Volume 42, Issue 5

This study investigates the use of explicit manifestations of authorial identity (namely self-mention pronouns) and their collocation networks in academic and workplace written texts. Based on a purpose-built corpus of research articles and the Hong Kong Financial Services Corpus (HKFSC), this study used Antconc and Graphcoll to extract and analyze the pronouns and their collocation networks. The statistical analysis shows that the academic register contains significantly more self-mention pronouns than the workplace corpus, which can be attributed to a stronger tendency towards self-positioning. We also identified significant register-specific semantic features of the collocation networks of self-mention pronouns. These findings contribute to our understanding of how self-mention pronouns operate in tandem with their surrounding context in register-specific discourse. Pedagogically, the findings can be useful for workshop-based training for finance students and early-career professionals in this domain to support the development of the discipline-specific writing skills needed for careers in academia and industry.

This paper examines online discursive representations of migrant domestic helpers (MDHs) by Hong Kong employers. Unlike existing research, which concentrates on the experiences of MDHs from their own perspectives, this study focuses on positive narrations about MDHs by their employers. Using critical discourse analysis, this study identified the discursive strategies deployed to portray MDHs in more than 2,000 Facebook posts. The findings reveal that, although the interlocutors attempted to commend the MDHs in their employ, they also emphasised their own superiority by portraying themselves as gastronomic experts, good educators, and benefactors, thus developing an ideological paradox. Another dimension of ideological ambivalence concerned the discursive conflict between their high expectations from the MDHs and their underlying belief that domestic work neither requires skills nor deserves high pay. Taken together, these factors are responsible for the entrenchment of the inferior image of MDHs in Hong Kong society, despite the persistent endeavours of activist groups to spread awareness of their exploitation.

Introduced by African American communities, Chinese rap battle features an intensive ritual exchange of impoliteness, aggression, and vulgarity, but its linguistic realizations have not been systematically examined. Taking Iron Mic as a case study, this paper explores how advanced and novice rappers perform ritual impoliteness in Chinese underground rap battle competitions. Using mixed methods of discourse analysis and content analysis, we analyze the ritual impoliteness strategies in 51 rounds of Chinese freestyle rap battles. The findings show that advanced and novice rappers employed comparable instances of taboo language, threatening, and insults on their opponents’ superficial qualities and rap skills. Moreover, advanced rappers performed significantly more boasting and ritual insults on the others’ moral qualities. Their use of ritual impoliteness is warranted by hip-hop community norms of authenticity and creativity as well as Chinese social values of reciprocity, filial piety, and moral educators. This paper contributes to the research on Chinese ritual impoliteness and rap battle competitions.

With the surge of global health threats, “health security” constitutes a large proportion of international security. Drawing on proximization theory, the study aims to reveal how proximization serves to legitimize health emergency measures based on a case study of U.S. policies on travel restrictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The study annotated and counted the lexico-grammatical items identified as proximization triggers in terms of space, time, and axiology based on the data from a corpus of approximately 60,237 tokens. An attempt is then made for a critical cognitive analysis of health security discourse, indicating that proximization facilitates the legitimization of travel restrictions through the construction of threats, both synchronically and diachronically. Furthermore, the results suggest that the proximization approach is suited to the analysis of health security discourse. Notably, this study may shed new light on research into state politics, crisis management, and international security.

In this paper, we aim to explain how metaphors can be employed for clarificatory purposes in British parliamentary debates. These debates typically involve an exchange of arguments concerning complex issues, which more often than not may require clarification. In clarifying something complex, metaphors are often employed in which an unfamiliar and abstract concept is compared to a more familiar and concrete concept. Because the choice of metaphor affects how an issue is understood and reasoned about, discussants may wish to oppose such a metaphor to avoid biased conceptions or even misunderstandings of the issue under discussion. We present a number of cases in which metaphors used for clarificatory purposes are opposed in a British Public Bill Committee debate on the Digital Economy Bill. Our analyses uncover which metaphors are used for clarificatory purposes, to what extent these clarificatory metaphors contribute to furthering the resolution of a debate on the acceptability of legislative proposals, and what consequences opposing such metaphors may have on the continuation of the debate.

Rapport management is argued to be a critical antecedent of voter support in election campaigns, as it can motivate cooperation. However, little research has been conducted exploring how rapport is managed in such practice. In the present study, the campaign leaflets of four political parties in Sheffield Central constituency for the 2017 UK general election were analysed in relation to rapport-management strategies. Three domains of discourse were identified and classified in terms of one or more of the six principles of persuasion: Reciprocity, Consistency and Commitment, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity. The findings showed that Reciprocity and Liking were the commonly employed principles in the rapport-management strategies. These two principles were established in the leaflets by justifying and explaining credentials. Authority played a major role in influencing the functioning of the other principles in the rapport-management strategies. Specifically, the more authority a party had, the stronger the commitment made to act as rapport-management strategies. In contrast, the less authority a party had, the greater social proof and scarcity were involved in the strategies.