56,593 research outputs found

    Metadiscourse repertoire of L1 Mandarin undergraduates writing in English : a cross-contextual, cross-disciplinary study

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    This article presents a qualitative, comparative study of metadiscourse in the academic writing of two groups of undergraduate students working in two different disciplines. The groups of students were: 1) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in China through the medium of English; 2) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in the UK through the medium of English. For each group of students, we examined writing undertaken in two undergraduate disciplinary courses: Literary Criticism and Translation Studies. Our aim was to extend research into English writing by L1 Mandarin speakers, and to identify patterns of difference and similarity both between educational contexts and between disciplines. Results suggest that patterns of metadiscourse use in our corpus are associated with both disciplinary and contextual factors, but that contextual factors may have a stronger effect than disciplinary factors. For our data, local institutional culture seems to have a noticeable influence on student writers' use of metadiscourse

    Old tales, untold : Lu Xun against world literature

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    World literature has smiled on Lu Xun é­Æčæ…. He stands, if not as the foremost, then as a major representative of modern Chinese literature in anthologies. Though anthologies are not the ultimate arbiters of literary worldliness, they are influential discursive sites because of their accessibility and classroom utility. To wit, he is a common figure on university syllabi in world literature surveys. Professionally, scholarship on Lu Xunā€™s work reaches far beyond disciplinary Chinese studies. His works have been translated and retranslated many times in less than a century. All this is perhaps fitting considering his extraordinary services rendered to world literature as a reader and translator. Following David Damroschā€™s (2003) provisional definition of world literature as circulation beyond a national origin (281), Lu Xun enabled dozens of works to circulate in Chinese, and in turn his works circulate beyond the Sinosphere. But not all of them. If, following Franco Moretti (2013), we were to look at world literature as a market, a workā€™s circulation has to do with the demands of readers as much as with its innate qualities (69-70). These demands reflect geopolitical realities, to be sure, but can also constitute an apologetics for them

    Usage Effects on the Cognitive Routinization of Chinese Resultative Verbs

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    The present study adopts a corpus-oriented usage-based approach to the grammar of Chinese resultative verbs. Zooming in on a specific class of V-kai constructions, this paper aims to elucidate the effect of frequency in actual usage events on shaping the linguistic representations of resultative verbs. Specifically, it will be argued that while high token frequency results in more lexicalized V-kai complex verbs, high type frequency gives rise to more schematized V-kai constructions. The routinized patterns pertinent to V-kai resultative verbs varying in their extent of specificity and generality accordingly serve as a representative illustration of the continuum between lexicon and grammar that characterizes a usage-based conception of language

    Bayesian phylolinguistics infers the internal structure and the time-depth of the Turkic language family

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    Despite more than 200 years of research, the internal structure of the Turkic language family remains subject to debate. Classifications of Turkic so far are based on both classical historicalā€“comparative linguistic and distance-based quantitative approaches. Although these studies yield an internal structure of the Turkic family, they cannot give us an understanding of the statistical robustness of the proposed branches, nor are they capable of reliably inferring absolute divergence dates, without assuming constant rates of change. Here we use computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods to build a phylogeny of the Turkic languages, express the reliability of the proposed branches in terms of probability, and estimate the time-depth of the family within credibility intervals. To this end, we collect a new dataset of 254 basic vocabulary items for thirty-two Turkic language varieties based on the recently introduced Leipzigā€“Jakarta list. Our application of Bayesian phylogenetic inference on lexical data of the Turkic languages is unprecedented. The resulting phylogenetic tree supports a binary structure for Turkic and replicates most of the conventional sub-branches in the Common Turkic branch. We calculate the robustness of the inferences for subgroups and individual languages whose position in the tree seems to be debatable. We infer the time-depth of the Turkic family at around 2100 years before present, thus providing a reliable quantitative basis for previous estimates based on classical historical linguistics and lexicostatistics

    Towards a corpus-based, statistical approach of translation quality : measuring and visualizing linguistic deviance in student translations

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    In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, more particularly translation acceptability, by comparing the features of translated and original texts. We discuss initial findings that aim to support and objectify formative quality assessment. To that end, we extract a multitude of linguistic and textual features from both student and professional translation corpora that consist of many different translations by several translators in two different genres (fiction, news) and in two translation directions (English to French and French to Dutch). The numerical information gathered from these corpora is exploratively analysed with Principal Component Analysis, which enables us to identify stable, language-independent linguistic and textual indicators of student translations compared to translations produced by professionals. The differences between these types of translation are subsequently tested by means of ANOVA. The results clearly indicate that the proposed methodology is indeed capable of distinguishing between student and professional translations. It is claimed that this deviant behaviour indicates an overall lower translation quality in student translations: student translations tend to score lower at the acceptability level, that is, they deviate significantly from target-language norms and conventions. In addition, the proposed methodology is capable of assessing the acceptability of an individual studentā€™s translation ā€“ a smaller linguistic distance between a given student translation and the norm set by the professional translations correlates with higher quality. The methodology is also able to provide objective and concrete feedback about the divergent linguistic dimensions in their text
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