Volume 2, Issue 1

The Journal des Sçavans was the first academic journal to appear. The first issue was published in Paris in January 1665. It was edited by Denis de Sallo at the instigation of Louis XIV’s first minister, Colbert, whose objective was the state control of new knowledge. This study is based on a sample of texts from the Journal des Sçavans for the period 1665–1696 totalling approximately 66,000 words. These texts are available on Internet, but only in image form, so they are distinctly non-digital and not amenable to computer analysis; this paper gives a manual analysis of thematic structure as a way of showing that manual analysis can provide interesting and significant results. This analysis shows that 73% of themes function as grammatical subject (rather less than might be expected), and 22% as circumstantial adjunct (rather more than might be expected); 52% of the latter are clausal in form. Ranking clauses frequently have a textual theme (29%), but only rarely an interpersonal theme (3%). Reference to humans other than the author account for 37% of topical themes and constitute the largest semantic group. These are usually the author of a book under review or a person mentioned in a book under review. Reviewers, however, rarely refer to themselves, and when they do it is usually in general terms. These results have intrinsic interest as an example of the use of thematic structure in early academic periodical writing in French, but also show that manual analysis remains a useful tool in approaching texts which are not amenable to computer analysis.

Existing theories of translation are mostly product-oriented, the process of translation is under-theorized. The concept of equivalence, as idealized quality of a translated text, is re-examined from the perspective of functional linguistics. It is argued that equivalence should not be merely interpreted as similar perlocutionary effects of the source text and the target text. The translated text should be maximally equivalent to the source text in the interpersonal, ideational and textual meanings. A process model is constructed to reveal the process of translation as interlingual re-instantiation and the sorts and sources of information dealt with by the translator in his/her endeavour to achieve maximal equivalence. The subjectivity of the translator in making inferences and in rhetorical manoeuvring is analysed based on data from two English translations of Lao Zi’s Book of Tao and Teh.

The French presidential election takes place in two ballots. The second round opposes the two leading candidates at the end of the first. Between the two ballots, since 1974, the two finalists take part in a TV debate along the lines of the US presidential debates. This presentation analyses the texts of these six debates (136,000 words). A library of more than 6000 political texts – and nearly 13 million words – provides some benchmarks. This paper presents the statistical indices proposed for the analysis of the communication within a situation of interaction. These indices are derived from theories concerning the presentation of actants in the speech, the expression of the speaker’s subjectivity and the speech modalization. The application of these indices allows to bring a new perspective on these debates and it defines, for each of these indices, its scope, limitations and possible improvements. The first part analyses the tendency of the speakers to personalize. These indices are broken down into the following dimensions: the relative importance given to the speaker, to the other and to the real message recipients (the listeners). The second part measures the fundamental choice in favour of the verb and, within this part of speech, between the accomplished ones (verbs to be and to have) and modal verbs (possible, desirable, obligation, knowledge). Finally, the greater or lesser density of the negation highlights the real scope of discourse. The study leads to interesting conclusions about electoral discourse and the evolution of French political discourse over the last 40 years. Finally, it emphasizes the usefulness of vast corpuses of texts and of lexicometry for language studying and teaching.

Only a few attempts have been made on comparisons between the indigenized varieties and foreign-speaker varieties of English. Surprisingly, for instance, there has been scarcely any comparative study on Singapore English and China English. This study aims to develop a framework allowing for the investigation of the indigenized varieties and learner varieties of English. Considering the situatedness of linguistic behavior, I propose that data from the same genre may be suitable for contrastive analyses of both varieties. The genre of academic discourse is selected for investigation, with the focus on grammatical metaphor (GM). The notion GM is brought in where the variation is essentially in the grammatical forms. My investigation involves qualitative analysis of GM identified in academic texts, their corresponding distribution between Singapore English and China English corpora, as well as discussion of their stylistic effects and the underlying generic and sociocultural conventions. The study finds relatively less GM in Singapore English texts than their Chinese counterparts within the academic genre. Chinese academic texts tend to exhibit a higher degree of technicality and compactness than the Singaporean counterpart, which could be explained in terms of the interaction between generic and sociocultural conventions.