Abstracts of Major Papers in This Issue

Representative Men：W. E. B. Du Bois, African American Intellectuals, andThirteenWaysofLookingataBlackManby Henry Louis Gates, Jr., by LEE Yu-cheng, p. 2

In hisThirteenWaysofLookingataBlackMan, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. includes profiles of eight African American celebrities in diverse fields such as literature, religion, the military, and the entertainment industry. These people are “the talented tenth” in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, and their stories are “narratives of ascent”. In the American tradition, they are what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “representative men,” entrusted with “the burden of representation”. This paper first analyzes Du Bois’ perception of race and the origins of his idea about “the talented tenth”, and then moves on to explore the inheritance and development of this idea of elitism among African Americans so as to establish the genealogy between Du Bois and contemporary African American intellectuals. Finally, it also attempts to reveal how Gates manages to find an open space, in the stories of the celebrities, for the deployment of a new politics of race that downplays the importance of race in order to meet the needs of changing realities.

Inheritance and Revision: Louise Erdrich’sLoveMedicineand the Homecoming Pattern in Native American Renaissance, by ZOU Huiling, p. 8

This article explores Louise Erdrich’s inheritance and revision of the Native American homecoming pattern in herLoveMedicine. During the Native American Renaissance, many Native American writers follow the narrative pattern of homecoming created by N. Scott Momaday in hisHouseMadeofDawn, describing how detribalized Indians return to their homeland, participate in tribal ceremonies, and reconstruct their Indian identity. InLoveMedicine, Erdrich transforms this pattern into the pursuit of a transcultural identity, showing how contemporary Indians cross over the conflict and syncreticity between Indian and mainstream cultures and return home with a new identity. Thus, Erdrich develops the narrative pattern of homecoming in Native American literature and gives recognition to a hybrid Native American cultural identity.

An Overview of Hispanic American Literature, SHI Pingping, p. 12

On the basis of clarifying the definition of Hispanic American literature, this paper outlines the Spanish origin and English tradition of Hispanic American literature and, with an emphasis on the introduction of the development of contemporary Hispanic American literature, makes a brief introduction to its representative authors and their English works, in an attempt to draw the attention of Chinese scholars to this ethnic American literature.

The Construction and Function of Middle School English Classroom Corpus, by LIU Yongbing, LIN Zhengjun & WANG Bing, p. 17

Foreign language classroom corpus, as a kind of oral corpus, can provide massive and real audio, video and textual data. With its extensive and automatic functions, researchers in foreign language teaching and learning prefer to use this type of corpus both as a database and an analytical tool. This paper intends to describe the construction and functions of NENU Middle School Classroom Corpus. Firstly, we briefly introduce the initiation of the corpus construction and argue for the importance of the corpus construction based on the review of the current foreign language classroom research in China. Secondly we describe the process of material collections and the construction of the corpus. We conclude the paper by highlighting the main functions of the corpus and its significance in both interlanguage research and foreign language teaching and learning research.

A Study on “Focus on Form” Generated by Chinese EFL Learners, by ZOU Huimin, p. 22

There have been increasing interests in learner-generated focus on form due to the fact that learner interaction is the more common phenomenon in language classroom. Previous research has revealed that learner-generated focus on form rarely occurs and is significantly affected by learners’ proficiency; learners themselves rarely attend to form during communicative language tasks; even if they do, they tend to focus on lexical problems. Based on our investigation into 32 Chinese adult learners’ class interaction during communicative language tasks, we find that the frequency of learner-generated focus on form is relatively high and not influenced by their proficiency; they simultaneously attend to form while concentrating on meaning communication, and they primarily focus on discoursal and morphosyntactic problems; learners’ explicit knowledge of langauge plays an important part in their focus on form. we launch a discussion on the applicability of the two models in SLA concerning learners’ inner mechanism of input processing, namely the Input Process Model and Developmental Readiness.

An Interview with Lin Wusun, by LIN Wusun and QIAN Duoxiu, p. 28

In this interview, Professor Lin Wusun shares with us his experiences and views concerning translation practice and administration in China. Before retirement, he had been Deputy Editor-in-Chief and Director of Beijing Review, Director of Foreign Languages Publishing Bureau and President of China International Publishing Group, Executive Vice-President of The Translators Association of China, council member of FIT (International Federation of Translators), Chief Editor of Chinese Translators Journal, etc. He is currently advisor to the Translators Association of China, Deputy Chairman of the Chinese National Committee for Accreditation of Senior Translators. His translation works have won widespread acclaim, includingSunZiandSunBin’sTheArtofWar,SilkRoad,LestWeForgetNanjingMassacre1937,GettingtoKnowConfucius:ANewTranslationoftheAnalects, and many others.

On Intercultural Translation from the Perspective of Cultural Pragmatic Presupposition Theory, by YUAN Jian-jun and LIANG Dao-hua, p. 35

Cultural presupposition，as a complex language phenomenon, is characterized by mutual knowledge and appropriateness. The cultural differences in translation can be attributed to the different cultural presuppositions in the source language (SL) and target language (TL) texts, hence the understanding of cultural presupposition is helpful to thoroughly understanding and flexibly dealing with cultural presupposition of the source texts, and to selecting translation reconstruction strategy at the macro-level.

Ideological Manipulation on Translated Texts: An Empirical Study onRobinsonCrusoe, by WANG Qin and XU Jian, p. 40

Based on a corpus of 19 full-text Chinese translations, this research studies diachronically the ideological manipulation over the translated texts ofRobinsonCrusoe. The researchers find that ideology influences both translators’ linguistic behaviors and also their interpretation of cultural value. Studies of culture-loaded words and linguistic forms in the translated texts ofRobinsonCrusoeshow that Chinese language in the translated texts has experienced a change from classic Chinese to highly Europeanized Chinese, and then a moderate return to the former.

On the Mechanism and Hierarchy of Syntactic-level Conceptualization, by LIU Xiaolin, p. 48

Based on the qualificational categories of states of affairs proposed by Jan Nuyts (2009), this article, within the framework of Layered Syntactic Structure ofRoleandReferenceGrammar, constructs the mechanism and hierarchy of syntactic-level conceptualization. This article argues that macro-syntactic conceptualization consists of sentence, clause, core and nuclear levels, which is evidenced with child language development; micro-syntactic conceptualization consists of subjective and objective levels, each of which is composed of different number of grammatical operators. Syntactice-level conceptualization is the computation of the values of various grammatical operators, and the essence of conceptualization is computation and composition.

On the Multi-Semantic Features of Pragmatic Ambiguity and Their Cognitive Interpretations, by GAO Fengjiang, p. 54

Based on the qualificational categories of states of affairs proposed by Jan Nuyts (2009), this article, within the framework of Layered Syntactic Structure ofRoleandReferenceGrammar, constructs the mechanism and hierarchy of syntactic-level conceptualization. This article argues that macro-syntactic conceptualization consists of sentence, clause, core and nuclear levels, which is evidenced with child language development; micro-syntactic conceptualization consists of subjective and objective levels, each of which is composed of different number of grammatical operators. Syntactice-level conceptualization is the computation of the values of various grammatical operators, and the essence of conceptualization is computation and composition.