Language politics in Nepal: a socio-historical overview

This paper aims to outline the language politics in Nepal by focusing on the influences and expansions shifted from Global North to the Global South. Based on a small-scale case study of interviews and various political movements and legislative documents, this paper discusses linguistic diversity and multilingualism, globalization, and their impacts on Nepal’s linguistic landscapes. It finds that the language politics in Nepal has been shifted and changed throughout history because of different governmental and political changes. Different ideas have been emerged because of globalization and neoliberal impacts which are responsible for language contact, shift, and change in Nepalese society. It concludes that the diversified politics and multilingualism in Nepal have been functioning as a double-edged sword which on the one hand promotes and preserves linguistic and cultural diversity, and on the other hand squeeze the size of diversity by vitalizing the Nepali and English languages through contact and globalization.

A corpus-based study of the ADJ-looking adjectivization in English

This article aims to conduct a corpus-based study of the diachronic and synchronic distributions of a special type of participle adjectivization, the ADJ-looking adjectivization. The study based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) finds that this process of adjectivization consists of two phases: (1) The downward rank-shift from the look ADJ construction to the ADJ looking adjectivization is a process of metaphorization; (2) The transcategorization from the ADJ looking adjectivization to the ADJ-looking adjectivization is a process of lexicalization. The study based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) finds that ADJ-looking adjectivizations are mode and register sensitive but not discipline sensitive. The modifier use prefers to occur more in hard science texts to increase the complexity of nominal groups and the predicative use prefers to occur more in soft science texts to increase the grammatical intricacy of sentences. The reason for the non-sensitivity across disciplines is that evaluative adjectives tend to occur in neither soft nor hard science texts.

Exploring modality in multimodal macrogenre: A social semiotic analysis of EFL pedagogic materials in China

Given the evolving multimodal features in educational settings, modes other than language further enable the diversity in the realization of meanings and pedagogic goals. This paper explores modality in multimodal pedagogic materials for teaching English as a foreign language in China. Drawing upon the social semiotic approach to modality in visual media, this study provides a comparative analysis of modality markers in different elemental genres that constitute the macrogenre of a teaching unit, with a focus on explaining the underlying reasons for the different choices in terms of coding orientation. It is shown that different degrees of deviation from the accepted coding orientation are employed in different constituent genres of the macrogenre of a given text.

Ecolinguistics: A half-century overview

The last 50 years have witnessed ecolinguistics come into bloom as a mature domain. This paper aims to examine the half-century development of ecolinguistics by reviewing its backgrounds, definitions, strands, and approaches, and also briefly previewing its future horizons. The birth of ecolinguistics can be attributed to such ecological necessities as the ecological crisis as an essential root, and an ecological perspective for linguistics as a linguistic necessity, together with six ecolinguistic turns in this domain (Section 2). Since the emergence of ecolinguistics in the 1970s, various definitions for ecolinguistics as an evolving concept have come into being, involving the geographical, conceptual, disciplinary, methodological, and practical sides (Section 3). Figures who have contributed to the development of this domain can be divided into old strands like Haugenian and Hallidayan ecolinguistics, as well as new strands such as strong ecolinguistics and the latest radical embodied ecolinguistics (Section 4). Given the diverse definitions and strands, a set of approaches have taken shape, ranging from the Haugenian approach to ecological discourse analysis (Section 5). Due to major problems found in reviewing four parts of ecolinguistics, it is high time three shifts in perspective be put into effect in ecolinguistics that can promise its future horizons.

Evidentiality and other types readjusted: interpersonal modality revisited

Interpersonal modality, bifurcating modalization and modulation, is an important construct of interpersonal meaning in the architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics. By meticulously reviewing relevant researches from the perspectives of traditional modality and modality’s semantic map, three respects with respect to the system of interpersonal modality have been supplemented. Firstly, modalization, being subcategorized into possibility and usuality, is suggested to entertain evidentiality from the traditional sense. Secondly, considering the delicacy of the system of interpersonal modality, possibility in modalization should be further categorized into epistemic and root possibility; necessity as one subtype of modulation, superseding the original obligation in modulation, is subclassified into obligation and permission; inclination, being the other subtype of modulation, should be specified as the superordinate of volition and ability. Thirdly, the shifting of modal meanings from root possibility to epistemic possibility in modalization and from inclination to necessity in modulation should be clearly specified as far as language evolvement is concerned.

Exploring ecological identity from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics

Ecological identity, acting as the baton to guide the public’s behavior in nature, is closely correlated with environmental crises that threaten human survival. Previous studies of ecological identity are mostly conducted in the domain of sociopsychology with an emphasis on human’s attitude and behavior. Less attention, however, has been paid to the discursive construction of one’s ecological identity. The current study aims to build a framework to explore the mechanism of discursive strategies in constructing one’s ecological identity. To this end, this article classifies different ecological identities according to their impact on nature and the ecosophy of holism. It then puts forward a framework based on systemic functional linguistics to explore how lexicogrammatical resources can be employed strategically in the construction of ecological identity. The framework is significant for ecolinguistic investigations of identity and the cultivation of human’s critical language awareness related to the protection of ecosystems.

Emotional positioning in British news reports about Dover and Essex migrant tragedies: A corpus-based study

This article, based on the Appraisal System, investigates British journalists’ different attitudes toward China and Vietnam in British news reports about the Dover migrant tragedy in 2000 and the Essex migrant tragedy in 2019. By analyzing affect resources in a newly built corpus with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3, this study finds that more negative affect resources are used to portray China than those depicting Vietnam. British journalists manipulated emotions to emphasize that China, whether in 2000 or 2019, was a backward and underdeveloped country where citizens tried all means to escape to Britain. However, when British journalists found that the victims were Vietnamese instead of Chinese, they shifted attention to the pitiful Vietnamese families of the victims and tended to arouse readers’ sympathy. The corpus findings highlight the ideological contradiction between Britain and China, reveal Britain’s distrust to China’s system, and suggest that the different comprehensive national powers of China and Vietnam have different impacts on Britain’s international status, verifying that news discourse is permeated by ideology, politics, and economy.

Readability and adaptation of children’s literary works from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor

Widely studied in fields like education, psychology, and linguistics, readability can be defined as (a) reader’s understanding of a reading text, (b) features of a text, or (c) the matching of a text to its reader. The existing research has been focused on the formulaic and multilevel discourse approaches, relatively neglecting others such as systemic functional linguistics oriented one. Moreover, contemporary reading materials pose as a challenge for average children in many ways. This study examines readability and adaptation of children’s literary works from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor inspired by systemic functional linguistics. Through case studies of metaphorical transferences involving zero, one, two, and three ideational grammatical metaphors used in the parallel excerpts in the original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its eight adapted ones published in China, it is concluded that addition, maintenance, revision, unpacking, and demetaphorization are five major strategies which are found to decrease, maintain, or increase readability of some parts in the adapted versions.

Collective discursive representation of the Chinese Dream by public speech and media discourse from the perspective of positive discourse analysis

A positive discourse analysis is conducted on the collective discursive representation of the Chinese Dream by the discourse of the sovereign state and the national media, with the aim to show how discourses at different levels could collaborate to promote the power of the Chinese Dream discourse in the domestic communication. Borrowing the dialectical-relational framework of critical discourse analysis, the present research carries out structural analysis and interactional analysis of President Xi Jinping’s speech at the closing meeting of the 12th National People’s Congress and the subsequent media discourse produced by official news outlets. The structural analysis reveals Xi’s speech on the Chinese Dream forms a genre chain with related news reports, editorials, and features within a couple of days, in which the appeal to the public is repeatedly made. The interactional analysis indicates the news discourses facilitate concreteness and enrichment of the Chinese Dream by recontextualizing various components of the original speech and adopting specific represented processes and modality to echo and promote the constructed Chinese Dream by the speech. The findings reveal the inspiring Chinese Dream discourse is produced and consumed among different official discourses, collaboratively representing a bright future for the public.