Abstracts of Major Papers in This Issue

RapportOrientationofMitigatorsandTheirInterpersonalPragmaticFunctionsby RAN Yongping, p.4

This paper studies the pragmatic roles of mitigatiors or mitigating devices within interpersonal relations.It holds that language use is constrained by pragmatic motivations, such as to reduce the directive force of an utterance or increase its acceptance so as to better manage interpersonal relations, this is considered the rapport orientation for the adoption of such mitigators of politeness markers, terms of address, hedges and supportive utterances.Thus, mitigation facilitates the management of interpersonal relations in interaction.

APragmaticInterpretationof“N1sileN2”Construction:WithRandomCommentsonViewsofTransposition,Topic,andBlendingby HOU Guojin, p.11

The thesis discusses the Chinese (partial schematic) construction of “N1sile N2”.The beginning is a review of a few papers discussing the derivative “Wang Mian sile (dies) fuqin (father)” example, respectively “Transposition View”, “Topic View” and “Blending View”.This paper holds a “pragmatic-coercion view”: pragmatic coercion, in its narrow sense, refers to relevant modulation of such linguistic means as sounds, grammar and meaning, on the part of the communicator governed by a certain number of pragmatic parameters in the light of a certain number of pragmatic principles.The “N1sile N2” construction in question comes into being out of such pragmatic coercion.

OntheSemanticInterpretationModelofPersonalPronominalAnaphorainDiscourseby SONG Hong, p.23

Anaphora is one of the critical issues in linguistics.The researchers of different subjects have conducted abundant studies and proposed plenty of theories and paradigms.However, there is still lack of thorough understanding of the complicated anaphora in natural discourses.This thesis, from the perspective of semantic interpretation, analyzes various definitions of pronominal anaphora given in different theories.The analysis reveals that the semantic interpretation model of personal pronominal anaphora has undergone a typical transformation from static to dynamic notion.The semantic interpretation of anaphora is not subject to linear constraint of the superficial verbal form but subject to deep constraints of pragmatic and cognitive factors.The resolution of language expressive forms lies on the awareness of conceptual conformity between the speakers and listeners in cognition.

GenerativeAnalysisofCounter-unidirectionalAnaphoraby YANG Yongzhong, p.27

The present study is manly concerned with the internal structure and syntactic derivation of counter-unidirectional anaphora.It is argued that the key to the interpretation of counter-unidirectional anaphora lies in the construal and checking system of its semantic features, for in the minimalist framework, the motivation of movement is to check features.As a functional category, Am has special marked determiner features, and its projection follows the projection rules of other functional categories.In the minimalist framework, lexical categories are fully inflectionalized while functional categories contain only morphological inflectional features.Whether the features of lexical categories and those of functional categories match each other depends upon proper local constraints.Thus, the matching constraints of morphological features require that lexical categories move to the positions corresponding to functional categories in order to check their inflectional features.It is convincingly proved that the binding principles of counter-unidirectional anaphora are universal.

EducationalLinguistics:ItsScopeandFocusby MEI Deming, p.32

This paper traces the historical roots of educational linguistics and reviews its major schools of thought.By way of reviewing and critiquing, it highlights the major views on the disciplinary orientation of educational linguistics as a field of research and education.The key notions, objectives and missions of educational linguistics are analyzed and clarified; and the independent, interfacing, pervasive and open characteristics of the field are identified and discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives.Grounded in acknowledgement of the objective, scope and focus of the field, this paper underlines some expectations on the academic development and areas of research of educational linguistics.

ELT：ItsAcademicDisciplinethatGuidestheTeacherDevelopmentby XIA Jimei, p.43

This paper calls for the academic recognition of ELT in China as either educational linguistics or linguistic education depending on its focus.The issue is put forward on account of the unfortunate situation in ELT field in China where teacher’s research on teaching is not recognized as academic acts.The writer argues that ELT teachers may neither be interested in literature critics nor be able to do research on linguistics, but must be involved in teaching research.She believes that the academic recognition of ELT as a discipline of its own will guide the ordinary teacher’s professional development.In the paper, she proposes some teacher-oriented and classroom-based topics or concerns with certain rationales underneath for teacher’s research.

WorkingMemoryResearchinSecondLanguageAcquisition:TheoriesFormulationandEmpiricalStudiesby MA Zheng, p.46

Working Memory is one of the central issues in psycholinguistics, and it offers insights into the understanding of individual differences in second language acquisition.During the past several decades, various studies on working memory have been carried out at home and abroad.This paper will discuss the theoretical models, working memory span tasks and results of some influential studies in order to make new directions for future research.

DiscussionontheTranslationSkillsforMeasureWordsinMandarinChinese:InTermsofTheirAppraisalMeaningby CAO Yingchun, LIU Yueming & LE Xiuhua, p.61

The measure words in modern mandarin Chinese can fulfill the functions of not only describing the objects and the events, but also expressing the author’s opinions towards the objects or events being discussed.These opinions include the affects, the judgments, and the appreciations from the author, realizing the rhetoric strategies.The lack of measure words as a lexis category in English may cause problems in the process of translation between Chinese and English.Few studies have been carried out so far.Based on a small corpus of parallel C-E texts, this article tries to find out how the Chinese translators tackle the problem during their C-E translation.We find that: (ⅰ) most of the measure words are due to the epistemic difference between the two language systems; (ⅱ) the measure words with salient evaluations as rhetoric skills are overtly translated; and (ⅲ) there are generally two translating strategies for the measure words during the process of C-E, each of the two contains several translating skills.

StudiesonTranslationeseinHongKongandTaiwan:ABriefReviewby JIN Qibin, p.67

These days, the ever-present translationese has found its way into the literary works translation and posed a great threat to the idiomatic expression of Chinese, bearing the brunt of criticism in the circle of translation studies.The inundation of translationese attracted a lot of attention and was widely criticized among the scholars of translation and literary studies in Hong Kong and Taiwan.The paper presents a review of translationese studies in Hong Kong and Taiwan from perspectives of definition of translationese, metaphors on translationese, translators’ guard against it in bilingual dictionaries making, and some typical examples of translationese such as “bei” (被), “xing” (性), “ruguo” (如果) and “zuowei” (作為).The paper summarizes the features of translationese and points out its damage to the flexibility and implicit nature of Chinese, which aims to be of some help to current studies on translationese.