Chinese Discourse Analysis Research Articles

Evolution of interpreting as a social practice in China during the past four decades. An analysis of Chinese discourse on interpreting through the lens of social practice theory

This article examines how interpreting has evolved as a social practice in China and how it has been shaped by the changing social environment during the past four decades. Viewing interpreting as a social practice, the study employs an adapted three-element model from the social practice theory as the analytic framework. Through a qualitative thematic and content analysis of about 50 relevant articles representing the three sets of elements, which are selected from a database of Chinese articles on interpreting, and published in quality journals of Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index/Core Journals of China in the past four decades, the “competences,” “meanings,” and “materials” of the social practice of interpreting are identified and their evolution in different periods are analysed. Through an examination of the economic, socio-political, and technological developments in China during the past four decades, the evolution of interpreting in three periods (late 1970s to early 1990s, the mid-1990s to early 2000s, and 2007 to present) are identified, and the role of the changing environment in shaping the social practice of interpreting is revealed.

Соотношение визуальных и вербальных компонентов в поликодовых текстах китайской социальной рекламы

The article presents an analysis of the discourse of the Chinese public service announcements, taking into account its national specifics, and analyses the correlation of verbal and visual components of polycode texts of public service announcements. The subject of the research is the national and cultural special features of the Chinese public service announcements discourse. The material was samples of public service announcements dedicated to traditional Chinese values, the basic values of socialism and the “Chinese dream” policy. The research methods were Shi Xu’s culturological discourse analysis method and method of analysis of polycode text proposed by M. B. Voroshilova. The results obtained confirm the validity of Shi Xu’s method, in which special attention is paid to the cultural and historical features of the PRC in the analysis of Chinese discourse, as well as the dominant role of the visual component in most of the polycode texts of the analysed public service announcements.

Analyzing Chinese text with clause relevance structure

Discourse structure is generally represented as hierarchical structure, the two most well known representations are rhetorical structure theory (RST) and Penn discourse treebank (PDTB). The main problem of the hierarchical structure is that it can not describe the direct semantic relevance between the elementary discourse units (EDU), especially the non-adjacent and cross-level EDUs. Discourse dependency structure (DDS) has been put forward in recent years to describe the head-dependent relation between the EDUs. However, the judgment process of the head can not be answered theoretically. This problem is particularly serious in Chinese discourse analysis, because Chinese lacks the form differences between the main clauses and the subordinate clauses. In this paper, we propose clause relevance structure to represent the discourse structure. Compared with the hierarchical discourse structure and DDS, the clause relevance structure can effectively describe the direct semantic association between discontinuous and cross-level clauses in a text, and the construction of structure is not presupposed by the head recognition. We propose the judgment criteria and formal constraints of the clause relevance structure, and built a human-annotated corpus on Chinese text. Based on the Chinese corpus, we explore the automatic recognition of clause relevance structure. The clause relevance recognition task is formalized as a classification problem and performed by the BERT-based model. A bidirectional LSTM layer is added on the top of the BERT to improve the performance, and the recognition accuracy (90.77%) is achieved by the BERT-LSTM model. Experimental results show that the long distance clause pairs are the main difficulties in the clause relevance recognition, and these difficulties mainly focus on the positive examples, while the clause pairs with short distance are especially difficult to be correctly recognized as negative relevance.

Building a Chinese discourse topic corpus with a micro-topic scheme based on theme-rheme theory

BackgroundHow to build a suitable discourse topic structure is an important issue in discourse topic analysis, which is the core of natural language understanding. Not only is it the key basic unit to implement automatic computing, but also the key to realize the transformation from unstructured data to structured data during the process of big data analytics. Although the discourse topic structure has wide potential for application in discourse analysis and related tasks, the research on constructing such discourse resources is quite limited in Chinese language. In this paper, we propose a micro-topic scheme (MTS) to represent the discourse topic structure in the Chinese language according to theme-rheme theory, with elementary discourse topic unit(EDTU) as the node and referent of theme-rheme as link. In particular, thematic progression is employed to directly represent the development of the discourse topic structure.ResultsGuided by the MTS, we manually annotate a Chinese Discourse Topic Corpus (CDTC) of 500 documents. Moreover, we get 89.9 and 72.15 F1 value in two identification preliminary experiments, respectively, which show that the proposed representation can perform good automatic computation.ConclusionThe lack of the formal representation system and related corpus resources for Chinese discourse topic structure has greatly restricted the study of discourse topic analysis in natural language, and further affected the development of natural language understanding. To address the above issues, a micro-topic scheme(MTS) representation is proposed based on functional grammar theory, and the corresponding corpus resources(i.e., CDTC) are constructed. Our preliminary evaluation justifies the appropriateness of the MTS for Chinese discourse analysis and the usefulness of our CDTC.

ОПЫТ АНАЛИЗА КИТАЙСКОГО ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ ВНЕШНЕ И ВНУТРЕННЕ ОРИЕНТИРОВАННОГО ДИСКУРСА О ПОЛИТИКЕ ОГРАНИЧЕНИЯ РОЖДАЕМОСТИ В КНР

Nagibina Irina Gennadievna – senior lecturer of Eastern languages dpt. Institute of philology and language communication of Siberian Federal University. The article presents and analyzes a monographic study of the Chinese scientific Jan Na devoted to a discursive perspective, the study of women’s rights, namely the strategies of internal and external orientation of the representation of the Policy of birth control conducted in China for more than 30 years. The paper describes the strategy implemented by the Chinese authorities both in Chinese and English discourses. The article is an attempt to describe the ways and methods for the study of Chinese discourse based on cultural and philosophical components of the Eastern mind. Key words: policy of birth control, Chinese discourse analysis, philosophical and religious canons in Chinese communication .

Discourse is cultural: New approaches to discourse analysis in the ‘Non-West’

A review article on two recent books arguing that Western techniques of discourse analysis are unsuited to the discourses of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The review article asks whether Shi-Xu, sole author of the earlier book and one of a trio of authors of the later one, has tacitly changed his view or has contradicted himself concerning whether his proposed Chinese Discourse Analysis is culture specific or applicable to anywhere in the ‘non-West’. The review article strives to balance recognition of the books' positive contributions with honest acknowledgement of logical weaknesses.