Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal

Publisher's text about this journal: A peer-reviewed journal which seeks to publish original work on Chinese and related languages, with a focus on current topics in Chinese discourse studies. The notion of discourse is a broad one, emphasizing an empirical orientation and encompassing such linguistic fields as language and society, language and culture, language and social interaction, discourse and grammar, communication studies, and contact linguistics. Special emphasis is placed on systematic documentation of Chinese usage patterns and methodological innovations in explaining Chinese and related languages from a wide range of functionalist perspectives, including, but not limited to, those of Conversation Analysis, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, grammaticalization, cognitive linguistics, typological and comparative studies.

This volume features a discourse empirical orientation from diverse perspectives and various methodologies, in which narratives, interviews, surveys, and large-scale databases or self-created written and spoken corpora are employed and analyzed to gain a better understanding of new developments and changes in Chinese language and discourse. Authors employ updated approaches from a variety of fields, including applied linguistics, functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, to describe the structure of Chinese language and discourse and to examine its critical issues, many focusing on globalization-induced language developments and changes. With an empirically-based discourse/socio-cultural approach, this collection makes valuable contributions to research on Chinese language and discourse and serves as a sound reference for Chinese researchers and educators in diverse fields such as Chinese language and discourse, Chinese linguistics and language education, Chinese multiculturalism, and more.

The Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse book series publishes works of original research on Chinese from a linguistic, cognitive, socio-cultural, or interactional perspective. We welcome contributions based on systematic documentation of language structure which displays fresh data and analysis from such areas as corpus linguistics, grammaticalization, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse and grammar, conversation analysis, and typological and comparative studies. Both monographs and thematic collections of research papers will be considered.

Abstract. Chinese language education is becoming popular in the world, including in Indonesia. Since the end of the New Order government in 1999 and the establishment of the strategic partnership between Indonesia and China in 2005, more and more Indonesians are starting to learn Chinese. Apart from being a foreign language, Chinese is also considered as a heritage language for Chinese Indonesian. With the increasing interest in learning Chinese, trilingual schools that offer Chinese, English, and Indonesian language learning have started to appear in various cities in Indonesia, including in Surabaya. Within the context of trilingual schools, this study uses a qualitative method to explore family language policy (FLP), related to multilingualism and the efforts to preserve the heritage language, in the Surabaya Chinese family. Data were obtained by interviewing eight participants who are parents of trilingual school students from various levels of education: kindergarten, elementary and secondary school. Three core components of FLP, namely: language ideology, language management, and language practice were used as guidance to code the interview data. We found that the language ideology of the parents is linked with the global and economic value of the language and the imagined multilingual person they hope their children to be. The parents consider English and Chinese as the important languages in relation to today’s globalized world. They imagine their children to be multilingual persons who have the necessary linguistic capital for communicating transnationally. But, due to the lack of Chinese and English language skills of the parents, the language practice at home is rather limited to the Indonesian language. They still rely heavily on trilingual schools to provide a language environment and linguistic capital of English and Chinese language. Although parents’ language ideology is supportive of their children being multilingual, it turns out that trilingual schools have a fairly important and central role in forming multilingualism in children.Keywords: family language policy, trilingual schools, Chinese Indonesians

Aspirational and expanding, this book examines contemporary Chinese language and discourse across a spectrum of linguistic layers and genres in diverse social contexts. Addressing issues ranging from the usual focus on language per se, or language use in reaction to the immediate settings, to the connections between properties of texts and social practices (ideologies, stancetaking, power relations, etc.), the updated and exemplary research projects presented in the volume demonstrates a developing trajectory of research in Chinese language and discourse. With its empirical focus and stress on the role of language and discourse in social practice, this important new book discusses various language features as well as gender, stancetaking, and identity in Chinese discourse. This is a vital discussion for anyone interested in contemporary Chinese language and discourse studies. In examination of different layers of language (i.e. from lexical items and sentence structures to discourse features and discursive practices) across different genres of texts, the research projects have drawn on a variety of linguistic approaches and methodologies, including functional linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and various approaches to discourse analysis. Researchers and students of Chinese linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, translation studies, and China studies in general will find this volume an indispensable reference and an enjoyable read.

Chinese is one of the oldest and most widely used languages with an ideographic writing system. It is curious to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese in cognitive linguistics, cognitive informatics, and knowledge science. This paper presents a comparative study on the fundamental theories and formal models of Chinese and other languages. A number of interesting findings on the cognitive and social impacts of the widely used Chinese language are revealed. It is found that, although the idiographic languages are more efficient in language manipulation, the alphabetic languages contributed more to the development of the knowledge processing power of the brain. A set of fundamental properties of knowledge is elicited, which reveals that the knowledge space of an individual is proportional to both the number of concepts and the number of their relations developed in long-term memory of the brain. Toward a more powerful and efficient scientific language for rigorous inference, the expression means of the Chinese language may yet need to be extended in its abstraction mechanisms and a convergent approach to integrate and synergize observations and truths in order to form rigorous theories and a formal knowledge framework. The findings of this work provide a foundation for comparative studies on Chinese and other languages in particular, and for cognitive linguistics and knowledge science in general.

The concept of “pride” has one of the central places in the system of moral and ethical concepts. The article provides a comparative analysis of the concept of "pride" from the point of view of linguacultural studies. The authors consider the features of the perception of "pride" in the linguistic picture of the world of two cultures, and also analyze the similarities and differences in the understanding of this concept. The authors draw attention to the historical context of the formation of ideas, which makes it possible to see the dynamics of changes in the perception of the context of "pride" over time. The study is based on the analysis of Russian and Chinese phraseological units, including proverbs and sayings. The paper includes descriptive, componential (analysis of lexical meaning) and comparative analysis. The authors come to the conclusion that the concept of "pride" has polar meanings, ranging from the shade of "positive pride" to the semantic connotation of "negative arrogance". When the concept of "pride" is expressed in a neutral or positive sense, it is perceived positively in both cultures. The analysis of phraseological units from the point of diachronic comparison showed that the perception of the concept in the Chinese language is characterized by relative "stability" over time, while in the Russian language this concept has experienced significant changes under the influence of extralinguistic factors. The conducted analysis opens up new prospects for further research in the field of intercultural communication and cognitive linguistics. Future research can focus on a more detailed study of other concepts, their evolution, influence on intercultural interaction, as well as on a comparative analysis of concepts in other languages.

Today, the Chinese language is increasingly serving as a vital bridge connecting China with the world, powerfully advancing mutual learning and shared prosperity among diverse civilisations[1]. A global wave of enthusiasm for learning Chinese is now surging. According to a 2023 report by the overseas edition of the People's Daily, over 30 million people worldwide are currently studying Chinese[2]. To better serve the multitude of Chinese language learners, the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) has organised experts from China and abroad in the fields of Chinese language teaching, linguistics, psychology, and educational measurement. Building upon thorough investigations into the actual conditions of overseas Chinese language teaching, and drawing upon the latest achievements in international language testing research in recent years, such as the International Chinese Language Proficiency Standards and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), Hanban has launched the new Chinese Proficiency Test, namely the HSK examination[3]. Considering the learning needs of Chinese learners and the constraints faced by some learners due to physical and natural environmental conditions, while also integrating the development of contemporary scientific information technologies such as the internet and multimedia, this research plans to develop a comprehensive Chinese learning application tailored for the HSK examination. This application is named the ‘YuLu’ Chinese Learning App (hereinafter referred to as the ‘YuLu App’). This research will first conduct a questionnaire survey among university student users, analysing their learning foundations, needs, and usage intentions. Based on these findings, four core modules will be designed: interface layout, learning functions, community interaction, and settings feedback. The aim is to provide diverse, personalised learning services to assist learners in achieving their HSK level objectives. Following the completion of the overall design, this research will conduct a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Language Path App, with ongoing refinement and iteration. The goal is to meet learners' fundamental needs for passing the HSK examination while simultaneously stimulating their enthusiasm for independent Chinese language learning, thereby promoting the widespread dissemination, friendly exchange, and deep integration of international Chinese language education.

This book is an anthology on topics in the grammar of Chinese (Sinitic) languages. The aim of the book is to meld historical and typological approaches in the examination of grammatical phenomena in order to show the extent to which both earlier stages of Chinese, as well as the modern dialects, differ from standard Mandarin. With this purpose in mind, each author has provided important background information on the Chinese language or dialect under investigation-or on the historical period as the case may be. Similarly, the introduction to the book provides an up-to-date description of Sinitic languages in terms of history and geography, placing the goals of the volume into perspective. A dialect map of China and a summary of each chapter is provided in this same introductory chapter to further facilitate use of the book. General readers, curious about Sinitic languages-or Chinese dialects-should find this collection equally accessible as specialists in the fields of Chinese linguistics; typology; historical and diachronic linguistics; grammaticalization; and empirical, descriptive linguistics. Topics covered include aspect, evidentials, locatives, verb complementation, reduplication, modal verbs, markers of predication, affixation, prepositions, relative clauses, interrogatives, and stratification. Language data from most of the ten main Chinese dialect groups are presented, the specific dialect studies being on Xiang, Cantonese Yue, and Taiwanese Southern Min. Earlier stages of Chinese examined include the Pre-Archaic Shang bone inscriptions, Archaic and Medieval Chinese, and the written genre of Classical Chinese.

This article aims to observe the latest scientific theories in the field of corpus linguistics, to analyze the latest research trends in corpus linguistics and the creation of language corpora. The results of our research are based on bibliometric analysis of scientific research results and review articles of universities, scientific research centers and well-known scientists of different countries where scientific and practical work is being carried out in the field of corpus linguistics. We analyzed the publications in the Scopus database in the field of corpus linguistics in 2017-2021 and found research results related to finding solutions to various problems in language corpora and problems in it and we observed bibliometric method through speech recognition, syntactic parsing problems, semantic tagging problems, automatic tokenization and lemmatization. This is the first research in Uzbek linguistics to report on the landscape of corpus linguistics in recent years. This research contributes to the general scientific understanding of corpus linguistics and provides insight into the past, present, and future of linguistics. 1353 publications were analyzed in the article. Although the field of corpus linguistics originated in the 1960s and 1970s, the fields of study have expanded and changed over time. Among the fields of linguistics, this direction is dynamic. In recent years, national corpora and target corpora have been created in various languages, and solutions to complex linguistic problems have been found.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the lettered words of the Chinese language and their use in the Chinese digital media discourse. Previously, this phenomenon was unusual for the traditional system of the Chinese language, in view of both the closed nature of China itself and the careful preservation of its national foundations. Active international contacts inevitably led to changes in the Chinese language, a large number of neologisms and foreign borrowings appear in it. The aim of the present study is to study the process of integrating lettered words into the Chinese language system and their features as new lexical units of the Chinese language, as well as studying the variety of lettered words of the Chinese language presented in a digital media discourse. The increasingly active penetration of the analyzed phenomenon into various areas of communication is due, in addition to globalization, to the principle of economy - a foreign, lettered term - easier to pronounce and spell than the generally accepted foreign loan word or the Chinese term itself. In addition, foreign-language lettered words often perform a euphemistic function in the modern Chinese language. With the spread of lettered words in the everyday oral and written communication of native Chinese speakers, their presence in the language began to cause both positive and negative response from the Chinese public.

According to the primary and secondary school syllabi, one of the major purposes of Chinese language teaching in Singapore is to inculcate Chinese culture and values in Chinese Singaporean youth (Ministry of Education MOE. (1992). Chinese language teaching and learning in Singapore: Report of the Chinese language review committee. Singapore: Author; MOE. (2004). Report of the Chinese language curriculum and pedagogy review committee. Singapore: Author; MOE. (2010). Nurturing active learners and proficient users: Report of mother tongue language review committee. Singapore: Author). However, the actual cultural content to be transmitted is only very briefly described in both the primary and secondary school syllabi, amounting to only a loose guideline for Chinese culture teaching. More importantly, teachers are required to restrict the teaching of culture to a certain extent to avoid the possible side effects of reducing the interest of their students in Chinese language itself (MOE. (2002). Secondary Chinese language syllabus. Singapore: Curriculum Planning and Development Division, Author; MOE. (2007). Primary Chinese language syllabus. Singapore: Curriculum Planning and Development Division, Author). The teacher in the classroom must decide what to teach, when to teach and how to teach Chinese culture. There has been no empirical research investigating how Chinese culture is taught by Singaporean teachers. To fill this gap, this chapter examines how Chinese culture is represented in teachers’ talk through an analysis of classroom discourse within a framework developed on the basis of systemic functional linguistics (SFL).

В статье рассматриваются сходства и различия между концептами "Péngyou" и "Друг" в китайской и русской лингвокультурах.

The subject of the study is the semantic and functional features of the lexico-semantic group of verbs denoting interpersonal relations in the Russian and Chinese languages. The verbal vocabulary representing the category of relationship describes the relationships that arise between people in the form of feelings, judgments and appeals to each other in the course of everyday life. The purpose of the proposed article is to identify the semantic and functional features of the verbs of the lexico-semantic group of interpersonal relations in the system of Russian and Chinese languages. The study revealed similarities and differences in the meaning of these verbs. As the analysis showed, some Chinese verbs do not match the meaning of the verbs of the Russian language. This article also examines the types of semantic changes in the semantic structure of the verbal word form functioning in the context. The main method of studying this group of verbs in Russian and Chinese is the comparative method. The descriptive method and the functional-semantic method, as well as the method of component analysis, were used in the selection and use of linguistic material. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the verbs of interpersonal relations are still insufficiently studied on the materials of the Russian and Chinese languages. The results of the research can be used in the practice of teaching university courses in such disciplines as cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, and intercultural communication. The study allows us to conclude that the verbs of interpersonal relationships are quite often used in both languages. The meanings of Chinese and Russian verbs are not always equivalent. Their semantic structures may also differ. The analysis of interlanguage gaps reveals the presence of incomplete lexical correspondence to a foreign word. Some verbal lexicons express interpersonal relationships in their direct meanings, while others develop this ability as a result of semantic modulation and semantic derivation. Interpersonal relationships can be expressed by verbs from other lexico-semantic groups, acquiring the semantics of interpersonal relationships in the context. In conclusion, we note that expressions of interpersonal relationships can also be verb-noun combinations, which, when analyzing various specifiers in the context, indicate the reasons for a positive or negative attitude towards a person.

Cognitive Linguistics is the most swiftly growing school in modern linguistics. Theorists and practitioners in this discipline of linguistics work collaboratively to create a scientific, objectively verifiable approach to the study of language, integrating the theories and applications of general linguistics, philosophy, neurosciences and computer sciences. The cognitive approach to the study of language were originally grounded in philosophical thinking about how the brain functions vis-à-vis language processing and language learning, but more recent work highlights the significance of accumulating evidence from a wide-ranging empirical and methodological data base. The Cognitive Linguistics Reader encompasses significant writings by eminent scholars in the fields of cognitive linguistics accumulated over the last four decades, including both the classic seminal works and contemporary reflections and additions of cognitive linguistics to the different fields of linguistics. The essays and articles - selected to characterize a full-fledged range, scope and diversity of the Cognitive Linguistics sciences and applications - are clustered by theme into sections with each section discretely presented. The book opens with a comprehensive summary of Cognitive Linguistics intended for the beginner readership and closes with thorough additional readings to guide the reader through the thriving literature of this field. The Cognitive Linguistics Reader is both a perfect overview introducing the full gamut of Cognitive Linguistics and a complete, integrated reference book, bringing together the most significant work in the different fields of linguistics and other related sub-fields such as language acquisition and language pedagogy.