Determination and Classification of the Speech Act of Proposal in the Russian Language

This article provides a study of the definition and classification of the speech act of proposal in the Russian language. Speech acts, understood as the minimum unit of speech activity, is an elementary link of communication and the most important part of linguistic pragmatics. Scholars have already studied many different speech acts, such as speech act (SA) requests, complaints, and refusals. However, little attention is paid to the study of the Russian speech act of proposal. This belongs to the directive speech acts in relation to their realization, the cultural background against which  they are realized and their perception, for example, by Chinese speakers. The results of the paper suggest that proposals in Russian have to be studied in their cultural environment as a way to improve the teaching and learning and translation studies  of this language in China and avoid misunderstandings in the ongoing relations between the two countries, thus leading to help to achieve the goals of successful communicative contacts. Keywords: speech act, proposal, linguo-pragmatics, intercultural communication, language teaching, language translation and interpretatio

Unsupervised Boundary-Aware Language Model Pretraining for Chinese Sequence Labeling

Boundary information is critical for various Chinese language processing tasks, such as word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition. Previous studies usually resorted to the use of a high-quality external lexicon, where lexicon items can offer explicit boundary information. However, to ensure the quality of the lexicon, great human effort is always necessary, which has been generally ignored. In this work, we suggest unsupervised statistical boundary information instead, and propose an architecture to encode the information directly into pre-trained language models, resulting in Boundary-Aware BERT (BABERT). We apply BABERT for feature induction of Chinese sequence labeling tasks. Experimental results on ten benchmarks of Chinese sequence labeling demonstrate that BABERT can provide consistent improvements on all datasets. In addition, our method can complement previous supervised lexicon exploration, where further improvements can be achieved when integrated with external lexicon information.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables, EMNLP 202

Learning distributional token representations from visual features

In this study, we compare token representations constructed from visual features (i.e., pixels) with standard lookup-based embeddings. Our goal is to gain insight about the challenges of encoding a text representation from low-level features, e.g. from characters or pixels. We focus on Chinese, which—as a logographic language—has properties that make a representation via visual features challenging and interesting. To train and evaluate different models for the token representation, we chose the task of character-based neural machine translation (NMT) from Chinese to English. We found that a token representation computed only from visual features can achieve competitive results to lookup embeddings. However, we also show different strengths and weaknesses in the models’ performance in a part-of- speech tagging task and also a semantic similarity task. In summary, we show that it is possible to achieve a text representation only from pixels. We hope that this is a useful stepping stone for future studies that exclusively rely on visual input, or aim at exploiting visual features of written language

Jiang Zemin's discourse on intellectuals: the political use of formalised language and the conundrum of stability

This article focuses on the specific forms of power that are embodied in the properties and functions of formalised language, as it was used by Jiang Zemin in crucial political documents on the Party’s policy towards intellectuals. This inquiry illuminates various possibilities for the normalisation and inculcation of formalised language in the understudied decade of the 1990s, when the mantra “without stability, nothing can be achieved” became a tautology. The internal constitution of the selected texts is examined with an eye to the dialogic interaction with the production and reception of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s political discourses on intellectuals (Mao 1942; Deng 1978). The analysis of language practices and discursive formations in a comparative per-spective sheds light on the respective socio-political and historical contexts. It also reveals the extreme involution-devolution of formalised language in the Jiang Zemin era, when “preserving stability” was reaffirmed as a crucial concern of the Party leadership with the ultimate aim of preserving its monopoly of power

A spoken Chinese corpus : development, description, and application in L2 studies : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Linguistics at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

This thesis introduces a corpus of present-day spoken Chinese, which contains over 440,000 words of orthographically transcribed interactions. The corpus is made up of an L1 corpus and an L2 corpus. It includes data gathered in informal contexts in 2018, and is, to date, the first Chinese corpus resource of its kind investigating non-test/task-oriented dialogical interaction of L2 Chinese. The main part of the thesis is devoted to a detailed account of the compilation of the spoken Chinese corpus, including its design, the data collection, and transcription. In doing this, this study attempts to answer the question: what are the key considerations in building a spoken Chinese corpus of informal interaction, especially in building a spoken L2 corpus of L1–L2 interaction? Then, this thesis compares the L1 corpus and the L2 corpus before using them to carry out corpus studies. Differences between and within the two subcorpora are discussed in some detail. This corpus comparison is essential to any L1–L2 comparative studies conducted on the basis of the spoken Chinese corpus, and it addresses the question: to what extent is the L1 corpus comparable to the L2 corpus? Finally, this thesis demonstrates the research potential of the spoken Chinese corpus, by presenting an analysis of the L2 use of the discourse marker 就是 jiushi in comparison with the L1 use. Analysis considers mainly the contribution就是 jiushi makes as a reformulation marker to utterance interpretation within the relevance theoretic framework. To do this, it seeks to answer the question: what are the features that characterise the L2 use of the marker 就是 jiushi in informal speech? The results of this study make several useful contributions to the academic community. First of all, the spoken Chinese corpus is available to the academic community through the website, so it is expected the corpus itself will be of use to researchers, Chinese teachers, and students who are interested in spoken Chinese. In addition to the obtainable data, this thesis presents transparent accounts of each step of the compilation of both the L1 and L2 corpora. As a result, decisions and strategies taken with regard to the procedures of spoken corpus design and construction can provide some valuable suggestions to researchers who want to build their own spoken Chinese corpora. Finally, the findings of the comparative analysis of the L2 use of the marker 就是 jiushi will contribute to research on the teaching and learning of interactive spoken Chinese

Relational management in British-Chinese business interactions

A thesis submitted to the University of Luton in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThis dissertation sets out to investigate the management of relationships in British-Chinese business settings. Whilst set in the frameworks of politeness theory and accommodation theory, this dissertation studies the management of relationships in British-Chinese business interactions from a more comprehensive perspective. It examines the sociocultural as well as the communicative behaviour of the interactions between British and Chinese business people, to explore how relationship issues were handled and how communicative as well as cultural/sociocultural strategies affected the management of relationships. This work is based primarily on research conducted in Britain during November-December 1996, June 1997, and November 1997, when three Chinese delegations were visiting a local engineering company in the southeast of England. For the purpose of this study, three kinds of data were collected: 1) video recordings of authentic meetings between British business people and their Chinese clients (including training sessions); 2) comments from subsequent interviews and playback sessions held with the British and Chinese participants; 3) field notes. This study has shown that a variety of aspects can be held accountable for the management of relationships in intercultural settings. On a macro level, linguistic features alone can not adequately explain the process of negotiating relationships in fonnal intercultural settings, it also involves the non-linguistic perspective. From a linguistic perspective, attending to face needs is not the sole agent for relational management. Accommodation and respect for sociality rights also play an important part in it. The thesis attempts to distinguish the self-claimed face (self-image) and the perceived face (public self-image) and explore their respective functions in the management ofrelationships. The research also claims that group face is more likely to surface in group-versus-group. individual (group identity marked)-versus-group, or individual (group identity marked)-versus-individual (group identity marked or unmarked) settings. This study also argues that communication accommodation theory should incorporate convergence, maintenance or divergence along the line of culture specific behaviour. It proposes a new conceptualisation of CAT that should involve both speech and non-speech accommodative features. This study shows that a wider range of perspectives are needed in order to investigate intercultural communication

Effects of corrective feedback on EFL speaking task complexity in China’s university classroom

Corrective feedback (CF) and task complexity are two important pedagogical topics in second language acquisition research in recent years, but there is few research investigating effects of CF on speaking task complexity in China’s university classroom settings. This research, through conducting different versions of speaking task experiments among 24 university students in China, explores the effect of teachers’ CF on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) speaking task complexity. According to the analysis of first-hand data, this research finds CF has different effects on EFL oral production with different task complexity. In simple speaking task, the effects of five kinds of CF (from largest to smallest) are listed as follows: clarification quest, metalinguistic feedback, recast, repetition and confirmation check. Regarding complex speaking task, the effects of five categorized CF are ranked from largest to smallest as follows: metalinguistic feedback, confirmation check, recast, clarification request and repetition. Improving to provide CF in pedagogical practice is an important contribution to promote EFL speaking task, so, on the basis of above research results, appropriate ways and forms of providing CF are expected to promote efficiency of CF in EFL classroom under the context of Chinese university classroom