An Analysis of “Sorghum” Metaphors in the Novel “Hóng Gaoliáng Jiazú”: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach

《红高粱家族》“Hóng Gāoliáng Jiāzú” is a highly popular and influential novel written by the 2012 Nobel Literature Prize winning Chinese author Mo Yan. This research aims to study conceptual metaphors about “Sorghum” as reflected in metaphorical expressions used in this novel. The analysis was based on the rationale for implementing cognitive semantics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) developed by Lakoff and Johnson (2003). The results showed two categories of metaphors: (1) SORGHUM IS A HUMAN BEING (2) SORGHUM IS AN INANIMATE THING. The mapping from the source domains HUMAN BEING and INANIMATE THING to the target domain SORGHUM are possible due to the existence of similarities between the two domains. One part of the features of the source domains is highlighted in each of the distinct “Sorghum” metaphors. These metaphors are influenced by various factors such as cultural, social, and cognitive factors, all playing important roles in the formation of “Sorghum” metaphors

An Analysis of Chinese Students’ Performance in IELTS Academic Writing.

This study aims at investigating the cohesion and coherence problems in EFL essay writing in terms of the second part of IELTS academic writing task. There are fifteen sample articles written by fifteen Chinese students who studied in BJ IELTS School in Beijing. These texts consist of 3 levels：band 5, band 6 and band 7 and the articles have an equal number in each level. The selected data were analyzed with Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework.The result of the study revealed that there were five major types of cohesive devices in these writings. It involved reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion. In terms of the frequencies of occurrences, reference was the highest, followed by conjunction and lexical cohesion, while substitution was the lowest among the five types of cohesive devices in the three levels. There were few ellipses appearing in the data.Moreover, the study highlights some of the cohesive problems found in writing. Those problems were misused，overused and mechanical use of conjunctions and reference, and lack of substitution devices due to a large number of repetitions appearing, as well as some cohesive problems were influenced by grammatical mistakes and inappropriate task response.The study suggests that EFL teachers and students should foreground the importance of cohesion and coherence in their text. In addition, they should not overemphasize the quantity of cohesion used but also focus on other factors such as task response, lexical resource and grammatical features

Malaysian flight MH370 reports : A Critical Discourse Analysis

The disappearance of Malaysia Airline flight MH370 has been a controversial topic in the news media since March 8th 2014. This study aims to investigate how Chinese and Malaysian news reporting of this event differs in the stances and actions that emerge in their reporting of the same issue in their news articles. In my analysis, I analyse aspects of the discourse features that emerged during the investigation of the accident of Malaysian flight MH370. In so doing I illustrate the different types of ideologies that emerge in the media from these two countries. The data are derived from two popular Chinese and Malaysian online newspapers: China Daily and The Star. I examine 18 articles and reports, 9 articles from each newspaper. These articles are collected over the period of a year since its disappearance. This paper uses aspects of Scollon’s (1998, 2001) mediated discourse analysis of news reporting on MH370. As a theory and methodology of discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis enables us to examine the hidden ideologies and power relations in language, culture and society through an emphasis on the actions that people take

อุปลักษณ์มโนทัศน์ “ความฝันจีนเป็นการเดินทาง” : มุมมองทางปริชาน Conceptual Metaphor “CHINESE DREAM IS A JOURNEY” : A Cognitive Perspective

Abstract The Journey Metaphor, as a type of metaphor, is frequently employed in political discourse, namely, politicians usually selected words and expressions from one semantic domain “Journey” to describe politics that, to some extent, as an abstract concept. This article aims to investigate “CHINESE DREAM IS A JOURNEY” conceptual metaphor to help people understand the abstract concept “CHINESE DREAM” in terms of a more concrete concept “JOURNEY” from the perspective of cognitive linguistics within the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Data was derived from the official reports and important speeches delivered by Xi Jinping, President of the People's Republic of China, from November 15th 2012 to June 13th 2014. Results were that 67 linguistics expressions of journey metaphors occurred, referring to tourists, starting points, journeys and destinations. Mapping from the source domain “JOURNEY” to the target domain “CHINESE DREAM” was possible due to the existence of characteristic similarities between these two concepts. In addition, using metaphorical linguistics expressions to talk about the “Chinese Dream” in political discourse reflected underlying cognitive systems of the metaphor “CHINESE DREAM IS A JOURNEY”, making abstract ideas more concrete and effectively persuading listeners to follow the ideas of the language users. Keywords : “CHINESE DREAM IS A JOURNEY”, conceptual metaphor, culture and society บทคัดย่อ อุปลักษณ์การเดินทางเป็นลักษณะการใช้ภาษาที่พบบ่อยในวาทกรรมการเมือง ซึ่งผู้ใช้ภาษามักจะนำคำหรือกลุ่มคำที่มีความหมายเกี่ยวข้องกับการเดินทางมาใช้ในบริบททางการเมือง เพื่ออธิบายถึงมโนทัศน์ที่เป็นนามธรรมได้ชัดเจนยิ่งขึ้น บทความนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์มุ่งศึกษาอุปลักษณ์การเดินทางกับ “ความฝันจีน” จากวาทกรรมทางการเมืองที่ประธานาธิบดีจีน     สีจิ้นผิงใช้ในวาทะสำคัญต่างๆ ระหว่างวันที่ 15 พฤศจิกายน ค.ศ. 2012 จนถึงวันที่ 13 มิถุนายน ค.ศ. 2014 จากการวิเคราะห์ข้อมูลพบว่า อุปลักษณ์มโนทัศน์ “ความฝันจีนเป็นการเดินทาง” นั้นแสดงมาจากการที่ผู้พูดได้นำรูปภาษาที่เป็นอุปลักษณ์การเดินทางมาใช้กล่าวถึง “ความฝันจีน” มีจำนวนทั้งสิ้น 67 ข้อความ ส่วนรูปภาษาที่เป็นอุปลักษณ์การเดินทางดังกล่าวสามารถจำแนกประเภทตามองค์ประกอบทางความหมายได้เป็น 4 ประเภท ได้แก่ ผู้เดินทาง จุดเริ่มต้น กระบวนการเดินทาง และจุดหมายปลายทาง การนำเอาอุปลักษณ์การเดินทางมาเปรียบเทียบกับ “ความฝันจีน” ในที่นี้เกิดจากกระบวนการถ่ายโยงทางความหมายจากมโนทัศน์ต้นทาง “การเดินทาง” ไปยังมโนทัศน์ปลายทาง “ความฝันจีน” ทั้งนี้ไม่เพียงแต่สะท้อนให้เห็นว่าผู้ใช้ภาษามีมโนทัศน์เกี่ยวกับ “ความฝันจีน” เสมือนเป็นการเดินทางเท่านั้น ขณะเดียวกันอุปลักษณ์มโนทัศน์ที่ผู้พูดภาษาใช้นี้ยังช่วยถ่ายทอดความคิดเชิงนามธรรมให้เป็นรูปธรรม รวมทั้งเป็นเครื่องมือที่สามารถช่วยโน้มน้าวประชาชนจีนทุกคนให้คล้อยตามความคิดของผู้ใช้ภาษาได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ คำสำคัญ “ความฝันจีนเป็นการเดินทาง” อุปลักษณ์มโนทัศน์ สังคมและวัฒนธรรม

Beyond Object Recognition: A New Benchmark towards Object Concept Learning

Understanding objects is a central building block of artificial intelligence, especially for embodied AI. Even though object recognition excels with deep learning, current machines still struggle to learn higher-level knowledge, e.g., what attributes an object has, and what can we do with an object. In this work, we propose a challenging Object Concept Learning (OCL) task to push the envelope of object understanding. It requires machines to reason out object affordances and simultaneously give the reason: what attributes make an object possesses these affordances. To support OCL, we build a densely annotated knowledge base including extensive labels for three levels of object concept (category, attribute, affordance), and the causal relations of three levels. By analyzing the causal structure of OCL, we present a baseline, Object Concept Reasoning Network (OCRN). It leverages causal intervention and concept instantiation to infer the three levels following their causal relations. In experiments, OCRN effectively infers the object knowledge while following the causalities well. Our data and code are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ocl.Comment: ICCV 2023. Webpage: https://mvig-rhos.com/oc

A snoRNA modulates mRNA 3' end processing and regulates the expression of a subset of mRNAs.

mRNA 3' end processing is an essential step in gene expression. It is well established that canonical eukaryotic pre-mRNA 3' processing is carried out within a macromolecular machinery consisting of dozens of trans-acting proteins. However, it is unknown whether RNAs play any role in this process. Unexpectedly, we found that a subset of small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are associated with the mammalian mRNA 3' processing complex. These snoRNAs primarily interact with Fip1, a component of cleavage and polyadenylation specificity factor (CPSF). We have functionally characterized one of these snoRNAs and our results demonstrated that the U/A-rich SNORD50A inhibits mRNA 3' processing by blocking the Fip1-poly(A) site (PAS) interaction. Consistently, SNORD50A depletion altered the Fip1-RNA interaction landscape and changed the alternative polyadenylation (APA) profiles and/or transcript levels of a subset of genes. Taken together, our data revealed a novel function for snoRNAs and provided the first evidence that non-coding RNAs may play an important role in regulating mRNA 3' processing

Emerging Theranostic Nanomaterials in Diabetes and Its Complications

Diabetes mellitus (DM) refers to a group of metabolic disorders that are characterized by hyperglycemia. Oral subcutaneously administered antidiabetic drugs such as insulin, glipalamide, and metformin can temporarily balance blood sugar levels, however, long-term administration of these therapies is associated with undesirable side effects on the kidney and liver. In addition, due to overproduction of reactive oxygen species and hyperglycemia-induced macrovascular system damage, diabetics have an increased risk of complications. Fortunately, recent advances in nanomaterials have provided new opportunities for diabetes therapy and diagnosis. This review provides a panoramic overview of the current nanomaterials for the detection of diabetic biomarkers and diabetes treatment. Apart from diabetic sensing mechanisms and antidiabetic activities, the applications of these bioengineered nanoparticles for preventing several diabetic complications are elucidated. This review provides an overall perspective in this field, including current challenges and future trends, which may be helpful in informing the development of novel nanomaterials with new functions and properties for diabetes diagnosis and therapy.Peer reviewe

Measurement of the proton structure parameters in the forward-backward charge asymmetry

The forward-backward asymmetry ($A_{FB}$) in the Drell-Yan process $pp/p\bar p \to Z/\gamma^* \to \ell^+\ell^-$ is sensitive to the proton structure information. Such information has been factorized into well-defined proton structure parameters which can be regarded as experimental observables. In this paper, we extract the structure parameters from the $A_{FB}$ distributions reported by the CMS collaboration in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV, and by the D0 collaboration in $p\bar p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 1.96$ TeV. It is the first time that the unique parton information in the $A_{FB}$ spectrum can be decoupled from the electroweak calculation and measured as standalone observables, which can be used as new data constraints in the global quantum chromodynamics analysis of the parton distribution functions (PDFs). Although the parton information in the $pp$ and $p\bar p$ collisions are different, and the precisions of the measured structure parameters are statistically limited, the results from both the hadron colliders indicate that the down quark contribution might be higher than the theoretical predictions with the current PDFs at the relevant momentum fraction range

A Resoure Allocation Framework for Network Slicing with Multi-service Coexistence

Network slicing has been widely recognized as the architectural technology for 5G and beyond wireless network systems to provide tailored service for diverse applications by flexibly splitting and allocating various heterogeneous resources. However, it is still challenging to meet the strict delay requirements of a large number of delay-sensitive applications under traditional slicing architectures. One potential way to tackle this issue is to build network slicing upon Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems, where both communication and computing resources are integrated for providing customized service. As such, in this paper, we propose a framework, to jointly optimize communication and computing resources under the scenario of multi-service coexistence, with the objective to minimize the system cost while meeting the diverse QoS requirements. To make the original optimization problem more tractable, we decompose it into two convex sub-problems first. Then we obtain the optimal solutions of the two sub-problems respectively, and finally derive the optimal communication and computing resource allocation scheme based on the optimal solutions of these two sub-problems. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly saves the system cost under various scenarios compared with other benchmarks