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Research has shown that arts-based approaches facilitate literacy learning in children; however, few studies have focused on the integration of art and early writing in community-based Chinese heritage language classes, which have been marginalized from the formal educational discourse in the United States. By drawing on the theoretical perspectives on social semiotics, this paper explored how young Chinese heritage learners engage in "writing" Chinese characters using fallen leaves. The data sources included field notes of observations, video recordings of the class, and the artifacts made by the children. Multimodal analysis revealed that the teacher invited the students to write together and created a social context for children to compose writing artwork. Children engaged with their composition through a variety of modes. This study has implications for research, practice, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buyu, also known as verbal complements in pedagogical grammar, are a complex category of structures in Modern Standard Chinese grammar. These elements create a group of structures of different nature that are placed after the verb and some of them cause the displacement of the direct object when they are both present. This aspect of Modern Standard Chinese is especially complex, both for students to learn and instructors to teach. The main focus of this research is to understand better and improve the significance of buyu for Chinese as a foreign language teaching in Spain. For these reasons in this paper, we observe whether this aspect of Modern Standard Chinese is present in the different teaching curricula for Chinese as a foreign language and in HSK test papers and if so, how it is treated. On the other hand we observe the categorization offered in different curricula with the aim to understand a teaching area that is might be considered under-researched, but yet essential for the evolution of Chinese as a second language teaching field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisations involved in "risky" initiatives should implement risk treatments to reduce residual risks to levels acceptable to relevant stakeholders and ensure efficiency and effectiveness--to protect the organisation (or project) from potential losses or threats to its continued operations. Both the PMBoK (on Project Management) and ISO 31000 (on Risk Management) concur that Project Risk Management (PRM) should aim at increasing the "likelihood of success" in projects. Like in the "Five Chinese Brothers" story (Appendix A) where the brothers work together to defeat justice, five inadvertences bedevil Project Risk Management. Though they do not necessarily work in the same order as the Five Chinese Brothers, they do a disservice to project delivery, mostly in Large Infrastructure Projects. Whereas the Chinese Brothers used each one's special aptitude to escape an execution sentence, these insidious "Five Foes" have so obstructed risk management efforts that PRM's significance and utility are increasingly questioned by executive management. No wonder, less and less attention and resources are devoted to its proper implementation in LIPs. To the concerns raised in three previous articles (Mabelo, 2023a; Mabelo, 2023b; Mabelo, 2024) the author now adds two other issues that plague PRM and the delivery of Large Infrastructure Projects. Thus, five (three plus two) inadvertences in conventional PRM are unveiled as follows: (1) Ignoring "project life cycle" in PRM (2) Ignoring the project-specific context (3) Employing the PRM intermittently (4) Throwing money at treating risks (5) Implementing the PRM in a silo This paper essentially discusses these five flaws or inadvertences as the "Five Foes of Project Risk Management" that work insidiously to diminish the otherwise significant contributions of Risk Management in Large Infrastructure Projects (LIPs) and other industries--they bring woes!. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resemblance between languages could be due to relatedness in terms of etymology. Varieties of the same language or dialects resemble one another in many ways because they are related. The languages within a language family, descendants of a common ancestral language, also resemble one another in some ways. To contemplate resemblance between two languages, one could consider their mutual intelligibility or other kinds of formal similarities. For example, while the Chinese languages are not mutually intelligible, they exhibit very similar grammatical patterns. They are all tonal and share a largely common writing system. This paper, however, proposes another way of appreciating language resemblance. It has been observed in the Singapore context that when two different languages, English and Mandarin, are adopted by a community of speakers as dominant languages, over time, the two languages become nativized and resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and the cultural values they embody. The Singaporean bilingual speakers in question are offspring of people from Southern Chinese culture who, as recent as a few generations ago, spoke neither English nor Mandarin as a dominant language. This paper presents evidence to show how Singapore English and Singapore Mandarin, which are mutually unintelligible, may resemble each other in terms of meaning, ways of speaking and cultural values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of China Quarterly is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the rapidly evolving field of cybersecurity, the integration of multi-source, heterogeneous, and fragmented data into a coherent knowledge graph has garnered considerable attention. Such a graph elucidates semantic interconnections, thereby facilitating sophisticated analytical decision support. Central to the construction of a cybersecurity knowledge graph is Named Entity Recognition (NER), a critical technology that converts unstructured text into structured data. The efficacy of NER is pivotal, as it directly influences the integrity of the knowledge graph. The task of NER in cybersecurity, particularly within the Chinese linguistic context, presents distinct challenges. Chinese text lacks explicit space delimiters and features complex contextual dependencies, exacerbating the difficulty in discerning and categorizing named entities. These linguistic characteristics contribute to errors in word segmentation and semantic ambiguities, impeding NER accuracy. This paper introduces a novel NER methodology tailored for the Chinese cybersecurity corpus, termed CSBERT-IDCNN-BiLSTM-CRF. This approach harnesses Iterative Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks (IDCNN) for extracting local features, and Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory networks (BiLSTM) for contextual understanding. It incorporates CSBERT, a pre-trained model adept at processing few-shot data, to derive input feature representations. The process culminates with Conditional Random Fields (CRF) for precise sequence labeling. To compensate for the scarcity of publicly accessible Chinese cybersecurity datasets, this paper synthesizes a bespoke dataset, authenticated by data from the China National Vulnerability Database, processed via the YEDDA annotation tool. Empirical analysis affirms that the proposed CSBERT-IDCNN-BiLSTM-CRF model surpasses existing Chinese NER frameworks, with an F1-score of 87.30% and a precision rate of 85.89%. This marks a significant advancement in the accurate identification of cybersecurity entities in Chinese text, reflecting the model's robust capability to address the unique challenges presented by the language's structural intricacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The joint entity relation extraction model which integrates the semantic information of relation is favored by relevant researchers because of its effectiveness in solving the overlapping of entities, and the method of defining the semantic template of relation manually is particularly prominent in the extraction effect because it can obtain the deep semantic information of relation. However, this method has some problems, such as relying on expert experience and poor portability. Inspired by the rule-based entity relation extraction method, this paper proposes a joint entity relation extraction model based on a relation semantic template automatically constructed, which is abbreviated as RSTAC. This model refines the extraction rules of relation semantic templates from relation corpus through dependency parsing and realizes the automatic construction of relation semantic templates. Based on the relation semantic template, the process of relation classification and triplet extraction is constrained, and finally, the entity relation triplet is obtained. The experimental results on the three major Chinese datasets of DuIE, SanWen, and FinRE showthat the RSTACmodel successfully obtains rich deep semantics of relation, improves the extraction effect of entity relation triples, and the F1 scores are increased by an average of 0.96% compared with classical joint extraction models such as CasRel, TPLinker, and RFBFN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the properties of a particle, lǝ , in Yixing Chinese that invariably denotes telic reading, obligatorily fronts definite and bare NP objects to the topic position, and imposes past event reading in most situations. It is argued that lǝ is a functional item bearing a quantity feature in the sense of Borer (2005b) and is hence responsible for telicity. Following Partee et al. (1987), Partee (1990), Filip (1997) and Borer (2005b), we propose that lǝ functions as a verbal quantifier, and more specifically, as a verbal universal quantifier, which needs to bind a variable in its quantificational domain. The fronting of definite and bare NPs is compatible with this variable-binding requirement because a trace, and hence a variable, is left as a result of the movement. It is further argued, following the analysis in Lin (2000, 2003, 2007), that lǝ bears a perfective feature. When there is no specific reference time, speech time is taken as default reference time, resulting in the past event reading. lǝ , therefore, bears both an inner aspectual feature and an outer aspectual feature. This paper exhibits how telic items can behave differently across languages and shows the possibility of bundling two temporal features (inner and outer aspectual features) on a single functional item. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As High Speed Rail (HSR) has proliferated globally, so has a related research field dedicated to exploring and addressing its unique issues. Yet, studies to understand and classify the HSR research domain are limited. This paper addresses the gap, using bibliometric analysis to identify future research areas and 20 candidate topics for literature review based on keyword analysis through VOSviewer. Article and review papers related to HSR published in the last 20 years (2003-2022) were retrieved from Scopus, and then analyzed to determine the split in knowledge between languages, the collaboration between countries and institutions, highly productive and cited journals, and research topics which have and have not been reviewed. Approximately 30% of the search results were published exclusively in Chinese, highlighting the importance of extending the evaluation to cover both languages. This is a novel aspect of the work, which has enabled the recognition of potential knowledge gaps. It is recommended that future reviews incorporate works in both languages, possibly through international collaboration. Institutions in China and other countries that are strong collaborators have been identified, as well as relevant, highly cited journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to address the extraction of entities and relationships from unstructured Chinese text, with a particular emphasis on the challenges of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). This will be achieved by integrating external lexical information and utilizing the abundant semantic information available in Chinese. We utilize a pipeline model that is applied separately to NER and RE by introducing an innovative NER model that integrates Chinese pinyin, characters, and words to enhance recognition capabilities. Simultaneously, we incorporate information such as entity distance, sentence length, and part-of-speech to improve the performance of relation extraction. We also delve into the interactions among data, models, and inference algorithms to improve learning efficiency in addressing this challenge. In comparison to existing methods, our model has achieved significant results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global dissemination of Christianity has resulted in diverse singing styles and historical narratives that incorporate different languages and musical traditions. Chinese Christian hymns, in particular, possess distinctive features that reflect the Chinese thinking mode and cultural values, showcasing the interplay between Western hymns and Chinese singing and poetic and cultural traditions within the Chinese historical context. This paper takes Chinese Christian hymnals published between 1807 and 1949 as its object of study. It conducts research on representative hymnals from three historical stages: the emergence, flourishing, and prosperity of hymns, and examines their compilation and publication. Using methods such as historical research, textual criticism, translation studies, and cross-cultural communication, the paper explores the evolution of Chinese Christian hymns. The paper analyzes such aspects of the hymnals as translating and writing strategies, thematic content, linguistic features, editing and formatting, as well as the selection and composition of melodies. It is concluded that the indigenization of Chinese hymns does not involve outright rejection of foreign elements or unquestioning adherence to local traditions, but rather represents a common ground between Chinese and Western languages and vocal traditions, reflecting the characteristic of glocalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses shape grammar to conduct strategic research and innovative translation of existing wooden furniture designs. A traditional Chinese Ming-style recessed-leg table was used as an example to demonstrate its feasibility. The paper applies biological DNA genetic information to furniture products, and combines shape grammar to evolve and mutate them, thereby creating new forms of wooden furniture that maintain the original genes. A DNA gene pool of recessed-leg table was constructed, and an architectural queti replacement pool was constructed based on the rules of shape grammar as backup for subsequent experiments to replace part of the designed genes of the recessed-leg table. Shape grammar was used to deduce the recessed-leg table and generate three plans. A consumer questionnaire was established through the semantic differential method. After evaluating these three design plans, an optimal plan that meets market demand was selected, and modeling, rendering, and concept elaboration were performed. Finally, the paper takes Ming-style recessed-leg table as an example to demonstrate that it is effective and feasible to use shape grammar to guide the design and research of domestic wooden furniture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Chinese language teaching in an engineering department as an example, this paper explores how language teaching can meet the challenges of globalisation and the advancement of technology by fulfilling its educational function as described in Byram's model of intercultural communicative competence. By adapting theories and practices from counselling psychology, the proposed curriculum focuses on emotions to help learners uncover emotional barriers that arise when confronted with differences. It will support learners in raising awareness and developing their capacity to negotiate differences, leading to more effective cooperation with others. The paper discusses the use of experiential exercises in the classroom. They include those developed in Chinese language pedagogy, namely the performed culture approach and those developed in humanistic psychotherapy, such as body psychotherapy. The aim is to help learners notice their own feelings, attitudes, and behaviour as well as the otherness of the other in the classroom. This approach is powerful because it is in the here and now. It utilises movements and different senses as well as cognition. It helps uncover barriers to intercultural communication hidden under the surface by making the unconscious conscious. Reflection is a key part of this process. Learners are expected to reflect on their own thinking and feelings and to make sense of the dynamics in the classroom. Learners are expected to develop reflexivity, subjectivity and intersubjective awareness while acquiring linguistic competency and social cultural rules of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Íkala: Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With the rapid development of mobile application technology, the content and forms of comments disseminated on the internet are becoming increasingly complex. Various comments serve as users' firsthand reference materials for understanding the application. However, some comments contain a significant amount of inappropriate content unrelated to the app itself, such as gambling, loans, pornography, and game account recharging, seriously impacting the user experience. Therefore, this article aims to assist users in filtering out irrelevant and inappropriate messages, enabling them to quickly obtain useful and relevant information. This study focuses on analyzing actual comments on various Chinese apps on the Apple App Store. However, these irrelevant comments exhibit a certain degree of concealment, sparsity, and complexity, which increases the difficulty of detection. Additionally, due to language differences, the existing English research methods exhibit relatively poor adaptability to Chinese textual data. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a research method named "blend net", which combines text adversarial and multi-information fusion detection to enhance the overall performance of the system. The experimental results demonstrate that the method proposed in this paper achieves precision and recall rates both exceeding 98%, representing an improvement of at least 2% compared to existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for a paradigm shift in studying academic dependency, toward the paradigm of brokered dependency. Using Chinese academia as an example, I demonstrate how the neocolonial condition of academic dependency is always mediated through blockage-brokerage mechanisms. The two most salient blockage-brokerage mechanisms of dependency in the Chinese context are linguistic barrier and authoritarian malepistemization, and the effects of the latter consist of three layers: institutional, informational, and incorporational. On top of their domestic impacts, those mechanisms jointly exacerbate spectacularized postcoloniality in anglophone-hegemonic global academic publishing. The paradigm of brokered dependency not only represents a more nuanced approach to the study of academic dependency, but also underscores the fact that the dismantling of the neocolonial condition cannot be conceived and pursued in isolation from comprehending and confronting the authoritarian condition, especially when the latter pertains under the disguise of anticolonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the promotion of Chinese language, the funding that Confucius Institutes can rely on only comes from Hanban. From 2009 to 2014, the number of new Confucius Institutes opened is much higher than before. With the increasing number of Confucius Institutes established in various countries, the funding for promoting Chinese language has limited its development. The development situation of Confucius Institutes in Australia is diversified with very rich experience. The market-oriented development of Confucius Institutes has also tried many times. The Confucius Institutes in the Lancang-Mekong region have less experience but they can learn from various experiences from Australia to provide better ideas and paths for the development of Confucius Institutes in this region and the promotion of Chinese. This paper uses the strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) model to analyze the market feasibility of financial support for the development of Confucius Institutes and makes certain suggestions for the promotion of Chinese language in the Lancang-Mekong region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is to provide a statistical profile of metaphorical constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from the view of language as complex systems and the dynamic view of metaphor, this paper argues that metaphorical language change qualifies as a Self-Organized Criticality state and the linguistic expressions of a metaphor can be profiled as a fractal with spatio-temporal correlations. Synchronously, these metaphorical expressions self-organize into a self-similar, scale-invariant fractal that follows a power-law distribution; temporally, long range interdependence constrains the self-organization process by the way of transformation rules that are intrinsic of a language system. This argument is verified in the paper with statistical analyses of twelve randomly selected Chinese verb metaphors in a large-scale diachronic corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss a collaborative research project called Lacunae: Embodying the Untranslatable. The issue of untranslatability has been a much-discussed topic in translation studies, with recent debate linking it to performability. Although untranslatability has received some attention lately, the debate has been largely theoretical, confined to a textual conception of translation. In the study discussed in this article, we explored an applied approach to (un)translatability, working with/through the body in space, positing the body as the vehicle for deciphering the untranslatable. We draw on an embodied way of knowing as a phenomenological framework to construct knowledge as lived experience. The study aimed to investigate the lexical, intercultural, and aesthetic potential of performing untranslatability by exploring a series of untranslatable words through research-based theatre. The data generation process involved a retreat where nine researchers/artists/practitioners addressed the research question through practices like process drama, Butoh, physical theatre, improvisation, and visual arts on mixed media. In this paper, first, we introduce the theoretical framework and context of the study. Next, we illustrate the methodology, data analysis, and findings, with reference to one untranslatable word from the Chinese language, yuánfèn 缘分, loosely translated as 'serendipity in relationships and life events'. We contemplate the practice in this workshop through a philosophical, pedagogical, and research-based lens. Finally, we contemplate future iterations of this project, reflecting on how performing yuánfèn could inform theatre-based research on migration and identity in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Linguistica Asiatica is the property of Acta Linguistica Asiatica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study explores how the identity is constructed of elders who have Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (DAT) by examining the communicative disorder in daily interactions with other interlocutors. Specifically, this paper evaluates a conversation between one Chinese elder with early-stage DAT and the interviewer. It analyzes the identity construction processes in the discourse in depth, using the age-identity taxonomy, self-identity representation theory, and the pragmatic emergentist model. Based on the case study, this paper confirms the five dimensions of age-identity taxonomy provided by Coupland as: (1) disclosure of chronological age, (2) age-related categories/role reference, (3) age-identity concerning health, decrement, and death, (4) adding time-past perspective, and (5) self-association with the past. Meanwhile, two more approaches to the age-identity taxonomy were developed, i.e., address behavior and cross-generational contrast. Self-identity to realize interactional goals is typically constructed at the individual level, although rarely at the relational level. The DAT elder conducts compensation in the interaction by adopting verbal and non-verbal strategies to bridge cognitive disorders such as memory loss, word-finding difficulty, or meeting the desire to enhance the pragmatic effects of their identity. This shows that the self-identity construction also facilitates the DAT elders in generating a discourse strategy when encountering pragmatic impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of Tanzania’s language policy on the promotion of the Chinese language within Tanzania. The objective is to delve into the evolution of Tanzania’s language policy across different eras, understand the factors influencing language policy in Tanzania, and analyze how the present Tanzanian language policy affects the dissemination of the Chinese language. The results reveal that Tanzania’s current language policy has both positive and negative effects on the promotion of the Chinese language within the country. Based on the research findings, the authors propose strategies to further enhance the teaching of the Chinese language in Tanzania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a significant embodiment of Chinese subalternity, the subject formation of rural migrant women presents the multiple power dynamics emerging in the course of modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation in post-reform China. Northern Girls, a novel written by contemporary Chinese female writer Sheng Keyi, provides a realistic account of survival for this marginalised group of women that is intertwined with class, gender and rural–urban disparities. This paper takes this novel as a case study, exploring how the female subaltern subject is discursively reconstructed through literary translation. Regarding the English translation as part of the transcultural flow of ideas between Western and indigenous Chinese feminisms, this paper examines its translation strategies, demonstrating how gender stereotypes, misogynous discourse, power relations and female agency in a gendered subaltern narration are rewritten in a hegemonic language. The analysis reveals that the English version rearranges the intersectional dynamics of power in post-reform China. While the gendered autonomy and agency are reinforced in the target text, the discursive construction of the Chinese female subaltern is simplified by a hegemonic formation of feminism and modernity that underplays the original 'reverse discourse' in non-Western women's writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both challenges and opportunities are inherent with a growth in Chinese international students in UK Higher Education. However, teachers from the West may not understand the differences in Chinese educational practices, which can lead to negative stereotyping of these students as passive and problematic. This paper rejects this deficit perspective, focusing on the views of Chinese students as to what might need to change about the UK teaching and campus environment to improve their learning experience. Two focus groups were held with Chinese social science Masters' students in a UK university. Some of their key requests included to reduce class sizes; to provide more guidance around study skills; to offer more timely and accessible information; to provide a more flexible range of services and learning support; and to create more social time with staff and other students. The discussions particularly brought out the importance of 'relational pedagogy'. These requirements will need more staff time and institutional flexibility which will necessitate adequate funding. The authors conclude that, despite Chinese students' significant contribution to the local economy and to University finances, there does not seem to be a commensurate investment in protecting their wellbeing and ensuring they receive a quality education. We consider it is important to listen to and act on the students' suggestions outlined here if UK Higher Education is to remain the destination of choice for many Chinese and other international students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on ethnic minority students in Hong Kong (HK) has documented their struggles in learning Chinese-as-an-Additional-Language (CAL) and the linguistic challenges for ethnic minority students to learn CAL at school can be the source of their anxiety, which may prevent them from integrating into HK society. The paper aims to explore ethnic minority students’ perceptions of how their Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) affect their learning of CAL. The data, from semi-structured interviews with ethnic minority students of varying CAL anxiety levels and fieldnotes from classroom observations and informal teacher interviews, were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings illustrate that while FLA can certainly influence students’ CAL learning experiences, other personal and sociocultural factors, such as students’ motivation to learn CAL, the prevalence of English-as-a-Lingua-Franca in society, and the impact of examination policies, also contribute significantly. This paper argued that the perceived relevance and importance of CAL in students’ lives are closely linked to FLA and can contribute to the lack of motivation observed in students with high or mid-level FLA. Thus, there is a need for teachers to attend to the interplay between other sociocultural factors and FLA when understanding ethnic minority students’ CAL learning behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine discourses about border and scale in the context of Hong Kong's relationship with mainland China. We argue that, as the physical and political borders between Hong Kong and the mainland are eroding, other forms of bordering practices – such as linguistic borders – become more salient and contested. We draw on selected thematic analyses of a corpus of 70 articles from Hong Kong English media, as well as socio-historical analyses that have widely circulated since Hong Kong's handover from Britain to China, in order to examine how the construction of "Cantonese" and "Mandarin" is managed against anxieties about Hong Kong's potential loss of distinction and fears of becoming "just another Chinese city". In this process, both borders and scales become key terrains of negotiation and function themselves as ideological resources in debates about Hong Kong's identity and future, as certain distinctions take on reduced or pronounced meaning from particular scalar perspectives. Amid an ongoing reframing of what it means to be "Chinese", examining language ideologies in Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of how national and linguistic categories achieve or reframe their social meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alpha: Revista de Artes, Letras y Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Los Lagos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Alpha: Revista de Artes, Letras y Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Los Lagos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we present an approach for applied linguists to undertake research on speech acts in an interactionally anchored way. We first critically revisit studies on speech acts, with a special focus on L2 pragmatics, arguing that there is a clear need to further interconnect speech acts and interaction by relying on a finite, replicable and interactional typology of speech acts. We then suggest a methodological procedure through which such a typology can be employed in applied linguistic inquiries. Finally, we describe a case study featuring irritations faced by Chinese learners of English when it comes to extracting oneself from an interaction while the other keeps on talking. Such irritations are analysed through the lens of the approach proposed in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we revisit the popular assumption that politeness in languages such as Japanese and Korean with a complex honorific system is crucially different from politeness in languages with no comparably rich honorific repertoires, such as Chinese. We propose a bottom–up, contrastive and corpus-based model through which we challenge this binary view. This model combines interaction ritual and speech acts. As a case study, we compare a set of expressions representing lexico-grammatical honorifics in Japanese and Chinese, i.e., in a so-called "honorific-rich" and a "non-honorific-rich" language. Our results show that the group of honorifics studied work in an essentially comparable fashion, hence disproving the above-outlined binary view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the task of matching Chinese sentences, the key semantics within sentences and the deep interaction between them significantly affect the matching performance. However, previous studies mainly relied on shallow interactions based on a single semantic granularity, which left them vulnerable to interference from overlapping terms. It is particularly challenging to distinguish between positive and negative examples within datasets from the same thematic domain. This paper proposes a sentence-matching model that incorporates multi-granularity contextual key semantic interaction. The model combines multi-scale convolution and multi-level convolution to extract different levels of contextual semantic information at word, phrase, and sentence granularities. It employs multi-head self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms to align the key semantics between sentences. Furthermore, the model integrates the original, similarity, and dissimilarity information of sentences to establish deep semantic interaction. Experimental results on both open- and closed-domain datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing baseline models in terms of matching performance. Additionally, the model achieves matching effectiveness comparable to large-scale pre-trained language models while utilizing a lightweight encoder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of scientific publications nowadays is rapidly increasing, causing information overload for researchers and making it hard for scholars to keep up to date with current trends and lines of work. Recent work has tried to address this problem by developing methods for automated summarization in the scholarly domain, but concentrated so far only on monolingual settings, primarily English. In this paper, we consequently explore how state-of-the-art neural abstract summarization models based on a multilingual encoder–decoder architecture can be used to enable cross-lingual extreme summaries of scholarly texts. To this end, we compile a new abstractive cross-lingual summarization dataset for the scholarly domain in four different languages, which enables us to train and evaluate models that process English papers and generate summaries in German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. We present our new X-SCITLDR dataset for multilingual summarization and thoroughly benchmark different models based on a state-of-the-art multilingual pre-trained model, including a two-stage pipeline approach that independently summarizes and translates, as well as a direct cross-lingual model. We additionally explore the benefits of intermediate-stage training using English monolingual summarization and machine translation as intermediate tasks and analyze performance in zero- and few-shot scenarios. Finally, we investigate how to make our approach more efficient on the basis of knowledge distillation methods, which make it possible to shrink the size of our models, so as to reduce the computational complexity of the summarization inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing the mouthed words and official dubbings of Word of Honor (WoH), a Chinese web drama adapted from a homoerotic danmei novel, this paper examines which parts of dangai works are changed to accommodate censorship. The paper explains the censorship standards of the Chinese National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) regarding how the male image is conveyed: Men must achieve predictable social relationships with authorities and cannot be limited to their personal intimacies, let alone be regarded as objects of desire. On the other hand, the mouthed words hidden by the official dubbings are forms of strategic self-preservation. However, one must remain alert to how these mouthed words also support the dream of "a quiet time of equal rights for men and women"1 for Chinese female audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given their intricate nature and inherent ambiguity, sarcastic texts often mask deeper emotions, making it challenging to discern the genuine feelings behind the words. The proposal of the sarcasm detection task is to assist us with more accurately understanding the true intention of the speaker. Advanced methods, such as deep learning and neural networks, are widely used in the field of sarcasm detection. However, most research mainly focuses on sarcastic texts in English, as other languages lack corpora and annotated datasets. To address the challenge of low-resource languages in sarcasm detection tasks, a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning method is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach is based on prompt learning and aims to assist the model with understanding downstream tasks through prompts. Specifically, the model uses prompt templates to construct training data into cloze-style questions and then trains them using a pre-trained cross-lingual language model. Combining data augmentation and contrastive learning can further improve the capacity of the model for cross-lingual transfer learning. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we utilize a publicly accessible sarcasm dataset in English as training data in a zero-shot cross-lingual setting. When tested with Chinese as the target language for transfer, our model achieves F1-scores of 72.14% and 76.7% on two test datasets, outperforming the strong baselines by significant margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talmy's (1991; 2000a; 2000b) influential work on motion events provides a strong two-way typology that can examine and account for the typology of a language, but this framework is basically synchronic. It may not be equally valid to explain language change. In this paper, we apply the event integration theory and its latest development, The Macro-event Hypothesis (Li, 2020, 2023), to account for the development of the causative verb 使-shǐ- make (SHI for short) in Chinese. This study reveals that, firstly, the multi-functional behavior of SHI represents a typical case of grammaticalization, with a full verb acquiring the role of conjunction and expressing abstract meanings. Secondly, the semantic division of the causative and non-causative uses of SHI in Contemporary Chinese is the most clear-cut. Thirdly, causative SHI shows a greater level of semantic bleaching, and the construction profiles a single causal activity and has a higher degree of event integration when compared to its lexical verbal use. The constructional grammaticalization of SHI confirms that event integration is key to its development. This study verifies The Macro-event Hypothesis of a continuum of grammaticalization in language and uncovers the process of semantic gradation that takes place in Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the association between abnormal disclosure tone in the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) section of annual reports and analysts' forecasting behavior. Using analysts' forecast data of Chinese listed firms from 2008 to 2020, we find that analysts can discern abnormal tone in managers' disclosures, leading to a downward revision of earnings estimates and an enhancement of forecast accuracy. Moreover, we observe that abnormal tone in the MD&A section attracts analysts' attention as they navigate the challenges posed by tone management and diminished information transparency. Collectively, this paper enhances our understanding of analysts' forecasting behavior concerning the extent of tone management observed in MD&A disclosures within emerging markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes incorporating linguistic semantic information into discourse relation recognition and constructing a Semantic Augmented Chinese Discourse Corpus (SACA) comprising 9546 adversative complex sentences. In adversative complex sentences, we suggest a quadruple (P, Q, R, Q β ) representing internal semantic elements, where the semantic opposition between Q and Q β forms the basis of the adversative relationship. P denotes the premise, and R represents the adversative reason. The overall annotation approach of this corpus follows the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), except for the classification of senses. We combined insights from the Chinese Discourse Treebank (CDTB) and obtained eight sense categories for Chinese adversative complex sentences. Based on this corpus, we explore the relationship between sense classification and internal semantic elements within our newly proposed Chinese Adversative Discourse Relation Recognition (CADRR) task. Leveraging deep learning techniques, we constructed various classification models and the model that utilizes internal semantic element features, demonstrating their effectiveness and the applicability of our SACA corpus. Compared with pre-trained models, our model incorporates internal semantic element information to achieve state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper explores the difficulties of translating Chinese expressions frequently used in communicating governmental policies to the public. In particular, we focus on the expression wenming 文明, a term with manifold meanings and uses, which often ends up being translated into English simply as 'civilised'. This translational convention is problematic because wenming in Chinese tends to be used in many collocations where the English civilised sounds distinctly alien. In order to systematically investigate this translational problem, we propose a bottom-up tri-partite approach to the study of Chinese policy expressions in general and wenming in particular. This novel mixed-method approach not only allows us to go beyond essentialist generalisations about expressions frequented in Chinese political discourse, but more importantly it allows us to unearth and label practical difficulties faced by translators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical semantic changes spanning centuries can reveal the complicated developing process of language and social culture. In recent years, natural language processing (NLP) methods have been applied in this field to provide insight into the diachronic frequency change for word senses from large-scale historical corpus, for instance, analyzing which senses appear, increase, or decrease at which times. However, there is still a lack of Chinese diachronic corpus and dataset in this field to support supervised learning and text mining, and at the method level, few existing works analyze the Chinese semantic changes at the level of morpheme. This paper constructs a diachronic Chinese dataset for semantic tracking applications spanning 3000 years and extends the existing framework to the level of Chinese characters and morphemes, which contains four main steps of contextual sense representation, sense identification, morpheme sense mining, and diachronic semantic change representation. The experiment shows the effectiveness of our method in each step. Finally, in an interesting statistic, we discover the strong positive correlation of frequency and changing trend between monosyllabic word sense and the corresponding morpheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates language transfers in third language acquisition of Chinese by native German and English speakers at intermediate level. Subjects are divided into two groups and complete a Grammaticality Judgment and Correction Task through a behavioral experiment online. The results from multiple sources show that: (1) both L1 and L2 are sources of language transfers and the perceived crosslinguistic similarity of abstract structural properties serves as the main reason; (2) language transfers can be non-facilitative on L3 learning; (3) as L3 proficiency level improves, the less likely learners are to be affected by non-facilitative language transfers in L3 learning, but it may not disappear completely; (4) the background language with higher proficiency level is more likely to impose language transfers in L3 learning. The research suggests that language transfers in TLA are simultaneously regulated by a number of factors, such as similarities of abstract structural properties between background languages and L3, as well as language proficiency levels. At the end, we discuss the application of the results to Chinese language teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes Xiaomi's social media posts on Facebook and Weibo, addressing three different audiences: the global audience, the Egyptian audience, and the Chinese audience. Its primary aim is to dissect Xiaomi's strategies in employing local, global, or glocal approaches within its intercultural brand communication. To achieve this, the study employs a multimodal framework that integrates brand communication and linguistics, allowing for a comprehensive examination of Xiaomi's digital marketing strategies through brand personality appeals and the strategic use of linguistic features. The paper finds that Xiaomi displays an exciting personality on its global and Chinese social media pages, while it reflects a competent personality on its Egyptian social media page. The study also finds that Xiaomi employs culture-specific linguistic features in its social media posts, including intimate address forms for its Chinese audience, colloquial expressions for its global audience, and codemixing and dialect for its Egyptian audience. These insights not only affirm the existing literature's observations of cultural disparities in intercultural marketing but also contribute to our understanding of how global brands strategically adapt to diverse cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies and demonstrates the change and continuity in China's science and technology (S&T) policy over 30 years. Firstly, we analyse and compare the two top-level S&T policies in 1985 and 2015 by applying institutional grammar (IG) in Chinese. To situate the policy analysis in the dynamic history, this paper then reviews the development of S&T-related policies from the late 1970s until now. By analysing the policy content and history, we find that policy-making with strong pragmatism continually sets S&T as the role of the engine of economic development. Meanwhile, the paradigm of how China governs S&T changed from decentralization and direct order to top-level design and indirect guide. In terms of the S&T policy framework, China grows into a holistic innovation policy (HIP) concentrating on demand-side and environment-side and soliciting more public sectors, from the linear model. These changes between the two eras do not happen suddenly but proceed gradually. During these, a significant shift that views innovation as a culture of comprehensive reforming forms HIP with Chinese characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a bottom-up way of approaching China's macro-level initiative in the regions of Asia and examines the language ideologies and linguistic entrepreneurship of international students as an agentive response to China's rise. Using data gathered via semi-structured interviews, we present the narratives of 26 Asian international students enrolled in courses at higher education institutions in Shanghai. The findings reveal that China's growing presence in the region has increased the instrumental value of Chinese, as a majority of students acknowledged China's rapid development as well as the dominant positioning of Chinese in the current regional language system. Chinese was ideated as linguistic capital in the local labour market, where the learners were empowered to express their desire for material success and upward mobility. The findings also reveal linguistic entrepreneurship associated with Chinese language learning, and such agentive behaviour was previously observed in the domain of English language learning, especially in South Korea. We argue that the process of commodifying the Chinese language appeared to legitimise the value of Chinese in the regions of Asia, while providing an entry point to problematise our current understanding of English hegemony and linguistic imperialism in the changing global landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese spelling errors are commonplace in our daily lives, which might be caused by input methods, optical character recognition, or speech recognition. Due to Chinese characters' phonetic and visual similarities, the Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a very challenging task. However, the existing CSC solutions cannot achieve good spelling check performance since they often fail to fully extract the contextual information and Pinyin information. In this paper, we propose a novel CSC framework based on multi-label annotation (MLSL-Spell), consisting of two basic phases: spelling detection and correction. In the spelling detection phase, MLSL-Spell uses the fusion vectors of both character-based pre-trained context vectors and Pinyin vectors and adopts the sequence labeling method to explicitly label the type of misspelled characters. In the spelling correction phase, MLSL-Spell uses Masked Language Mode (MLM) model to generate candidate characters, then performs corresponding screenings according to the error types, and finally screens out the correct characters through the XGBoost classifier. Experiments show that the MLSL-Spell model outperforms the benchmark model. On SIGHAN 2013 dataset, the spelling detection F1 score of MLSL-Spell is 18.3% higher than that of the pointer network (PN) model, and the spelling correction F1 score is 10.9% higher. On SIGHAN 2015 dataset, the spelling detection F1 score of MLSL-Spell is 11% higher than that of Bert and 15.7% higher than that of the PN model. And the spelling correction F1 of MLSL-Spell score is 6.8% higher than that of PN model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Emotional words are often used as stimulus material to explore the cognitive and emotional characteristics of individuals with depressive disorder, while normal individuals mostly rate the scores of affective words. Given that individuals with depressive disorder exhibit a negative cognitive bias, it is possible that their depressive state could influence the ratings of affective words. To enhance the validity of the stimulus material, we specifically recruited patients with depression to provide these ratings. Methods: This study provided subjective ratings for 501 Chinese affective norms, incorporating 167 negative words selected from depressive disorder patients' Sino Weibo blogs, and 167 neutral words and 167 positive words selected from the Chinese Affective Word System. The norms are based on the assessments made by 91 patients with depressive disorder and 92 normal individuals, by using the paper-and-pencil quiz on a 9-point scale. Results: Regardless of the group, the results show high reliability and validity. We identified group differences in three dimensions: valence, arousal, and selfrelevance: the depression group rated negative words higher, but positive and neutral words lower than the normal control group. Conclusion: The emotional perception affected the individual's perception of words, to some extent, this database expanded the ratings and provided a reference for exploring norms for individuals with different emotional states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional method to evaluate outdoor thermal comfort which used indicators (UTCI, PET, SET, etc.) has its limitations. Firstly, emotional factors are not included in the assessment, and secondly, the results lead to less accessibility, and it is difficult for non-experts to understand. Due to the above reasons, some scholars have investigated how to evaluate outdoor thermal comfort by 'English vocabulary', and there is still a gap in exploring the multidimensional semantic assessment of outdoor thermal comfort by using 'Chinese vocabulary'. This paper established a 'Chinese vocabulary' thesaurus for outdoor thermal comfort evaluation through online and on-site questionnaire survey including 63 words, and an outdoor experiment was carried out to validate the effectiveness of the thesaurus. The results showed a significant correlation between the 2-phases results, revealing the effectiveness of the multidimensional semantic Chinese thesaurus. PET value has a wide range when Thermal Comfort Vote (TCV) are the same, and the words people used to describe the thermal environment in 5 dimensions are very different. The results showed that it is necessary to evaluate the thermal environment by the way of multidimensional semantic, which could make up the short comings of the traditional way (thermal comfort indicators). The field validation experiment of this study was only carried out for 3 days in spring in Shenyang city, thus the result was highly influenced by the experiment conditions and has its limitations. This study could be a fundamental exploration of thermal comfort evaluation by semantic way in Chinese words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]