Abstracts of Major Papers in This Issue

ExperimentalStudyofDeclarativeandInterrogativeIntonationinEnglishandChinese, by GUO Jia & SHI Feng, p.5

Based on intonation pattern, this study employs the methods of normalization and relativization to investigate the pitch representations of the declarative and interrogative sentences spoken by four British people and four Chinese people, and to compare the sentence range and tonegroup range of these sentences.The aim of this study is to discover the similarity and difference in terms of intonation patterns between English and Chinese declarative and interrogative sentences.

ResearchesonAcousticalPatternofConsonants, by RAN Qibin, p.12

There are many types of consonants, and each type has special acoustical characteristics.Researches on consonants can be conducted such as in stop pattern and fricative pattern, etc.Consonant pattern researches are summarized in this paper.As for stop pattern, VOT (Voice Onset Time) and GAP (Closure Duration) can be chosen as the two dimensions of coordinates; and as for fricative pattern, center of gravity and dispersion of energy can be chosen as the two dimensions of coordinates.In these consonant patterns, acoustical characteristics of consonants are revealed clearly.In applied aspects, ways of consonant pattern are also important to L2 learning, language (or dialect) contrasting studies.

TheEffectofSentenceLengthonEFLLearners’IntonationPhrasingduringTheirReading-aloudTests, by WANG Hongmei & JIANG Nan, p.16

The paper aims at observing and analyzing the intonation phrasing of Chinese English learners from the aspects of pause, anacrusis, final syllable lengthening and pitch reset.The research subjects include six English native speakers as the baseline and thirty-eight Chinese English majors.Six sentences with long, medium and short in length are selected as test materials.The findings show that in long and medium length sentences there exists great differences in intonation phrasing between the native speakers and the Chinese learners while no such difference distinction is found in phrasing short sentences; in addition, the native speakers use pitch reset and anacrusis more often while Chinese learners rely more on pause in intonation phrasing and vary little in intonation phrasing.

ACognitiveAccountofMetonymyandItsRoleinTextualCoherence, by TENG Yanjiang & LU Weizhong, p.21

As an important research topic in discourse analysis, coherence has drawn wide attention.Significant achievements have been made in this area.However, up to now no systematic methods and standards have been proposed.Based on the discipline of cognitive linguistics, metonymy is seen as a conceptual cognitive means drawn on human experience and one knows a whole person, an object or event by understanding the most salient feature of that person, object or event.From the perceptive of semiotics and based on the schema theory the paper analyzes the schematic motivation of metonymy, putting forward a model aimed for a better account of the cognitive mechanism of textual coherence.

Dual-mechanismTheory:ABetterAccountofLanguageOperatingMechanismthanSingle-mechanismTheory, by ZHENG Lina, p.26

Language operating mechanism in the human brain has been an extremely important research topic for linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and brain science.Both single-mechanism theory and dual-mechanism theory provide hypotheses and accounts for it.First of all, the single- and dual-mechanism theories are introduced in this article.Then, evidence from first language, second language, neuroscience and natural languages are provided to show that dual-mechanism theory is a better account of language operating mechanism than single-mechanism theory.Finally, the implications of the dual-mechanism theory for the foreign language vocabulary teaching are explored.

ReconstructionintheInterpretationofCurrentPoliticalTermswithSemanticDefault, by WANG Jianian, p.32

In light of Default Semantics, this paper approaches interpretation of the current political terms which few literatures have discussed.Jaszczolt differentiates semantic default into two types: cognitive default and social-cultural default.The information in cognitive default is the tacit knowledge only shared by the common speech community.If one and the same term may cause cognitive variation in a different cultural community, the interpreter should transfer the default value of the term into essential value.Social-cultural default is defined as absence of some cultural background knowledge shared by the speaker and his/her intended audiences.If the defaulted pragmatic value in a current political term is the very information expected by the audiences from different cultures, it should be transferred or compensated in the target language.Sometimes current political terms may be represented in wordy or redundant forms, which can be strained off by economic interpretation.

ResearchintheBuildingandApplicationoftheEnglish-ChineseMedicalParallelCorpus, by GUAN Xinchao, HU Kaibao & ZHANG Guannan, p.36

The building of ECMPC, which includes text digitalization, sentence-level alignment, chunk extraction, choice of inducing words etc, is a complicated task.It is very important to translation theory and practice research of medical literature.After investigations of statistical characteristics of original language and collocation of medical texts at the corpus platform, some research results have been acquired.

AStudyofVictorH.MairandHisTranslationofZhuangZi, by LIU Yan, p.42

Professor Victor H.Mair is a famous American scholar on the study of Chinese literature and a renowned translator of classical Chinese works.His translation ofZhuangZibrings the career of the translation ofZhuangZiinto a spring time and inspires the passion on the study ofZhuangZiin America.Mair favorsZhuangZi, especially the literary attraction of this wonderful book.He has done a profound study on Zhuang Zi andZhuangZithe book, and his translation puts the transfer of the literary characteristics on the first place.This paper introduces Mair’s academic background, analyzes his understanding ofZhuangZiand his methods of rendering names, verse and rhetoric devices inZhuangZiand attempts to criticize his translation achievement in the aspect of transferring the literary characteristics ofZhuangZi.

AParadoxofSelf-fashioning:OnSusanSontag’sInAmerica, by KE Ying, p.48

Susan Sontag’s last novelInAmericais based on real historical figures and events.The paper, evolving around the concept “self-fashioning”, analyzes the heroine’s urgent need of self-fashioning, her dream of escape and conquest and the price she paid for self-fashioning, revealing that the heroine’s original wish to refashion a new self failed and that she was ultimately modeled into a consumption symbol.By availing of the historical materials, Sontag turned her concerning eyes to the present plight in which the immigrants are trapped when they try to reconstruct their identity but only to find themselves spiritual exiles in a new country.

SocialDiscipline,DomesticationandAlteration:MaryandAnna’sLongJourneytoLiberty, by CHEN Shangkun, p.53

The social discipline imposes on women two different norms:the social norm and gender norm.From Mary in Doris Lessing’sTheGrassIsSingingto Anna in her masterpieceTheGoldenNotebook, the heroines have to face those visible and invisible social barriers in the pursuit of their self-fulfillment.The social discipline has forged for women the mode of their fate.Lessing emphasizes the importance of freedom of thinking without which women seem most likely to lose or diminish their gender identity.Mary lost herself under the domestication of social norms while Anna accomplished her salvation for her firm belief in freedom of thinking and liberation of spirit for women.