Address Terms Used among Male Basketball Players at a Ghanaian University

In the last three decades, there has been an increasing interest among scholars in the use of address terms across domains such as academia, politics, religion, family, friendship, and sports. The present study examines the range of address terms and the factors that influence their use among male basketball players in a Ghanaian university. In this study, we draw on the notion of community of practice. An ethnographic research approach, comprising mainly participant and non-participant observation and interview, was adopted in collecting our data. Two key findings emerged from the analysis. First, Ghanaian male university students used four major categories of address terms while playing basketball: personal names, descriptive terms, nicknames, and ethnic-related terms. Second, in general, these address forms constituted an isogloss or idiolect, identifying the male basketball players as a distinct community of practice. These findings have implications for the sociolinguistic research on address terms in the domain of sports, gendered language, and further research on communication in sports.

How the Titles of Popular Songs have Changed over the Last 60 Years

Billboard magazine has been keeping track of the 100 hottest (most popular) songs of the year since 1958. Lists of the Hot 100 titles from 1960 to 2019 (6001 titles) were used to study the way in which popular song titles changed over time. Based on significant polynomial regression trends and significant results from a discriminant function analysis, it is concluded that there were three main phases in titles (early, middle, and late) and that these phases differ in predictable manners in terms of stylistic features such as length, abstraction, activity, and the use of the word “love”. Early phase titles are longer, more concrete, more passive, and they do not use the word “love” often; middle phase titles are of medium length, more abstract, of medium activation, and use the word “love” frequently. Titles of the last phase are shorter, more concrete, more active, and do not often employ the word love. A possible factor contributing to these differences is the rise in popularity of rock and roll and hip-hop respectively and their different periods of ascendency.

An Analysis of the Spatial Structure of “Lao Can Travels” from the Perspective of Spatial Literature

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Liu E’s “Lao Can’s Travels” showed obvious spatial structure in both content and ideological level, and its space writing showed the characteristics of “endorsement” for the writer’s psychology. Therefore, exploring the space structure of “Lao Can’s Travels” is an important perspective for understanding the text of the novel. The space structure of the novel can be divided into three levels: The first is the real space, including the landscape space such as Shandong Wufu, the peach blossom mountain cave and other living spaces; the second is the virtual space including the dream space and the hell space; the third is the author’s psychology shown through the protagonist’s behavior and consciousness space. In addition, the effect of the spatial structure itself also makes the novel open to readers and expands the interactivity of the novel.

A Constructionalization Approach to the “Hen + X” Construction from the Perspective of Information Structure

“Hen (?)” is a common degree adverb in modern Chinese, which is generally used to modify verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The special phenomenon that “Hen” modifies nouns has attracted the attention of many scholars. Based on the theory of Diachronic Construction Grammar, this study attempts to investigate the constructionalization process of the “Hen + X” construction (X refers to words of any part of speech) through using corpus, clarify the evolution of the form-meaning/function of the “Hen + X” construction, analyze the cognitive mechanism behind the constructionalization of the “Hen + X” construction, and explore the cognitive motivation of the constructionalization of the “Hen + X” construction, which aims to enrich the study of the “Hen + X” construction and provide a new way of thinking for the study of Diachronic Construction Grammar.

A Critique of Tin’s (2013) “Exploring the Development of ‘Interest’ in Learning English as a Foreign/Second Language”

This paper critiques the research article “Exploring the Development of ‘Interest’ in Learning English as a Foreign/Second Language” written by Tan Bee Tin (2013) and mainly analyzes its strengths and weaknesses. Tin (2013) argued that the previous notions for motivation in foreign/ second language learning were considered as inadequate and claimed a new concept from a cognitive perspective. This review paper recognizes the problems Tin (2013) put forward in previous studies on learning interests, but points out that the solutions she described in her research article cannot well fill the gap.

Delineating Delhi: Spaces of the Neoliberal Urbanism in Tarun Tejpal’s The Story Of My Assassins

Recent Indo-Anglican literature has also seen a burgeoning of the genre of urban crime fictions set against the backdrop of India’s modernizing metropolises. While explorations of the contemporary Indian city mostly consists of non-fictional, journalistic writings, like Katherine Boo’s Pulitzer winning book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, the genre also includes fictions like Altaf Tyrewala’s critically acclaimed debut novel No God in Sight, Vikram Chandra’s bestseller Sacred Games, Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins, Hrish Sawhney’s volume of short stories Delhi Noir, Atish Tasser’s The Templegoers and others, which deal with the dark underside of the cities. Significantly, as rapid urban growth deepens existing disparities, a distinct rhetoric conflating impoverishment and criminality emerges, further justifying the exclusion of certain sections from the vision of urbanism. This paper looks at the representation of Delhi in Tarun Tejpal’s novel The Story of My Assassins, as a dystopic space riddled with contradictions of.

Impenetrable Eyes, Stealth and Surveillance: A Corpus Stylistic Study of Salient Adjectives in William Faulkner’s The Hamlet

Stylistics combines both a granular and global approach to works of literature. Through analysis of linguistic and semantic patterns in a text, stylistics explores how authors construct a fictional text world and populate it with vividly realized characters. In this article, I adopt a corpus-stylistic approach to William Faulkner’s The Hamlet. Through identification of high-frequency words and close reading of their concordances, I explore what the data reveals about Faulkner’s thematic concerns in the novel and how his linguistic strategies convey them to the reader.

The Linguistic Landscape of Regional Hospitals in Tanzania: Language Choice on Signage

The study aimed at identifying the language choice on the signage and assessing the outpatients and their aides’ views on the language choice on the signage in regional hospitals, namely Bukoba and Sekou Toure. The study was guided by language choice theory on the signage where qualitative approach was employed. Data were gathered through observation and interview methods. Thirty-six respondents who were hospital management teams, medical care providers, patients and their aides were involved. The study findings reveal that there were two languages on the signage including Kiswahili and English where Kiswahili was predominant. This indicates the linguistic landscape of the selected hospitals suits the targeted people though it excludes some clients who cannot understand Kiswahili. The study recommends that there is a great need of using two languages on the signage and establishing a clear national policy on language choice on the signage. This will help to direct, inform, educate, warn and instruct the clients around the hospital surroundings.

A Semantic Analysis of the Top Ten Network Buzzwords of China in 2020 from the Perspective of the Prototype Theory

With the further development of the Internet and the rapid growth of the number of netizens, there are always new network buzzwords appearing during online communication. Most of these buzzwords don’t come out of nowhere but are variants of the extant words or expressions. They inherit, extend or sometimes overturn the original meanings. To some extent, these semantic variations not only influence the language system, expanding the semantic category of words, but also reflect people’s cognition and emotions. Therefore, based on the prototype theory, this paper aims to analyze the semantic variations of the top ten network buzzwords of China in 2020 from three aspects: horizontally, the extension of meanings of the basic-level words; vertically, the emergence of new subordinate-level words; and the combination of the two ways of variation. The analysis of these words shows complex emotions of people, including positive life attitudes, nostalgia to the past and helplessness under huge pressures in real life.

A Study on Creation Principles of Five-storied Pagoda: From the Perspective of Eco-aesthetics

The novel-Five-storied Pagoda-written by Japanese novelist Koda Rohan manifestly presents ecological consciousness from the perspective of the natural principle, the holistic principle, and the harmonious principle, which are the three principles of ecological aesthetics. By perceiving the harmonious atmosphere among man and nature, individuals themselves, individuals, and society in texts, we can learn that Koda Rohan insisted on traditional Japanese aesthetics and prospectively reflected on the modern aesthetic ideology of Japanese society after Meiji Restoration. This paper explores the aesthetic features of—Five-storied Pagoda—by analyzing text expression from a new angle, and probes into the relationship with the three principles of eco-aesthetics. It is aimed to determine the consensus between eastern aesthetics and ecological aesthetics, and it can be inferred that the consensus will, to a great extent, make a special contribution to enriching the construction of ecological aesthetics.