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Recently, there has been a surging interest in meaning-making processes in Chinese social media. However, most studies focus on the current contexts, ignoring the process of entextualization, that is, how semiotic resources have been decontextualized from the original/prior contexts and recontextualized in the current Chinese social media context. This paper intends to fill this gap by studying an example of entextualization coupled with modal shift. Specifically, an oral warning – initially a line frequently uttered in a Japanese animation serial – has been reshaped and reused to type comments in various video scenes and for various meanings on a Chinese video-sharing website Bilibili (https://www.bilibili.com/). Drawing on selective notions in computer-mediated communication and social semiotic multimodality, this paper analyses a set of these comments, which we call high energy texts, focusing on their multimodal quality and the meaning-making processes involved. We suggest that new possibilities are generated during the modal shift (i.e. from speech to writing); in particular, warning acts carried out through high energy texts have been transformed into a collective social action that is recognized and understood by Bilibili users, the participation of which enables the users to build alignment and enact different identities. Our paper showcases how a social semiotic multimodal perspective can enrich our understanding of the semiosis in Chinese social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As China internationalizes its own banks more and more, and the Chinese are an expanding market in Western banks, the linguistic specificities of communication strategies may be understood and applied in the professional environments of banks. The present comparison is based on the key features of metadiscourse markers in the Chinese English-version CEO letters and the Western English-version CEO letters in banking annual reports. Metadiscourse in business genres is an under-represented topic, particularly across cultures; this study invites further inquiry. This paper applies corpus-based contrastive analysis to CEO letters in English from Chinese and Western banks. Comparing distribution patterns of metadiscourse markers, we found that both interactive and interactional metadiscourse was more frequently used in the Western letters. This suggests that Western CEO letters tend to use more credibility and affective appeals, while Chinese CEO letters are based more on rational appeals. Variation in use of metadiscourse is discussed with a focus on the interplay of linguistic and cultural features. This study contributes to the fields of Chinese English professional written communication, and cross-cultural writing in workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using naturally occurring conversation data, this paper investigates preverbal ah in Shishan, a dialect of Lingao of the Tai-Kadai language family. On the surface, Shishan ah displays broad parallels to English also, too, and Mandarin ye in the marking of “sameness” and “additivity,” as well as concessive relations and a variety of speaker stances. This paper proposes a unified analysis of Shishan ah through the central meaning of [addition + reassessment]. Specifically, in direct interaction, ah-marked utterances primarily constitute misaligning responses, signaling a piece of information as capable of engendering a shift in the interlocutor's prior evaluative stance. In narratives, ah highlights aspects of the narratives where re-evaluation occurs, which ultimately leads to a more elaborate, thorough understanding of the situation of concern. Overall, this paper contributes to particle research, particularly research of the interactive basis of the meanings and functions of particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a comparative study of thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts, conducted within the systemic functional theory of Theme-Rheme () and the thematic progression model evolving from Daneš's work in the 1970s. It is suggested, following a detailed analysis of a corpus of sixty English and Chinese texts, that there are some similarities and disparities in structuring thematic information between the two languages. Overall, the key differences identified are that the English news tends to have a greater incidence of textual, and thus, multiple Themes, whereas the Chinese news tends to allow elliptical participants and circumstantial elements to be thematized more frequently. Such differences can be attributable to the distinctions in grammatical structure across the languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the use of gesture by participants of the reality television show Sisters Who Make Waves. Based on 23.5 h of footage involving 30 participants, the analysis focuses on gestural communication by the female participants, who must straddle a formal/informal communicative environment dictated by the medium of reality television. More specifically, I examine two features of pointing gestures by the participants: social parameters and context constraints. The main interest is how a combination of general cultural norms as well as considerations of the interlocutor's social status contribute to gesture use. Context constraints and pragmatic concerns are also analyzed regarding the choice of manual or non-manual pointing gestures. These factors are seen to play a strong role in gesture choice. The findings show that the participants are sensitive to these social and contextual variables, especially regarding concepts like saving face, politeness, and friendly intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-mail has firmly established itself as a dominant channel of interaction for both social and professional purposes. Despite its importance as a communication tool, the influence of professional roles on discursive practices has yet to be thoroughly addressed, especially when e-mail is specifically used between academics, students, and other relevant stakeholders in the higher education setting, where English is a second or foreign language. Through the case study of an e-mail corpus containing messages received by an academic in one year, this paper investigates the general discursive patterns, discourse structures, and nonstandard linguistic features of e-mail discourse in higher education in Hong Kong. Specifically, it examines how such discursive practices are influenced by sender roles and sender-receiver relationships. Findings from the present study show traces of interdiscursivity in e-mail use in the academic domain and how sender roles influence the level of interdiscursivity between e-mail and genres of old and new. The similarities and differences in the discursive practices between academic professionals and students in e-mail communication also underscore the importance of having more fine-grained accounts of e-mail use in a wide range of settings in professional communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated in the hybrid context of a Chinese courtroom, this paper sets out to examine how attorneys orient themselves to differences in court debate. Applying the notion of intertextuality as understood within the tradition of Bakhtinian dialogism, the analysis focuses on how attorneys handle otherness, their adversary, and the situated texts (i.e., the legal documents, witness statements, etc.) when they argue. The findings suggest that attorneys may intertextually construct two stances, confrontational monologue and rational dialogue. The implication of this study is two-fold: attorneys are aware of contextual conditioning and, procedurally, attorney advocacy has a potential to influence the final judgment. Data for this study are drawn from three highly iconic infringement cases in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a conceptual model to study the discourse of initial negotiation meetings between members of New Zealand and Chinese corporations. It attempts to make two contributions to existing cross-cultural negotiation research, especially to rapport management. Firstly, it develops a conceptual position where negotiation meetings require mutual effort for building intercultural alliances. Secondly, the application and further division of initial moves (initiating moves-relational [[IM-R]] and initiating move-transactional [[IM-T]]), responding moves (responding move-cooperative [[RM-C]] and responding move-uncooperative [[RM-UC]]), and strategies into politeness strategies (PS) and uncooperative strategies (UC-S) offer an in-depth analysis of the nuances of positioning construction between parties. The findings indicate that a successful negotiation meeting establishes and develops intercultural alliances through appropriate use of moves and strategies. Negotiations, however, derail if inappropriate moves and strategies are used, and potential conflicts and communication breakdowns are not addressed in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) peer tutors' discursive behavior to manage epistemic challenges in writing tutorials at a local university in China's Mainland. Based on approximately 24 h of audio-recorded interactions involving eight tutorial groups over six weeks, we searched different types of epistemic challenges to Chinese EFL peer tutors and explored how they managed them discursively. Our findings, in adopting a CA (Conversational Analysis) approach, show that Chinese EFL peer tutors mainly experience two types of epistemic challenges – the language proficiency-based challenges and the resistance-based challenges. They construct different identities to cope with these challenges – EFL learners, careless but competent tutors, and authoritative and trustworthy experts. These practices are realized through valuable pragma-linguistic devices, including advising and assessing speech acts, deontic modality, self-mocking expressions, imperative and assertive tones, narrative discourse, and smiley voice and laughter. These findings highlight the need for writing center instructors to follow tutor training guides suitable for EFL peer tutors instead of following a universal training recipe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher monologue has received scant attention in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms which emphasise the teacher-and-student exchange. This study assumes that a key index of interaction would be the construction of knowledge, in which teacher monologue has a due role to play. The research is set in the context of EFL teaching at the tertiary level in China and examines teacher monologue with reference to the concept of making semantic waves in Legitimation Code Theory, which has been proved to be an important means of cumulative knowledge building in classroom practice. Systemic Functional Linguistics is used to analyse how semantic waves are generated on the ideational base of context dependency, i.e. the extent to which the reality construed in teacher monologue is dependent on its context. The transdisciplinary perspective attempts to provide one possible way to model linguistic choices in making semantic waves in EFL classrooms. The findings are the primary and secondary categories of semantic patterns representing a scale of context dependency. Semantic waves trace recurrent movements between relatively decontextualised and context-dependent meanings in the progression of semantic patterns. The shifts might scaffold students in the construction of knowledge essential for developing academic English proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the conflictive construction of identities in Chinese interactions. We examine the way in which people build up their own identities as "experts" and negate others' similar identities in Chinese televised debates with complex participation structure. Our datasets are collected from 120 Chinese televised debates. Using indexicality (Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: a socio-cultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7[4/5]. 585-614) and Membership Categorization (Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on conversation, vols I and II, edited by G. Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell) as analytic notions to capture the interactional co-construction of identities, we examine the ways in which identity co-construction in such conflict scenarios takes place, as interactants attempt to construct their own identities as experts, and negate the expert identities of others. This exploration fills an important knowledge gap: little research has been done on Chinese conflict talk, in particular from the perspective of the co-construction of identities. Our research models identity construction in conflict by identifying various routes or "strategies" through which identities can be worked out in conflict scenarios. Our focus is on revealing how interlocutors construct or promote their identity by making their membership category conform to their category-bound activity/attribute, and negate others' identity by revealing others' violation of category-bound activity/attribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on naturally occurring conversation, the present study examines three utterance-final yes/ no question particles, mi, o, and ang, in Shishan, a dialect of Lingao of the Tai-Kadai language family, spoken on northern Hainan Island (China). Both mi and o signal the proposition as deriving from an external information source (primarily preceding discourse). Mi marks simple, linear knowledge accruement/thought progression, based on external information, including plain registration of new information and simple inference. O signals conflicts between externally derived information vis-à-vis the speaker's pre-existing knowledge/expectation. Ang constructs a genuine query for unknown information, ascertaining whether the quality/characteristic, as coded in the predicate of the utterance, can ascribe to (i.e., ascribable as a property of) the entity represented by the sentential subject. The meaning of 'property ascertaining' gives rise to the use of ang in various presequences (cf. Schegloff 1988). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the change in the representation of human rights issues in a corpus containing over 5,000 articles collected from a leading English newspaper in Hong Kong in two periods before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997 using Sinclair's (Textus 9: 75-106, 1996, Trust the text, Routledge, 2004) lexical item. The analysis of instances of the phrase 'human rights' in the corpus as a lexical item shows that the newspaper in question has changed its representation of human rights issues, particularly in China and Hong Kong, over the decade. This reflects an ideological shift in the newspaper's stance in response to the current situations in both local and world politics, and that human rights concerns are not merely a nationalistic, but also a culturally dynamic phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]