Talking up China: An analysis of China’s rising cultural power and global promotion of the Chinese language

This essay focuses on the remarkable rise of China from a veritable hermit state in the 1960s to a cultural lodestone in the early 21st century. We explore the country's growing cultural power and the implications of the PRC's increasing promotion of the Chinese language as a global idiom. Our findings suggest that while China faces significant internal and external barriers to fully achieving its potential as a global cultural power, recent efforts by Beijing to promote the Chinese language and Mandarin's increasing utility as a lingua franca for trade have significantly increased the resonance of Chinese culture abroad, especially in the Pacific rim. With this increase in cultural influence beyond its borders, we argue that China's “soft power” is also in ascendancy.     

汉语汉字在越南的传播及其文化意义分析

汉语汉字在越南的传播既是中国封建统治者出于统治和开发边境民族文化的需要,更是越南封建王朝加强自身统治的需要。汉语汉字通过多种途径在越南进行传播,对越南社会政治文化以及语言文字的社会功能产生了广泛而深远的影响,它所包容的文化意义也就因此呈现出多方面性和多层次性。     

中古汉语助动词句法结构论

中古汉语的助动词分可能、意愿、应当三大类,各类助动词在中古典籍中的出现频率不同。助动词的句法结构主要有NP＋助动词＋VP、NP＋Neg＋助动词＋VP、NP＋助动词等几种,每一格式的内部有一些变化。中古以降,“应当、必当、宜须、要当”等13个助动词同义组合这种句法现象得到了发展。     

Effects of language mismatch in automatic forensic voice comparison using deep learning embeddings

In forensic voice comparison, deep learning has become widely popular recently. It is mainly used to learn speaker representations, called embeddings or embedding vectors. Speaker embeddings are often trained using corpora mostly containing widely spoken languages. Thus, language dependency is an important factor in automatic forensic voice comparison, especially when the target language is linguistically very different from that the model is trained on. In the case of a low-resource language, developing a corpus for forensic purposes containing enough speakers to train deep learning models is costly. This study aims to investigate whether a model pre-trained on multilingual (mostly English) corpus can be used on a target low-resource language (here, Hungarian), not represented by the model. Often multiple samples are not available from the offender (unknown speaker). Samples are therefore compared pairwise with and without speaker enrollment for suspect (known) speakers. Two corpora are used that were developed especially for forensic purposes and a third that is meant for traditional speaker verification. Speaker embedding vectors are extracted by the x-vector and ECAPA-TDNN techniques. Speaker verification was evaluated in the likelihood-ratio framework. A comparison is made between the language combinations (modeling, LR calibration, and evaluation). The results were evaluated by Cllr_min and EER metrics. It was found that the model pre-trained on a different language but on a corpus with a significant number of speakers can be used on samples with language mismatch. Sample duration and speaking style also seem to affect the performance.     

语篇分析与大学英语阅读教学

传统大学英语教学往往关注语言知识和语法规则的掌握,功能语言学的语篇分析理论,无论在大学英语精读教学还是在阅读教学中,都为教学法的改革提供了强大的理论支持。本文从阅读教学的角度探讨了语篇分析与阅读教学的关系,并就如何利用语篇分析理论培养学生阅读理解能力提出了一点参考性策略。     

语言输出理论与英语写作教学

大学非英语专业教学普遍存在学生语言输出过少的现象,本文以语言输出理论为依据,提出强调英语写作教学以增加学生语言输出,促成语言知识的重构和程序化,从而增强学生的语言实际运用能力。并结合教学实践的基础,着重探讨了英语写作课堂教学中教师和学生的角色定位问题和形成性评价在英语写作教学中的运用机制。提出了相应的写作课堂的教学模式。     

法律语言确定性与法律文化的发展

语言是文化的载体,是民族精神的体现。英美法律语言和中国传统法律语言不同的发展特点源自于各自独特的思维方式和民族特性。因此,中国法制现代化的进程中,法律借鉴、移植必须使制度性的法律文化与观念性的法律文化同步发展,使法治精神通过民众的语言体现出来。     

Oppositional symbolic values of language display,or the case of “English” drinking in France

This article examines the linguistic manifestations of the tension between notions of a healthy national drinking culture and the increasing homogenisation of problematic drinking practices in an era of globalised marketing and media influence. Taking the proliferation of English in France when it comes not only to alcohol advertising, but also public health discourses and mass media commentary as its object, this paper discerns patterns of and motivations for English language borrowings in French when discussing alcohol and immoderate drinking practices. Findings point to a double indexicality in these borrowings. On the one hand, the widespread use of English in alcohol advertising draws on and creates positive associations between English and Anglo-American culture and, on the other, the public health community's use of English terms like binge drinking designates problematic drinking behaviours as foreign and anathema to traditional modes of French alcohol consumption, and by extension to French cultural identity.     

Embodiment and meaning: moving beyond linguistic imperialism in social semiotics

Social semiotic approaches to multimodality have tended to take language as the model for other modalities even when their professed aim is to move away from it. This kind of “linguistic imperialism” causes problems for theorising the relationship between the two basic semiotic planes of expression and interpretation in different modalities, and how the affordances of the expression plane relate to the meanings of the interpretation plane in each case, as well as in understanding the particular role of language in multimodal texts. The current paper brings together insights from semiotics, sociology of music and philosophy of language, as well as critiques of social semiotic approaches, in order to argue that the missing element in accounts of semiotic systems like language and music is the fundamental role played by embodiment in both these systems.     

Noting Silence

Abstract

In coming to words, language "reserves" itself: it holds back its event, keeping it illegible and silent. It is possible to see much of modern innovative or "experimental" poetry as such an experience of reticence and stillness, an experiment of language listening to itself "speaking" in order to allow the force of the illegible to come to speech. How this silence both limits what can be said and holds what has been written open to the possibilities of saying otherwise comes from the "restraint" characteristic of the specific way in which language "speaks", that is, arrives each time singularly as words precisely by withholding this very arrival from signification. Myung Mi Kim's poetry stands out among contemporary American poets precisely for its specific attentiveness to this simultaneously "generative" and "constraining" force of silence. To understand better the workings of this force of silence, I examine Kim's poetry in the context of Heidegger's reflection on language, specifically his point about the withdrawal and restraint "essential" to the unfolding of language. I suggest that this withdrawal marks the poietic momentum of language, which can be traced, though, only by way of a listening response. This listening response becomes in turn a kind of constraint under which poetic thinking operates, a holding back of assertions and statements in favor of a listening which responds precisely to how the saying withholds itself from what comes to be said. Exploring the proximity between Kim's poetry and Heidegger's thinking, this essay examines how this withdrawal—a restraint at play in language itself—necessitates the attitude of poetic "reservedness".