Referential Strategies Research Articles

A Study on C-E Translation Methods of Culture-Loaded Words: A Case Study of Selected Modern Chinese Essays

As a country competes for its overall national strength all over the world, culture has grown to be an increasingly significant aspect. Considering the differences in the development paths and cultural traditions of different countries, more sophisticated translation strategies and skills are needed in the process of cultural going out. From the cultural perspective, this paper takes Zhang Peiji’s English Translation of Selected Modern Chinese Essays as an example, selects and summarizes culture-loaded words full of Chinese characteristics, and analyzes their translation strategies and skills, including place names, salutations and four-character idioms, which are representative of culture-loaded words. This paper aims to provide referential strategies for the translation of similar culture-loaded words in other texts, and to solve the difficulties in the translation of culture-loaded words. After the case analysis, this paper found that the most commonly used translation methods of culture-loaded words should be literal and free translation, and that it is necessary to preserve the original meaning and reveal the accurate connotation of culture-loaded words in order to convey the uniqueness and characteristics of Chinese culture.

Referential Strategies in the Speeches of President George W. Bush after 9/11 Attacks

Referential Strategies in the Speeches of President George W. Bush after 9/11 Attacks

The Comprehensibility and Appreciation of Non-Binary Pronouns in Newspaper Reporting. The Case of Hen and Die in Dutch

Abstract This paper examines the effect of the recently introduced Dutch non-binary 3rd person pronouns hen and die on tesssxt comprehensibility and text appreciation in the context of newspaper reporting on non-binary persons. Moreover, it presents a first measurement of Flemish people’s familiarity with and attitudes towards this pronominal reform in Dutch in its early stage. In a survey experiment we compared the use of non-binary hen and die (both combined with hen as object and hun as possessive form) with established referential strategies. We also examined the potential mediating role of perceived awkwardness of the referential strategy used and tested the moderating effect of cueing, i.e. making readers aware of the fact that the person reported on identifies as non-binary and prefers non-binary pronouns. The results show that perceived awkwardness explains the lower comprehensibility and appreciation scores of non-binary hen and that cueing improves those scores. Overall, our findings suggest that especially the non-binary pronoun die has the potential to be successfully implemented.

Referential modification strategy based on phenolic hydroxyl-containing KSA luminogens for ER-targeting probe construction

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) plays essential roles in various physiological processes and is intimately connected to kinds of diseases. The development of ER-targeting theranostic agents is highly demanded for precise treatments, however, the effective and referential strategies for the construction of ER-targeting probes are limited. Herein, we developed series of ER-targeting luminogens based on keto-salicylaldehyde azine (KSA) framework by introducing phenolic hydroxyl group, which present good theranostic performance with selective enrichment in ER. Under systematical structure modulation, the key role of phenolic hydroxyl group at K-terminal in ER-targeting was experimentally confirmed. Besides, the cyanobenzyl moiety at S-terminal can enhance the luminous efficiency and improve cellular uptake ability. Moreover, the generated reactive oxygen species (ROS) of these KSA derivatives can efficiently trigger ER stress to induce the apoptosis of cancer cells, resulting in the effective inhibition of tumor cells both in vitro and in vivo. Therefore, this feasible modification strategy of inserting phenolic hydroxyl group to common multi-aryl-based luminogens provides a reliable and referential approach for ER-targeting probe establishment.

Young Chinese EFL Learners’ Referential Strategies in Written Chinese and English Narratives

A good command of referential skills has been seen as an effective indicator that reveals learners’ discourse-related competence. However, in the realm of second language learning, a scant of attention has been paid to investigate L2 learners’ referential skills in narratives. Therefore, the present study aims to address the gap through examining young Chinese EFL learners’ abilities in using referential forms in English narratives. Three Chinese EFL fourth graders in Taiwan were asked to produce English and Chinese written narratives, elicited through a wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). The results showed that the participants made few mistakes and achieved high level of appropriateness in the use of referential expressions in English narratives. It was also found that they used similar referential strategies across different discourse contexts in both English and Chinese narratives. It was suggested that their near-proficient performance regarding the referential skills may be attributed to the positive transfer from L1 to L2. However, the analysis of some mistakes by the participants also demonstrated that L2 overgeneralization played a role that hinders the participants’ performance. Finally, implications for pedagogy and suggestions for future research are made.

Language, power and identity: discursive construction of post-Revolution national identity in Tunisia

ABSTRACT This study investigates post-revolution discursive identity formation in Tunisia. It uses insights from the discourse-historical approach to analyze five speeches given by the Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed since his election in 2019. Focusing on the referential and argumentative strategies employed in these speeches, the analysis reveals that the President constantly appeals to a unique Tunisian identity that reconciles Tunisia’s position between the East and the West and between Arabness, Africanism, Islam and Mediterranean cosmopolitism. The analysis indicates that in the context of an unstable post-revolution environment in Tunisia and in the MENA region as a whole, Kaïs Saïed tends to invoke the alleged importance of collective identity, be it on the basis of religion, history, language or culture, or by stressing the importance of affiliation with an ethnic group, a nation or an ummah.

Referential Strategies of the Correlation between Representational Gestures and Representation of Social Actors in Al-Fatlawi's Interview. A CDA Study

The present study deals with the gestural behavior in regard with linguistic manipulation and ideology in discourse, and how they work together to construct socio-cognitive representation of social actors; As a multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study seeks to diagnose representations in the communicative interaction in which gestures and speech function in meaning making, and to reveal the kind of ideas, absences and assumptions underlying the linguistic patterns expressed in speech and their associate representative gestures. The study works on uncovering the correlation between representational gestures (iconic, metaphoric and deictic) and specific linguistic patterns (circulating the representation of social actors with a polarization of Us and Them) in Al-Fatlawi's political speech (an interview on the channel of Al-Rasheed).

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Representation of Women in Selected South Asian Songs


 This paper analyzed how women are represented through derogatory use of language in the lyrics of the songs by men. This research is qualitative in its nature, different approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis as research tools, have been used to analyze the data. For a comprehensive analysis triangulated approach by Van Dijk (2006), Referential strategies by Reisigl and Wodak (2009), and schema of discursive reproduction of power by Dijk (2015) along with seven building tasks of language by (Gee, 2010) are used. The findings reveal that women are being portrayed as rapacious creature, as they tend to knee on just wealth and wealthiest, materialists, disloyal and liars, valueless as compared to men and as an object for sexual comfort for men, through different Punjabi songs. This study was focused only on the negative representation of women through Punjabi songs in South Asian countries, it can be analyzed how such representation of women in songs is affecting the thoughts of young generation. 
 Key words: Punjabi songs, Lyrics, CDA, Gender stereotypes, Women’s representation

When Evaluative Adjectives Prevent Contradiction in a Debate

This paper argues that some words are so highly charged with meaning by a community that they may prevent a discussion during which each participant is on an equal footing. These words are indeed either unanimously accepted or rejected. The presence of these adjectival groups pushes the antagonist to find rhetorical strategies to circumvent them. The main idea we want to develop is that some propositions are not easily debatable in context because of some specific value-bearing words (VBWs), and one of the goals of this paper is to build a methodological tool for finding and classifying these VBWs (with a focus on evaluative adjectives). Our study echoes the importance of “cultural keywords” (as reported by Wierzbicka, Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, 1997) in argument (as reported by Rigotti & Rocci, Argumentation in practice, 2005), but is rather based on a German approach developed by (as reported by Dieckmann, Sprache in der Politik: Einführung in die Pragmatik und Semantik der politischen, 1975), (as reported by Strauss and Zifonun, Der politische Wortschatz, 1986), and (as reported by Girnth, Sprache und Sprachverwendung in der Politik: Eine Einführung in die linguistische Analyse öffentlich-politischer Kommunikation, 2015) about “Miranda” and “Anti-Miranda” words that is expanded and refined here. In particular, our study tries to understand why some statements, fueled by appreciative (Tseronis, 2014) or evaluative adjectives, have such rhetorical effects on a pragmatic level in the particular context of a vote on the Swiss popular initiative called “for more affordable housing”. This context is fruitful since two parties offer reasons for two opposing policy claims: namely, to accept or to reject an initiative. When one party uses arguments containing such universally unassailable adjectival groups to defend a “yes” vote (in our example, pleading for more affordable housing rents), the opposing party cannot use a symmetrical antonym while pleading for the “no” vote. The methodological tool that is proposed here could shed light on the use of certain rhetorical and referential strategies in conflicting policy proposition contexts.

Different Discursive Constructions of Chinese Political Congresses in China Daily and The New York Times: A Corpus-based Discourse Study

ABSTRACT This paper adopts a corpus-based critical discourse study of the representations of the National Congresses of the Communist Party of China (NCCPC) in China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT) in the past two decades. It is found that the shared keywords in the CD corpus and NYT corpus tend to suggest different discursive constructions of the same event in different social-political contexts. The different representations of the NCCPC can be revealed in the three types of discourse-historical discursive strategies (referential or nomination strategies, predicational strategies, and perspectivation strategies). CD prefers to construct the NCCPC as important political events and brand China's political system, China's contribution to world stability and prosperity in reporting the events. By contrast, NYT tends to construct them as events of power transfer and point towards criticisms of China's political system.

Political Myth in Trump's Speech on Immigration: A Discourse Historical Approach

Due to the ever-changing political scene and the increasing effect of political language on people's perception, linguistic analysis is inevitable to understand political matters. By using myths in speeches, politicians legitimise specific political actions and motivate the public to accept these actions This study inspects the concept of 'Political Myth' by Bottici (2007) within the framework of Discourse Historical Approach [DHA] and Van Leeuwen's model of Social Actor's Representation. The present study examines the utilisation of the political myth of Conspiracism in Trump's Immigration speech to legitimize the rejection of refugees. The USA, known as the land of opportunities, has a long history of rejecting refugees and immigrants based on the myth of Conspiracism. In the famous Immigration speech, former President, Donald Trump, relied on promoting anti-immigrant sentiments to justify rejecting refugees. The data under study comprises extracts that referred to immigrants/refugees and American citizens. This paper attempts to answer the questions: What is meant by Political Myth? What are the principles of the political myth of Conspiracism? What are the referential strategies used to depict the in-group and the out-group? To what extent did the depiction of the in-group and the out-group fulfil the principles of the myth of Conspiracism?. Overall, this study indicates the usefulness of examining political myth to understand the political status quo. Also, it sheds light on the importance of linguistic analysis to decipher and evaluate politicians' actions.

Trump and Muslims: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Islamophobic Rhetoric in Donald Trump’s Selected Tweets

The emergence of Donald Trump as an anti-Muslim-Islam presidential candidate and victory over Hillary Clinton is an issue of debate and division in the United States’ political sphere. Many commentators and political pundits criticize Trump for his disparaging rhetoric on Twitter and present him as an example of how Twitter can be an effective tool for the construction and extension of political polarization. The current study analyzes the selected tweets by Donald Trump posted on Twitter to unmask how he uses language to construct Islamophobic discourse structures and attempts to form his ideological structures along with. The researchers hypothesize that Islamophobia is a marked feature of Trump’s political career realized by specific rhetorical and discursive devices. Therefore, the study purposively takes 40 most controversial tweets of Donald Trump against Islam and Muslims and carried out a critical discourse analysis with the help of macro-strategies of the discourse given by Wodak and Meyer and van Dijk’s referential strategies of political discourse. The findings reveal that Trump uses language rhetorically to exclude people of different ethnic identities, especially Muslims, through demagogic language to create a difference of “us” vs. “them” and making in this way “America Great Again”.

Political and Ideological Tensions in Palestine

It is widely accepted that the struggle over media representation within the Palestinian-Israeli struggle is no less important than the struggle on the ground (Wolfsfeld, 1997). Although the role of the media in this struggle has been a focal interest for researchers, the vast majority of studies adopt top-down approaches with macro-level tools of analysis which lead to a dichotomous positive ‘Self’ and negative ‘Other’ representation. This study, in contrast, is a qualitative language-based analysis of three Palestinian news websites, which publish in English, during the 2014 Gaza war. These news websites are indicative of the media landscape in Palestine, and the choice of these outlets is intended to present a range of possible views. The study adds to the effort that approaches media discourse to detect fissures and dissonances, rather than identifying stabilities and symmetries. It aims at revealing some discursive aspects of the way marginal ideologies compete with the dominant discourse in Palestine. This is intended to shed light on the latent change in the Palestinian political culture and how it is discursively articulated. Within the framework of critical discourse analysis, the study takes account of transitivity (Halliday, 1985; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), the social actor model (van Leeuwen, 2008) and referential strategies (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) to conduct its bottom-up analysis. The study finds that Palestinian news websites subtly exploit representations of actions and actors in their struggle for power, representativeness and legitimacy. More importantly, the results of this study reveal that a marginal ideology in Palestine is growing and competing with hegemonic national narratives. While the hegemonically dominant ideology depends on common public knowledge and backgrounds much contextual information, the marginal ideology mainly functions via the extensive contextualization of events, which takes a bottom-up discursive direction in relation to the prevailing socio-political culture.Keywords: Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory; conflict; Shakespeare; Chinese Daoism; education

Authority and ethics: A case for estrangement in educational research and research education

This article focuses attention on an underexamined issue in the literature on educational research ethics: how ethical authority is established in educational research. We address this from a perspective that disrupts naturalised approaches to ethics, arguing that rather than seeking ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’, researchers are always tasked with constructing ethical stances. Attention can then be placed on the array of embodied and objectified resources that might be recruited in establishing these. Through an engagement with published academic accounts of ethical reflection and decision‐making, the article explores the ways that educational researchers achieve or sometimes question their ethical security in respect of their research activity. The analysis we present draws out the referential strategies that constitute ethical subjectivity and maps the diversity of anchoring points that might be recruited in this action. We also draw attention to the process of recontextualisation that is inevitable when one activity (or aspect of an activity) regards another, introducing necessary incoherence into ethical practice. The case we present celebrates rather than seeking to conceal or repair such disruption.

Representation of Social Actors in <i>Financial times</i> Report on China’s Panda Diplomacy

Communicators have a range of referential options to represent individuals and groups, who in Critical Discourse Analysis are often termed “social actors” or “participants”. These choices allow communicators to place people in the social world and highlight certain aspects of their identity while downplaying others. Choosing one social category instead of another means foregrounding certain features and backgrounding others, leading to different views and interpretations of the persons represented. This paper takes a quantitative study of the social actors represented in Jamil Anderlini’s article on China’s panda diplomacy published in the Financial Times, identifying and analyzing referential strategies adopted in representing participants involved in the social practice, mainly focusing on the discussion of such representation means as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/ individualization, association/dissociation and their indications for the revelation of the writer’s attitudes, beliefs and political stance. The study reveals that the writer’s representation of participants tends to be bi-polarized, holding sharply different attitudes towards the main social actors—China, foreign countries and zoos, researchers and FT, depicting China as a crafty, deceptive, and intimidating manipulator of panda diplomacy while other countries as innocent, ignorant and helpless victims. This difference can be partly explained by Teun van Dijk’s “ideological square” in which China is a typical out-group, emphasized as a communist, authoritarian country in opposition to the democratic West to which the writer belongs.

Turkey's Otherness In The Identity Discourses Of European Parliament

This study aims to analyze discursive constructions of the Turkey’s otherness with its relation to European identity in the European Parliament (EP). The social constructivist approach is employed in the study and European identity is proposed as a contested, hybrid and relatively exclusivist concept, which primarily shaped within the self/other nexus particularly in the enlargement process. The focus of the paper is the identification of hegemonic referential strategies and related metaphors emphasizing otherness of Turkey, without denying the inclusive discourses in the EP. In that sense, the research data consists of 1999-2012 EP plenary debates. The major findings are a) the tendency to present acquired characteristics as the innate differences alongside with the inherent differences; b) the majority of exclusive discourses possessed the right-wing MEPs and c) the exclusivist debates peaked 2004-09 term, the time of the launch of negotiations.

User adoption of a hybrid social tagging approach in an online knowledge community

Purpose Online knowledge communities make great contributions to global knowledge sharing and innovation. Resource tagging approaches have been widely adopted in such communities to describe, annotate and organize knowledge resources mainly through users’ participation. However, it is unclear what causes the adoption of a particular resource tagging approach. The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that drive users to use a hybrid social tagging approach. Design/methodology/approach Technology acceptance model and social cognitive theory are adopted to support an integrated model proposed in this paper. Zhihu, one of the most popular online knowledge communities in China, is taken as the survey context. A survey was conducted with a questionnaire and collected data were analyzed through structural equation model. Findings A new hybrid social resource tagging approach was refined and described. The empirical results revealed that self-efficacy, perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use exert positive effect on users’ attitude. Moreover, social influence, PU and attitude impact significantly on users’ intention to use a hybrid social resource tagging approach. Originality/value Theoretically, this study enriches the type of resource tagging approaches and recognizes factors influencing user adoption to use it. Regarding the practical parts, the results provide online information system providers and designers with referential strategies to improve the performance of the current tagging approaches and promote them.

The impact of the interactional setting on the choice of referring expressions in narratives

This article aims to account for the impact of the interactional setting on adults’ referential uses by determining if telling a story to/with a child impacts the referential strategies of adults. The long-term goal of this study is to better understand the models of reference in narratives children are exposed to in order to account for young children’s uses. The study analysed the referring expressions of 20 women telling a story with their child (5 to 7 years old) (CHILD condition), and 20 women telling the same story to an adult experimenter (ADULT condition). Referring expressions were coded according to their linguistic type, their position in the referential chain and the properties of the referents. Results revealed differences between the two settings in the referential choices for the first mention and the reactivation of a referent. Overall, in the CHILD condition, the participants used a wider range of referring expressions than in the ADULT condition. In the CHILD condition participants were oriented towards the interactional demands of enlisting the child in the task and keeping his/her attention. The findings suggest that the models children experience differ from adults’ uses, which are generally considered as the developmental target.

Effects of repeated practice in pre-task planning on the acquisition of English personal pronouns by Chinese EFL learners

While the literature concentrates on the effects of one-time planning on immediate task performance, this article aims to uncover how repeated practice in planning helps promote L2 learners' acquisition of English third-person singular pronouns, conceptualized as pronominal use and selection of referential strategies in their oral monologue. In this study, 63 intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners were enrolled in a longitudinal experiment, in which they narrated picture-prompted stories 12 times under one of three conditions, namely, unguided planning, guided planning, or no planning. Comparison of posttest data among the groups showed that (a) long-term practice in planning facilitated the learners' control over accurate use of “he” but not the use of “she”; (b) repeated planning practice did not alter L2 learners' strategy for reference selection when doing a new task, but task repetition seemed to improve referential use; and (c) planning guidance did not promote their acquisition of the target form. Such results also suggested that effects of pretask planning might be moderated by the cognitive load required for producing the linguistic forms.

Evaluation of the uptake capacities of heavy metals in Chinese cabbage

Heavy metal (HM) contamination in soil result in second pollution damage to Chinese cabbage, leading to deleterious health impacts. To elucidate the common transfer and accumulation characteristics of HMs in Chinese cabbage cultivar is important for safety breeding and consumption. In this case, concentrations and transfer capacities of HMs (Cd, Cr, Hg, Pb and As) in 35 common Chinese cabbage genotypes and their genotypic difference were investigated in this work. Results indicate that Chinese cabbage cultivar was more susceptible to Cd pollution, Hg was easily sifted from underground part to aerial part, Cr and Pb have similar enrichment and translocation characteristics, and Chinese cabbage cultivar had tolerance to As toxicity to some extent. Moreover, genotypic difference in HM accumulation in different parts of Chinese cabbage cultivar was also observed, and for edible part, followed by Hg>As>Cd>Pb>Cr. Referring to overall HM pollution level and biomass yield of edible part of 35 tested Chinese cabbages, B18, B6, B2 and B3 could be considered as the potential HMs pollution-safe Chinese cabbage cultivars. Information founded in this work may be used to provide referential strategies and methods to minimize the influx of HMs pollutants to human being through consumption and cultivation of Chinese cabbages.