scholarly journals A Contrastive Analysis of Interpersonal Function Between the Chinese and English Versions of The Sight of Father’s Back

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Lijun Xin ◽  
Jun Gao

As a reminiscent prose, The Sight of Father’s Back was written by the modern writer, Zhu Ziqing, in 1925. A wave of warm current floods a large body of readers since this essay describes, in earnest, love of father. This research performs a contrastive analysis of interpersonal function between the Chinese and English versions of The Sight of Father’s Back in terms of mood, modality, and evaluation meanings. We find that mood and evaluation meanings display parallel distribution. Declarative and exclamatory moods occur most frequently in both the Chinese and English versions, whereas interrogative mood is at a premium. Besides, various evaluative adjectives and adverbs are used in both versions. However, modality shows remarkable discrepancies. The English version tends to adopt modal verbs with median-and-low value, while most median-and-high value modal verbs are presented in the Chinese version. In our view, the exercise of median-and-high value modal verbs reflects the thoughts more directly. While the selection of median-and-low value modal verbs might be concerned with the need for politeness. Besides, diverse choices of modal verbs are incident to various modal meanings along with research purposes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1595
Author(s):  
Sha Zhu

Humor plays an important role in daily life and also quite useful in interpersonal communication. Nowadays, the cross-cultural communication between the English-speaking countries and China becomes more and more frequent while some humor is difficult to appreciate with diverse cultural backgrounds. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing the Chinese and English humor from their similarities, like the use of ambiguity and figure of speech, as well as differences, especially in functions, topics and ways of expression. Related causes are further discussed the differences. Hopefully, the findings will help to reduce the obstacles in understanding humor in different culture and promote transcultural communication in a delightful manner.



Author(s):  
Aleksandra Erić-Bukarica

The aim of this paper is to examine and describe similarities and differences in the use and distribution of modal verbs by contrasting English and Serbian legal texts. The corpus consists of an English version of The Convention on the Rights of the Child and its official Serbian translation. We started from an assumption that modal verbs are more frequent in legal texts in English than in Serbian, where we expected to find examples of lexical items with modal meanings instead. In addition, we assumed that due to its specific use in legal texts of this kind, the English modal ‘shall’ will show the highest frequency of occurrence. A total of one hundred and twenty six (126) modal verbs and a semi-modal ‘need not’ were found in the source text. The results of the analysis support the initial presumption that ‘shall’ will stand out as the most frequent of all modal verbs (60% of all occurrences). Despite the high occurrence rate of the legalistic ‘shall’ in the source text, translation solutions in the target language only rarely take the form of the modal verb. Most often deontic notions of imperative directness and necessity in Serbian legislative writings are expressed by means of the present indicative. The analysis also indicates that translation solutions for the remaining English modal verbs most often take the form of a modal verb or a modal lexeme with a corresponding meaning in Serbian.



2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrine Drira ◽  
Frida Ben Rais Lasram ◽  
Tarek Hattab ◽  
Yunne Jai Shin ◽  
Amel Ben Rejeb Jenhani ◽  
...  

AbstractSpecies distribution models (SDMs) have been proposed as a way to provide robust inference about species-specific sites suitabilities, and have been increasingly used in systematic conservation planning (SCP) applications. However, despite the fact that the use of SDMs in SCP may raise some potential issues, conservation studies have overlooked to assess the implications of SDMs uncertainties. The integration of these uncertainties in conservation solutions requires the development of a reserve-selection approach based on a suitable optimization algorithm. A large body of research has shown that exact optimization algorithms give very precise control over the gap to optimality of conservation solutions. However, their major shortcoming is that they generate a single binary and indivisible solution. Therefore, they provide no flexibility in the implementation of conservation solutions by stakeholders. On the other hand, heuristic decision-support systems provide large amounts of sub-optimal solutions, and therefore more flexibility. This flexibility arises from the availability of many alternative and sub-optimal conservation solutions. The two principles of efficiency and flexibility are implicitly linked in conservation applications, with the most mathematically efficient solutions being inflexible and the flexible solutions provided by heuristics suffering sub-optimality. In order to avoid the trade-offs between flexibility and efficiency in systematic conservation planning, we propose in this paper a new reserve-selection framework based on mathematical programming optimization combined with a post-selection of SDM outputs. This approach leads to a reserve-selection framework that might provide flexibility while simultaneously addressing efficiency and representativeness of conservation solutions and the adequacy of conservation targets. To exemplify the approach we a nalyzed an experimental design crossing pre- and post-selection of SDM outputs versus heuristics and exact mathematical optimizations. We used the Mediterranean Sea as a biogeographical template for our analyses, integrating the outputs of 8 SDM techniques for 438 fishes species.



PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-580
Author(s):  
Arthur Sherbo

In 1734 Edward Cave, founder of the Gentleman's Magazine, received a pseudonymous letter whose writer made a number of suggestions for the improvement of the magazine. The writer, “S. Smith,” was a young man named Samuel Johnson who, four years later, was to take over duties which made him virtually the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine until 1745. During the period from 1738 to 1745, then, Johnson may be assumed to have had full knowledge of all contributions to the magazine as well as no little voice in the selection of those thought worthy of publication. Possibly the implications of this fact have not been fully realized. Johnson probably read most of the contributions with the critical eye of an editor and, I suppose it proper to conjecture, re-read or glanced over the periodical upon its monthly appearances. In short, one can assume Johnson's close familiarity with much of the contents of the Gentleman's Magazine for a number of years, and it is not surprising in view of his remarkable memory that he should sometimes fall back upon this large body of material, consciously or unconsciously, in his own writings. I hope to demonstrate here one such use of the contents of the magazine that led to the writing of Ramblers 186 and 187.



2004 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-493
Author(s):  
Xiaofang Gao

Hedge is defined as the expression of provisionalness and possibility that makes scientific messages tentative, vague, and imprecise, thereby reducing the force of claims scientists make. Linguistic study of hedges began in the early 1970s in generative semantics. Since then, the focus has shifted from seeking linguistic properties in spoken discourse to analyzing its pragmatic functions in written contextual communication. The purpose of this paper was to analyze hedges in Chinese and English scientific articles from the perspective of contrastive pragmatics. Based on a contextual analysis of 5 Chinese and 5 English scientific articles, selected randomly, from two journals in molecular biology— Science in China and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, there were significant differences between Chinese and English scientific articles in use of hedges.



2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 1037
Author(s):  
Wenjun Zhong

By applying a contrastive analysis, this paper aims at presenting the differences of the views on friendship between China and Americans reflected in proverbs about friendship and friends under the guidance of Cultural Dimensions Theory. Differences are found in the acceptance of the hierarchy in human relations, expectations of loyalty and long-term commitments from friends, and inclination of independence. Power distance dimension, individualism versus collectivism dimension and long-term versus short-term orientation dimension are exploited to account for the differences.



2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mei-Hua Lee, ◽  
Patricia J. Larson, ◽  
William L. Holzemer,

The purpose of this study was to modify the CARE-Q into a 7-point Likert scale to measure the perceived frequency of caring behaviors from the nurse’s perspective. Potential participants were asked to self-administer a Chinese version of the questionnaire. The agreement for the equivalence of meaning between the Chinese version and the original English version was rated as 96% accurate for the 50 items. Test-retest reliability was 0.803 for the modified CARE-Q tested at a 2-week interval. The internal consistency for an overall coefficient alpha was 0.97 for the total scale of the modified CARE-Q and ranged from 0.82 to 0.92 for the subscales. Study findings suggest further research to delete overlapping items. Testing with different samples is also warranted.education are discussed.



2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Josep Cuenca

Abstract This paper consists of an analysis of the expressive secondary interjections found in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral and their equivalents in the Spanish and Catalan dubbed versions. The contrastive analysis of the interjections in the original English version compared with the Spanish and the Catalan dubbed versions shows that the strategies followed by the translators are different: literal translation is far more frequent in Spanish than in Catalan. Literal translation often implies an error that is pragmatic in nature since it derives from the misunderstanding of the pragmatic meaning that the interjection conveys.



2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Hon-Ping Ma ◽  
Jiann Ruey Ong ◽  
Ju-Chi Ou ◽  
Yung-Hsiao Chiang ◽  
Shoou-Yang Lian

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes major socioeconomic problems worldwide. In the United States, nearly three-quarters of patients with TBI have mild TBI (mTBI). 32% of these patients may develop dizziness. In this study, we analyzed the factor structure of the traditional Chinese version of the DHI and evaluate the differences in DHI factors between dizziness and nondizziness groups. In total, 315 patients with mTBI, comprising 158 with self-reported dizziness and 157 without dizziness, were recruited from three hospitals. The responses for Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) demonstrated between-group differences. The Chinese DHI had internal validity and had four factors that differed from the English version (3 aspects). The group effects for the physical subscale remained significantly different even after adjustments in the propensity score model. For the Chinese version, two of four factors remained significantly different in the effects between self-reported dizziness and nondizziness groups. The factors of our Chinese DHI differed from those of the original English version of DHI. After adjustments using the propensity score model, the physical subscale demonstrated significant differences between the self-reported dizziness and nondizziness groups. Only two factors from our Chinese DHI were significantly different; moreover, it contained only three physical, five functional, and three emotional items.



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