This book contains research by established and junior scholars from around the world who are committed to exploring contemporary Chinese language and discourse, reflecting the latest developments in the field by examining contemporary Chinese language and discourse across linguistic layers and genres in diverse social contexts.
The most notable breakthroughs in Chinese language and discourse studies over the past forty years can be broadly categorized into quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. Quantitative linguistic research provides insight into exploring language learning, language change, and the structure of natural language. The field of qualitative linguistic research has expanded from the analysis of language to the field of discourse analysis.
This book contains research projects that draw on a variety of linguistic approaches and methodologies, addressing issues ranging from concerns about language to the connections between properties of texts and social practices. As a teacher of Chinese as a foreign language, this interesting reading not only enriches my existing theoretical knowledge, but also gives me a new understanding and inspiration for some language phenomena. Starting from a multidimensional pragmatic-semantic-cognitive interface, Zhu Dongyi (chapter 3) proposes that the Chinese conversational narrative marker is a connecting device for establishing the narrator's subjective attitude to introduce his or her narrative intent. This chapter tends to regard conversational narrative markers, a new research term, as a discourse structure form in a specific context under the category of discourse marker. In the conclusion, it reminds readers that the corpus cited in this research does not necessarily reflect the overall usage characteristics of conversational narrative markers, but it is expected to provide a possible tool and research method for similar research. Textual analysis and discourse analysis are both qualitative studies, and there is some overlap in the objects and theoretical sources of research. However, compared with textual analysis, discourse analysis puts more emphasis on revealing the relationship between ideology and power behind the communicative content.
Taking the 2016 Hong Kong Legislative Council election debate as a study, Helen Wan (chapter 7) combines the stance triangle (John Du Bois, Stancetaking in disourse, 2017) and gestural-unit analysis (Adam Kendon, ‘Gesture units, gesture phrases and speech’, Gesture, 2004) to investigate how verbal and non-verbal activities are strategically organized to project affective and cognitive positions in the Hong Kong political debates. Xiao Jiayuan, Yang Qing, & He Shiyao (chapter 12) discuss the reliable and unreliable narratives of the English translation of re-narration of Nainai from the intersection of linguistics and narratology, providing a new perspective on the translation and transmission of Honglou Meng. This research has gone beyond the pursuit of pure literature and language values, and its contemporary significance is more to communicate and spread Chinese culture and English culture through translation.
The three sections of Chinese language, discourse, and translation studies included in this book are all focused on empirical research, emphasizing the role of language and discourse in social practice. By discussing various language features, it can provide a new perspective and useful reference for those who are interested in contemporary Chinese language and discourse research.
