Band 2, Heft 2-3

By “fronted qualifier”, I mean a relatively long initial segment, which precedes a headword and which has an adjectival function in relation to it. This structure seems to be relatively common in French. For example, a leaflet from a French university begins with a letter from the vice-chancellor almost entirely written in this form. The leaflet gives an English translation, which calques the French structure. Taken individually, the translation of each clause seems adequate, but when read as a text, unlike the original French, it somehow does not work. This seems to suggest that French accepts this structure more easily than English does. To the extent that it is usual to treat the fronted qualifier as part of the subject, and the whole of the subject group as theme, this would give “Born in Liverpool in 1937, he” as theme of “Born in Liverpool in 1937, he was educated at St. Mary’s College”. However, since the fronted qualifier is in a marked position, does this mean that it should be taken as theme, or, at least, be accorded additional thematic status? And since French seems to accept this structure more easily than English, might this be one of the points at which the two languages differ? These are the sorts of questions, which this article will attempt to address.

Situated at the nexus of linguistics, media and identity, this article addresses the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives by exploring within the framework of positioning how the community of Chinese people in mainland China is imagined and defined through the use of English in Chinese advertising. Based on a corpus of Chinese–English bilingual advertisements, it mainly discusses the mobilisation of English as a stylistic resource in producing a variety of positioning cues that are at work in this discursive process. Five positioning cues are identified in the analysis of lexical items and discursive features of the English language that was utilized in a representative sample of advertisements: proper names of Western places, emotion words, discourses of success, and discourses of Western masculinity and femininity. They are found to have been used in three interrelated processes of locating, refashioning, and assessing Chinese people. The findings are applied as a ground for discussion of the cultural politics of English in China and the question of whether Chinese people’s sense of cultural identity is being threatened.

Mandarin in Singapore has recently undergone the process of linguistic commodification, thus generating fundamental cracks in the ideological premises of the country’s much-touted bilingual policy: the pragmatic function is now ascribed to both English and Mandarin, and no longer exclusively to English only. This article argues that the complications wrought by the commodification of Mandarin on the bilingual policy have been shaped almost single-handedly by the ideology of pragmatism. Thus, the article seeks to answer this question: What does the commodification of Mandarin tell us about Singapore and Singaporeans’ recent (re)articulations and (re)enactments of the ideology of pragmatism? It transcends issues of language and permeates the very core of Singaporean political culture. It is not a simple case of commodifying a language; it is more a case of reinscribing government in the political culture of the country.

This paper explores, from a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective, a set of three comparable regulatory texts in English, Chinese and Portuguese. In regulatory texts, different semantic strategies are used to regulate and control addresse’s behaviour. One key strategy for doing so is the use of the system of modality, more specifically the resources for assigning obligations to the addressee, thereby regulating his or her behaviour. Here we will analyze three tenancy agreements in terms of modality, that is, a bilingual parallel text in Chinese and English and its comparable version in Brazilian Portuguese. Our main objective was to bring out similarities and differences in the deployment of the resources of modality in order to propose that a functional perspective on legal translation may aid translators/interpreters and also translation/interpreting students to construct systematic understandings of the function of the text in a given situation type. In other words, it is possible to build a relationship between the context and the register in order to identify correlations between contextual features and linguistic ones.

This study examines the process for gaining Russian instructional materials at a dual language immersion program for school children in the Western USA. The ethnographic approach to the bilingual and multilingual setting draws on Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory to explore how the context impedes or supports the instructional need for appropriate language materials in the reformist period: a period marked by standardized testing and managed schools under a business model. This transdisciplinary approach crossing linguistic, anthropological, and psychological fields was selected to explore the cultural–historical implications in the USA where bilingual education was aggressively dismantled with the onset of the World Wars. The findings demonstrate organizational leadership that was resistant to the needs of the Russian teachers and families, and is lacking in knowledge of languages, translation, and pedagogy. Findings also show how a community worked together for the benefit of young learners. Implications include the need for the US Government to better support immigrant communities and schools to achieve the multilingual workforce initiative. A protocol for selecting instructional materials from abroad is provided to assist with curriculum development.

This paper discusses some of Ruqaiya Hasan’s key ideas about language, literacy, and education with the goal of showing its relevance to Pakistan and of showing how a deep reading of her work can help in improving the educational culture of the country. This is done by surveying her research publications and drawing from the work that directly relates to issues of literacy and education in the Pakistani context. The paper is also highly relevant for those working in other “developing” countries or with people from underprivileged backgrounds.