International Linguistics Research

A Metaphor Analysis of Love Allusions in A Dream of Red Mansions

Lin Qiuming, Li Danyang — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0800

The paper explores two love allusions, ‘the pledge between plant and stone’ and ‘Jin’s marriage’ in the Chinese literary classics A Dream of Red Mansions written by Cao Xueqin and provides new explanations to the theme of the novel. Nearly 20 metaphorical expressions in the novel are selected through Critical Metaphor Analysis with 6 specifically representational examples analyzed in the paper by building integration networks based on Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT). The findings are as follow: 1) the counterculture of ‘plant and stone’ is embodied in the mythological stories at the beginning of the novel. 2) a ‘nested integrational network’, originally proposed by the researchers, links the mythological narrative space and the fictional human world space. 3) the comparison between integration networks of the two love allusions shows anti-feudalism of the author Cao Xueqin. This paper offers an interpretation of the novel from the aspect of cognitive linguistics, which, in turn, could promote the development of CIT within this field.

The Complaint Response Strategies in the Airline Outbound Calls from the Perspective of Rapport Management

Honglin Yang, Ping Liu — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0800

Customer complaints can have a significant influence on the rapport and relationships between the customer and the company. This article aims to study the company’s response strategies for customer complaints from the perspective of rapport management, collecting the data from the airline outbound calls. Results show that there are three types of customer complaints and three kinds of response strategies related, but the effect of strategies on rapport management is not satisfying.

Conceptual Metaphors in President Muhammadu Buhari's Political Rhetoric

Zubairu Malah, Dinyo Shadrach Taiwo — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0800

Conceptual metaphors continue to receive scholarly attention from discourse analysts taking political discourse seriously. Studies are often interested in the versatile discourse functions of metaphors; how political leaders deploy them as powerful weapons in their armory of political oratory. Therefore, this study extends the current knowledge by exploring conceptual metaphors in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric. It was guided by two major questions: (1) What types of conceptual metaphors does President Muhammadu Buhari deploy in his political rhetoric? and (2) What rhetorical functions do the Conceptual Metaphors deployed in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric perform? The study’s theoretical impetus was Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), and Charteris-Black’s (2009) Contemporary Model of Metaphor and Political Communication was also applied in the analysis. The speeches analyzed include: (1) Muhammadu Buhari’s Presidential Primaries Speech, (2) Muhammadu Buhari’s Acceptance Speech, (3) Muhammadu Buhari’s Victory Speech and (4) Muhammadu Buhari’s (First) Presidential Inaugural Speech. The results show that President Buhari, in his political rhetoric, mostly uses HUMAN metaphors (32%), WAR metaphors (21%) and JOURNEY metaphors (16%). Moreover, further analysis revealed that Buhari mostly uses conceptual metaphors to establish his ethical integrity, heighten emotional impact and communicate his anti-corruption and political ideologies. The study concluded that conceptual metaphors are vital resources for construction of persuasion in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political rhetoric.

Linguistic Evaluation of News Reports on Islamophobic Incidents

Noor Alaa Abdul- Razzk, Huda H Khalil — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0800

This research paper aims at figuring out the way in which the world perceives the Islamophobic incidents. Such a global perception can be obtained from employing a kind of pervasive discourse that is emitted from global institutions and directed to the world in general. Thus, the conducted linguistic evaluation has targeted the news reports as a kind of global media discourse. The linguistic theory employed for language evaluation is Martin and White’s (2005) theory of appraisal. Three categories are classified in the appraisal theory: attitude, engagement, and graduation. Attitude is subdivided into effect, judgment, and appreciation; engagement into monogloss and hetergloss, and graduation into force and focus. The methodology works on three variables in the Islamophobic incident: the aggressor, the victim and motive. The orientation of investigation works to identify the attitude of affect directed from the report towards the victim, judgement towards the behavior of the aggressor, and appreciation towards the motive of the incident. The research also identifies the features of these attitudes as being negative or positive, the types (sub- classifications), engagement (monogloss or heterogloss), and graduation (force and focus) of the spotted attitudes. The data consists of twelve news reports selected, according to their topic, from three News agencies: BBC, Independent, and Fox News. The analysis has revealed that, contrary to many claims, news reports tend to adopt a neutral stance towards Muslims and Non- Muslims. They tend to portray the Islamophobic incidents as close to reality as possible.

The Sociolinguistic Sampling. Does it Need to be Redefined?

Francisco García Marcos — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0800

The present article analyses a classic in the methodology on the analysis of the social variation of languages: the application of the ratio of 0'0025 % to obtain a representative sample of the population of a speaking community. This ratio, established empirically by Labov in 1966 for New York City, nevertheless presents important limitations when moving to communities with smaller populations. Replicating the empirical experimentation in four Spanish populations of different demographic size, it is shown that the empirically representative samples correspond to the confidence intervals already provided by the general statistics. Likewise, it is shown that these were the parameters between which 0,0025 % in the city of New York was developed. Consequently, the problem was not in the formulation of the ratio by Labov (1966), but in the subsequent indiscriminate application that has been made of it.

A Conversation Analysis of Repair Trouble Sources, Inadequacy and Positions in the Iraqi University Viva Discussions in English

Mohammed Jasim Betti, Mohammed Abbas Mahdi — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0800

Oral interaction is sometimes not articulated by its participants as perfect as they project. The unsuccessful instances of talk in exchange may cause serious communicative breakdowns between the involved partners of the interactive activity. Conversation analysis (CA) is privileged to have a powerful mechanism, which is called repair organization that is exploited in interaction to prevent and fix any variety of troubles in talk. This strategic organization of repair is then operated to capacitate talkers of unavoidable interactive breakdowns of talk.

Accordingly, this study aims at observing, describing, analyzing and identifying the trouble sources of repair strategies which exist in the Iraqi university viva discussions in English, and investigating their repair positions and inadequacies. Likewise, it is hypothesized that misunderstanding errors is the most frequent trouble source of repairs in the Iraqi university viva discussions in English, non-repair is the most frequent repair inadequacy, and that the fourth position of repair is the most frequent position type.

The procedure adopted to fulfil the aims and to verify the hypotheses include collecting data which consists of four hours and ten minutes of audiotaped oral interactions in the MA and Ph.D. viva discussions, developing a model for repair strategies from various theories in CA, observing and collecting the data by recording audiotaped samples of those interactions in viva discussions as sample of the study, putting the datasets into orthography, calculating and describing by the use of the model, and analyzing the dataset of the study qualitatively and quantitatively.

The study concludes that the eclectic model suggested and applied in the study gives a multi- faceted description of the different repair study. It is found that repair sources of trouble include grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, discourse, factual information, channel, processing, misunderstanding errors, repair of no errors. It also exposes that there are zero occurrence of miss-repair, self-repair and other-repair failures, that pronunciation trouble source of repair results in the highest occurrences and that factual information and repair of no errors are the least frequent trouble sources. The study reveals that non-repair is the most frequent repair inadequacy and same turn repair position is the most frequent one.

A Comparative Study of Linguistic Features of English Agricultural Journal Abstracts Written by American and Chinese Scientists

Wenli Xu, Yi Tang — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0800

The present study investigated the variations in linguistic features of English academic writing by American and Chinese scientists by building a corpus of 600 English agricultural journal abstracts and using the natural language processing tool Coh-Metrix. Through a one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and a discriminant function analysis (DFA), we statistically analyzed the corpus texts based on their lexical, syntactic and cohesive features and generated 8 distinguishing linguistic indices. The results indicated that Chinese scientists tended to write abstracts with more frequent words, more similar sentence structures, more modifiers per noun phrase and more agentless passive voice forms, while the American counterparts tended to write abstracts with a wider range of vocabulary, more specific terms, more words with multiple senses and more adversative connectives. These findings offer good guidance for Chinese scientists to write in a style closer to the agricultural research field and the native speakers so as to get their manuscripts better reviewed and more easily published. These findings also have practical implications for the development of agricultural English teaching materials as well as the curriculum design.