Volume 46, Issue 1

Engagement strategies in academic talks highlight how speakers position and manage their target audience, facilitating the effective communication of their academic stances. The present study investigates engagement strategies in academic talks delivered in L1 Mandarin Chinese and two varieties of English: L1 English and English as a lingua franca (ELF). Three corpora comprising 90 academic talks in the humanities and social sciences serve as the basis for analysis. The overarching findings underscore the prominence of hearer-mentions as the predominant form of engagement markers, with L1 English speakers notably favouring the combined use of hearer-mentions and directives to foster engagement with their audience. In comparison, L1 Mandarin speakers exhibit a proclivity towards using questions and directives as primary tactics for audience management and ELF scholars frequently incorporate knowledge appeals into their academic talks, while the use of personal-asides remains relatively infrequent. Moreover, the disciplinary nuances suggest that the choice of engagement markers may be influenced by specific disciplinary conventions and linguacultural variations. The findings not only contribute to a comparative analysis of academic spoken performance across diverse linguistic backgrounds and disciplines, but are also of potential interest to inform future speech training by adjusting and applying these strategies in communication.

Science and science popularization texts disseminating partly overlapped scientific knowledge show distinct writing strategies. We examine their differences concerning aspects of lexis, word classes, and dependency relations by Kullback-Leibler divergence, taking “60-Second Science” texts and source research article abstracts as an illustration. The findings reveal that “60-Second Science” is more interactive in terms of quotation marks, question marks, “they”, and “you” while abstracts are more informative with hyphens linking words from different categories. Moreover, word classes show that pronouns and adverbs are typical in “60-Second Science”. However, abstracts utilize nouns and adjectives significantly more. Dependency relations demonstrate that nominal subjects and adverbial modifiers are prominent in “60-Second Science” compared to adjectival and prepositional modifiers in abstracts. The study presents a clear comparison of linguistic features between science and science popularization texts that can be applied in scientific English writing and teaching in connection with different scientific communicative events and further promote the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

China implemented stringent COVID restrictions in 2020 but eased them in December 2022. Since metaphors can both reflect and shape people’s views and stances, it is relevant to study how the state-backed newspaper Global Times used metaphors to frame the policy shift for different target readers. It extends our previous research on the newspaper’s 2020 editorials, revealing the fluidity of metaphors used by the same text producer during a period of significant transition. Despite changes in COVID-19 policies, the newspaper continued to use WAR metaphors between January 2022 and February 2023. However, the gradual increase in JOURNEY metaphors and decrease in WAR metaphors over time suggest a transition from a “militaristic” to a “smoother” portrayal of the pandemic’s progression. While the newspaper consistently maintained pro-China and anti-US stances, it used fewer metaphors to describe the US position. The metaphor shift for China from “a person who does not lie flat” to “a person who rolls up sleeves and works hard” aligns with the government’s change in focus from the pandemic situation to economic recovery. It should be noted that translation practices further affect metaphor perception, with source-text readers exposed to more negative depictions of the pandemic and the US compared to target-text readers. Future research could explore these metaphors’ impact on audiences.

This study examines the use of literacy practices in a performance management system which aims to produce reflective practitioners, and how these practices were discursively resisted by staff. It employed a linguistic ethnographic research method, drawing on interactional data, interviews, field notes, and documentation to examine technologised literacy practices. These practices were a form of technologisation of discourse in the workplace, and were usually forms of writing connected to the performance management system that worked to also position reviewees as reflective practitioners. However, running parallel with these was a form of discursive counter-conduct that variously portrayed these practices as HR language , KPI language or managese . Implications for workplace discourse, and the interplay between institutional and professional discourses, are explored.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown is the second worst accident in the history of nuclear power. As nuclear power is a controversial policy option, interpreting the significance of the disaster is important in the struggle over the legitimacy of nuclear power. This article compares the representation of Fukushima between a corpus of five pro-nuclear and five anti-nuclear media opinion pieces published in English-language online newspapers. It uses systemic functional linguistics to examine the verbal process types and clausal positioning of Fukushima, focusing on themes in the data and how these representations construct competing arguments about the disaster. In pro-nuclear articles Fukushima has more frequent Relational and Mental process types and has more foregrounded clausal positioning, which reflects the need to emphasise alternative interpretations to the narrative of Fukushima as an unacceptable disaster. In anti-nuclear articles there are more frequent Material processes and backgrounded clausal positioning, which reflects a focus on the physical damage of the disaster and an assumption that Fukushima is evidence of the fallibility of nuclear power. Discursive differences over three specific aspects are identified – the lesson to be taken from Fukushima, the assessment of damage caused, and the performance of the nuclear plant.

This article offers an in-depth analysis of the evolving representations of older adults on Weibo, a leading Chinese social media platform, using a self-compiled corpus of nearly 7 million tokens from posts spanning January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2022. We utilize a corpus analysis tool to identify four-grams and perform concordance analysis to determine thematic categories and track their frequency changes over time. The findings reveal significant shifts in the portrayal of older adults, highlighting not only deteriorations in health but also perceived declines in cognitive abilities, moral standing, and societal roles. This evolved depiction paints older adults as increasingly isolated, outdated, and vulnerable, suggesting a nuanced form of marginalization compared to pre-pandemic portrayals. This study contributes to the existing literature by delineating the complex dynamics of older adult representation on Chinese social media against the backdrop of a rapidly aging population.