This study examines the generalizability of research in the areas of instruction; learning; and transfer of learning to the role these play in the area of the use of strategic competencies in foreign language contexts (FLC). While previous studies have tended towards a focus on learner variables, this study includes the conditions of applicability with a task that can impact learning and transfer as well. The contributions of both variables, learner and task, were investigated through note-taking strategy instruction and transfer, to ascertain the effect on reading comprehension of textual materials in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. Learning was measured as a precursor to transfer. In order to investigate the role of instruction and transfer in the transfer of strategy use, a mixed design using both qualitative and quantitative approaches for design and analysis was used. Findings suggest that the relationship between instruction and transfer as represented by strategy use and task performance is a multidimensional one, and that there are implications for language learning instruction in the foreign language classroom.