Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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).... More

Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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... More

Abstract: 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,... More