JournalTOCs

English Language and Literature Studies
Number of Followers: 17

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1925-4768 - ISSN (Online) 1925-4776
Published by CCSE

[43 journals]

Rhetorical Construction of COVID-19 News in Chinese Context—A
Corpus-Based Study
- Abstract: As a language practice, news discourse is rhetorical that responds to a given circumstance and conveys values and ideas to the target audience with specific goals. This study examined how the English official website in China represented COVID-19 news to affect the public under the rhetorical framework. Using Sketch Engine as the tool for data analysis on a self-built corpus, this study carried out a quantitative analysis of the linguistic features of the COVID-19 news on In Zhejiang, the official English website of China’s Zhejiang Province. Then, based on the data obtained from corpus analysis, this study applied both modern and classical rhetorical theories to conduct a qualitative analysis of the rhetorical mechanism, including rhetorical invention, rhetorical strategies, and style, of the COVID news on the website of In Zhejiang. The results showed that the COVID-19 news was a positive response to the COVID situation in Zhejiang province and China with the purposes of mobilizing the citizens and establishing favorable images of the government and the Zhejiang people. Meanwhile, the news was constructed within its cultural context and Chinese journalism conventions, making it more adapted to the home audience and limiting its appeal to a global audience and effectiveness for worldwide communication. By demonstrating that news discourse is a rhetorical construction, this study provides valuable insights for the news media, particularly Chinese official media, on how to approach the audience rhetorically to improve the persuasiveness of their news reports, as well as a new theoretical framework for the research of public health crises.
  PubDate: Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:46:41 +000
Reviewer Acknowledgements for English Language and Literature Studies,
Vol. 12, No. 4
- Abstract: Reviewer Acknowledgements for English Language and Literature Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2022.
  PubDate: Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:36:17 +000
Discursive Construction of Nanjing City Image in Public Health Emergency
- Abstract: In this study, the function of “Nanjing Release”, the official new media platform of the Nanjing Municipal Government, is analyzed in the construction of the city image in paroxysmal public emergencies from five aspects (e.g., discourse content, discourse form, discourse subject, stylistic style, and emotional orientation) based on the framework of pragmatic identity and cultural discourse studies. This study suggests that the discourse contents of “Nanjing Release” primarily comprise pandemic notification, pandemic prevention, and control measures, saluting anti-pandemic workers, serving people’s livelihood, government notification and handling, and pandemic-related science knowledge. Moreover, the forms of discourse are classified into single-modal reports and multi-modal reports. The subjects of discourse primarily include government agencies, anti-pandemic workers, new media organizations, public institutions, and virtual characters. The stylistic styles of discourse are divided into deliberative, formal, casual, and serious styles. Furthermore, the affective orientations include neutral reports, positive reports, and negative reports. This study reveals that the government’s WeChat account, “Nanjing Release”, has built an image of a warm, loving, and grateful city fighting against the pandemic in the public health emergency. Afterward, the motivation for the discursive construction of the city image is studied.
  PubDate: Tue, 29 Nov 2022 12:06:41 +000
On the Performability of Drama Translation: A Case Study of Zhu
- Abstract: Drama translation, as a part of visual art, is more than just textual translation; it is a component of dramatic performance portrayed in the form of verbal action. Lines in drama translation are thus dialogues that render the drama performance rather than descriptive languages that provide information. Translators must use a variety of translation strategies to achieve performability in drama translation. Following Levý’s (2011) translation theory, the paper conducts a contrastive analysis of Zhu Shenghao’s and Liang Shiqiu’s Chinese versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the aspects of the acquisition of speakability and intelligibility, restoration of semantic contexts, reflection of verbal action, and achievement of characterisation, exploring how the performability is satisfied in drama translation, and summarising strategies for fulfilling performability in drama translation. It is discovered that Zhu Shenghao (Zhu) insisted on his principles for drama translation, placed emphasis on performability in his translation, and used the following strategies to achieve performability in his translation: using colloquial style language, adjusting the order of sentence segments, reconstructing the syntax, uncovering the indeterminacy for different contexts, using modal particles, using dialects of the target language, and revealing characters’ intentions. However, in order to achieve speakability and intelligibility, Zhu abandoned the stichomythia rhyme, failing to present the verbal action. On the other hand, Liang preserved the stichomythia rhyme, reflecting the verbal action. Furthermore, Zhu replaced the personal pronoun in the original text with notional terms, resulting in the loss of semantic contexts, whereas Liang Shiqiu (Liang) preserved the personal pronoun, restoring the semantic contexts.
  PubDate: Thu, 24 Nov 2022 03:37:20 +000
Analysis of The Story of Your Life From the Perspective of Deconstruction
- Abstract: The growth of Western science fiction steadily slowed down after the last century’s “Golden Age”, but the emergence of Chinese-American science fiction writers has given the genre fresh life. This study investigates the deconstruction of Anti-Logocentrism and binary oppositions in the famous science fiction The Story Of Your Life by Chinese American author Ted Chiang applying Derrida’s deconstructionist theories as a theoretical framework. First, the paper analyses the traditional relationship between the self and others in terms of the attitude toward aliens; the author’s deconstruction of the conventional male-female interaction is then analyzed in light of the work’s depiction of the heroine, and the author’s analysis of the conventional cause-and-effect relationship follows. Based on above, the paper reveals Ted Chiang’s intention to create a just and peaceful society in the book, providing readers with a fresh perspective on how to understand it.
  PubDate: Thu, 24 Nov 2022 03:35:31 +000
How the Arrangement of Attitude Resources Can Strengthen the Objectivity
of News Reports
- Abstract: As Xiongan New Area in China is designed to attract international innovation elements, its publicity to the international community has become a prerequisite for the realization of its designed goal. Innovative talents who have a higher critical thinking ability constitute one essential part of the target readers of English news reports about Xiongan. In order to convince them of the brilliant future of the city, reporters need to arrange attitude resources in an objective way when expressing reporters’ appraisal about this city. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the current study finds that reporters attempt to use attitude resources to modify inanimate things in present and past tenses, as well as in passive voice. In addition, there is no attitude resources in expressing the essential concept guiding the construction of the city. All of these are considered to contribute to the enhancement of the objectivity of news reports and be of great help to present a more convincing image of Xiongan.
  PubDate: Thu, 24 Nov 2022 03:33:31 +000
Evaluating the Benefits of Literary Texts in EFL Coursebooks Based on
Littlewood’s Perspectives
- Abstract: In an attempt to conceptualize the role of literature in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses, this study analyzed the ways literary texts are approached in popular EFL coursebooks. It set out to find if these texts were used to their full potential according to Littlewood’s five perspectives. The scrutinized literary texts were drawn from 44 mainstream EFL coursebooks. The findings showed that when literary texts were used, they were not necessarily used as literary works. Furthermore, the findings substantiated that inauthentic and poorly adapted literary texts did not lend themselves to higher levels of inquiry.
  PubDate: Tue, 08 Nov 2022 02:15:43 +000
Analysis of Alienation and Interconnection in The Color Purple from the
Perspective of Ecofeminism
- Abstract: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in 1982 earned Alice a great reputation and an award as the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Since its publication, it became a masterpiece and attracted many critics’ attention, and then it was analyzed from various points of view. In this paper, I would like to apply ecofeminism to illustrate that only by overthrowing dualistic ideology can alienation dissolve, the world get reconnected and the whole ecosystem is healthy and sustainable. Through the protagonists’ fight and growth in the novel, the readers see hope in promoting new social systems based on equality, non-violence, cultural diversity, and non-hierarchical forms and hope in enhancing interconnection and cooperation in all.
  PubDate: Wed, 02 Nov 2022 01:25:11 +000
A Study on Lexical Chunks in Different Moves of Abstracts of Native and
Chinese Applied Linguistic Journals
- Abstract: The norm for abstracts of research articles (RAs) is important and will win the RAs more chances of being received. The analysis of how abstracts are written in papers published in well-recognized international journals can serve as a reference to help writers conform to the norm. This paper, adopting Hyland’s classification and Santos’ framework, employing a corpus-based method, compares how native and Chinese writers use lexical chunks differently in abstracts from a perspective of move analysis. The results show that Chinese writers tend to use more lexical chunks; there is no significant difference in the functional distribution on the whole but significant differences are found in two moves of “situating the research” and “discussing the research”.
  PubDate: Mon, 24 Oct 2022 14:16:11 +000
The Acquisition of “N + that” Appositive Clauses of Chinese EFL
Learners: A Corpus-Based Study
- Abstract: The present research used a corpus-based method to investigate Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of “N + that” appositive clauses by comparing data from the TECCL corpus of Chinese English learners and the NESSIE corpus of native English speakers. Quantitatively, the number of Ns (nouns) distributed in “N + that” appositive clauses in the TECCL has no significant difference from that in the NESSIE; but results of Chi-square tests revealed that the Ns that are frequently used by Chinese learners in these clauses are significantly different from those used by English native speakers, which may result from the grammatical drills in English teaching and learning in Chinese schools. Qualitatively, Errors occurring in the “N + that” appositive clauses in Chinese EFL learners’ compositions could be classified into two types: Errors in Vocabulary and Errors in Sentence Structure; and the errors could be explained by the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman, 1977, 1989) and the Interlanguage Theory (Selinker, 1972). This study may bring implications to the teaching and learning/acquisition of English appositive clauses.
  PubDate: Mon, 17 Oct 2022 10:04:22 +000
A Field Study on the Script Structure of English Drama in Education in
Chinese Primary and Secondary School
- Abstract: Drama in Education (DIE) is believed to play a specially positive role in helping students in primary and secondary schools to form language awareness and develop language abilities. It has gradually formed its own script structure characteristics in the practice of local English teaching. By analyzing the scripts of 31 dramas staged by three local schools in the English culture and drama festivals, this paper summarizes the implementation characteristics of DIE from the aspects of story source, script source, students’ involvement, and theme distribution. In addition, this paper also analyzes the script structure favored by local teachers and students from four stages: the beginning, the development, the climax and the ending, which will greatly help solve the problem of drama creation for primary and secondary school teachers and students, and improve their enthusiasm to implement DIE in English classroom.
  PubDate: Sat, 08 Oct 2022 09:29:40 +000
A Study of Nominalization in the Abstracts of Linguistic Academic Papers
- Abstract: Nominalization is widely used in the linguistic academic papers and it has the potential to transform a complex sentence into a concise one, while abstracts in the linguistic papers are the condensation of the main content, so it is of great significance to analyze the phenomenon of nominalzation in the abstracts of linguistic academic papers. Based on the theory of grammatical metaphor, this paper attempts to figure out whether the five types of nominalization proposed by Halliday exist and further analyze which kind of function they perform. 40 academic papers will be collected, the five types of nominalzation will be identified and their frequency will be quantified. Finally, the detailed analysis about their functions will be made. After the analysis of the data, the author found that verb nominalization is used most frequently, while proposition nominalization is relatively rare. And nominalization in the abstracts can serve several functions: adjective nominalization and verb nominalzation can reflect the objective facts without personal attitudes and stance; conjunction nominalization can make the abstracts more concise. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate different types of nominalization and their functions existing in the abstracts, and to promote authors’ awareness of nominalization and improve their abstract writing ability.
  PubDate: Fri, 30 Sep 2022 02:43:14 +000
From Stability to Uncertainty: An Analytical Survey of the Conception of
Subject
- Abstract: Subject used to be a stable concept referring to the actant of an event and it was the opposite of object. Emancipated from being the innate sinners of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance subject is intelligent and powerful and the Renaissance literature is loaded with compliments of human magnificence. Heidegger’s Dasein underscores the passivity of the subject as it is inadvertently thrown into this world. Sartre highlights the freedom of the subject and the choices made by the subject are the meanings of its existence. Derrida deconstructs the sematic meaning of the subject since the incessant chain of signification puts it in constant flux. The existential subject is deterritorialized by the postmodern thoughts and rendered fragmentary, frivolous and amoral.
  PubDate: Wed, 28 Sep 2022 09:43:47 +000
Disappointing Utopian Vision of W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to
Byzantium”
- Abstract: Most of the critical literature and readings of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, both form or content wise, focus on the aesthetic, spiritual or symbolic aspects of the poem, with occasional allusions to the biography of the writer. This research, apart from the allusive imagery and symbolic structure, presents a more critical view of the text. It attempts to highlight self-contradictory and irreconcilable outcome as well as paradoxical representations of both imagined spaces that have rarely been considered or examined. This article, therefore, analyzes the inconsistencies resulting from readers’ expectations that stem from the outcomes of such mythical vision and what is unfolding by the end of the poem. The research shows that the speaker’s disillusionment with his society, the fantasy of the body transcendence and the spatiotemporal idealization of Byzantium are based on false premises and fail the expectation of readers. These inconsistencies, the research argues, are the manifestation of the poet’s desideratum for an immediate and perennial consolation of the suffering from life at old age and resort to the pleasure of art and beauty.
  PubDate: Wed, 28 Sep 2022 09:42:37 +000