Band 42, Heft 2

The investigation of potential stylistic differences between translated and non-translated texts has been proven to be a promising line in corpus-based translation studies, yet similar research on the product of interpreting seems both smaller in scale and slower in development. This study compares the use of hedges in interpreted and spontaneous English speeches collected in similar settings. Specifically, we gathered the two types of speech data from Chinese and American political press briefings respectively and analyzed their differences in the employment of various hedging devices. The results show that interpreted speeches not only contain significantly fewer hedges but they are also dependent on a narrower range of such devices than spontaneous speeches, which is consistent with the tendency towards simplification in translations. Also, our findings suggest that interpreted and spontaneous speeches tend to follow distinct hedging patterns in terms of preferred linguistic choices. Potential factors triggering such differences are discussed.

This article views appraisal as co-selection patterns of target, source and evaluative parameters and investigates the ways in which news discourse retells news stories and reproduces truthful reality. We combined the corpus-assisted method and quantitative/qualitative analysis of the data, i.e., 904 sentences which were extracted from the corpus of German 5G news reports by selecting the top 5 items from each of the noun keywords lists of the three subcorpora of economics, politics and technology news reports. It was found that the German media restage the necessity and desirability to promote the development of German communication facilities/technology through international cooperation, particularly Germany-Sino cooperation. In addition, a hesitant image was evoked as to the high-profile 5G development in Germany with an awareness of the potential security risks and economic losses. On the intersubjective dimension, our findings suggest that journalists make full exploitation of different dialogistic positioning strategies for closing down or opening up the dialogic space to a greater or lesser degree. More specifically, they tend to acknowledge and endorse the positive/negative attitudes attributed to the non-authorial voices towards particular targets in the fields of economics, politics or technology. A future comparison with the genre of news comments or editorials would deepen our understanding of the performativity of media.

Academic text production usually includes various people intervening in the text at different stages of the writing and evaluation process. By focusing on trajectories of English-medium research papers, this article explores the moments and mechanisms of intervention in the text production processes, as well as the associated norm negotiations. The study takes a dynamic approach to text analysis, with focus on tracing the text histories of the research papers from the perspective of how the writing is regulated by different actors and in different ways at various stages along the trajectories. The data include two detailed text histories, covering research interviews with authors and their colleagues, copies of several drafts of the texts, language revisions, written comments from different brokers (reviewers, editors and colleagues), and recordings of research group meetings around writing. The findings illustrate how various evaluation mechanisms and practices function to enable and restrict interventions by specific actors, and how these actors may evoke different evaluating authorities. It is concluded that the moments of intervention serve as sites for (re)negotiating norms and appropriateness criteria.

This study is an extension of previous research on how writers of research articles (RAs) structure their texts to be coherent in the process of achieving communicative purposes of the RA genre. It examines how RA writers relate sentences in establishing a niche for their studies in the introduction section. Genre analysis methods and Rhetorical Structure Theory are used to analyse 40 applied linguistics RA introductions. The findings show that the RA writers who establish a niche by indicating a gap in previous research tend to use a concessive or contrastive relation to relate the gap statements to the descriptions of previous studies. The writers who establish a niche by indicating how their studies would extend previous research in the field tend to use a background relation to claim a niche based on the specific studies. The writers who indicate a real world problem for the niche establishment tend to use a background relation to reveal a niche based on contextual information surrounding the problem. Possible reasons for the selection of the relations are discussed in terms of the influence of the nature of the RA genre and/or the applied linguistics discipline.

This paper explores the correlations between imperative sentences and interpersonal relations in Jane Eyre . The imperatives uttered by Rochester, St. John, and Mrs. Reed to Jane are examined from four perspectives: quantity, imperative force, addressing, and Jane’s corresponding responses. It is found that the variation in these aspects matches well with the development of interpersonal relations. Specifically, when the addresser and Jane get more intimate in relationship, the quantities of the imperatives tend to decline, the imperative force tends to soften, the addressing becomes more personal, and Jane’s compliance to the imperatives tends to decrease and her non-compliance tends to increase. It is proposed that new indicators in imperatives (i.e. vocatives, personal pronouns and directional verbs like come and go in imperatives) can be adopted to evaluate interpersonal relations in a literary work.

This article is a contrastive study of epistemic stance in the English translations of the Chinese medical classic Huang Di Nei Jing by clinicians and non-clinicians. Epistemic stance is concerned with a translator’s certainty about the proposition of a statement and is highly consequential to information validity. By drawing on the systemic functional linguistic framework and using two sets of translations of the Chinese medicine classic, Huang Di Nei Jing , by both clinicians and non-clinicians, the study investigates the linguistic choices concerning epistemic stance. The findings show that epistemic stance is closely related to the translators’ domain knowledge and expertise, with clinician-translators more likely to express their epistemic stance in the translations. However, this study also finds a counterintuitive epistemic pattern: non-clinician translators express more certainty in their translations.