Category: Language, Linguistics
Romance Scam and Legal Interpreting/Translation
Due to COVID-19 starting in 2020, the flow of people or goods was restricted. Along with that, the mobility of criminals, migration, or smuggling of criminal items such as drugs were also stopped. On the other hand, romance scams have skyrocketed through the internet or SNS so that criminal groups or violent groups could raise …
Determinants of Learning Amongst 21st Century ESL Learners
This study focuses on determinants of learning amongst 21st century English as a second language (ESL) learners at Wenzhou-Kean University. Although it is an undoubted fact that the persistent change in learning experiences has contributed to the changing of learning determinants of 21st century ESL learners, the actual determinants have not been explored and defined. …
Pinoy-made Nutricosmetics e-advertisements: A Critical Discourse Analysis
The advent of modern technology and digitization of information has transformed the advertising of beauty products through electronic devices and changed the discourse of beauty. While the concept of beauty has been limited to cosmetics, recent development has extended the scope of beauty to cosmeceuticals. This descriptive qualitative research aims to describe the use of …
A Study of Good Chinese Learners at the University of Hong Kong
This is my sixth consecutive year of doing the research. As China is still the engine of world economy, there is a rapid increase in the number of foreign students coming to The University of Hong Kong to learn Chinese. As Chinese is one of the popular subjects for them to choose. Despite COVID-19, from …
The Jizani Arabic in Saudi Arabia: Communication Accommodation and Attitudes
The study attempts to examine the communication accommodation behaviours of Jizani speakers living in Riyadh-Saudi Arabia (SA). It seeks to document the existence of certain linguistic phenomena in the speech of Jizani informants in intergroup and intra-group interactions with Najdi speakers: people living in Riyadh, the centre of SA. It also aims to determine the …
Exploring the Linguistic Identity of Lebanese Undergraduates: Experiences and Perceptions of Lingua Franca Speakers
Globalization has turned English into the world’s dominating lingua franca. Its rapidly- growing spread of English has brought changes to its static rules, replacing by that its national culture with a global one (Dornyei’ et al. 2006 as cited in Jenkins, 2007) and leading to a linguistic diversity in the way English is used (Norton …
Phatic Communion: How It Works in Face-To-Face and Online Communications
This is a paper that demonstrates how phatic communion works in both face-to-face and online communications. Communication is the act of transferring information from the speaker(s) to the hearer(s). Phatic communion is a type of communication that occurs in social interactions. In many communicative situations, speakers intend to convey information, but in some situations, it …
“Our Gipsy Blood”: A Pragmatic Analysis of Minor Languages in Peaky Blinders
The present paper seeks to explore how, in the popular TV series Peaky Blinders (BCC, 2013-2022), minor languages are employed to deliver “face attacks”. My analysis will be centred on the pragmatic function exerted by/towards the Shelby family members – the leading gangsters of Birmingham, where the plot unravels – when the so-called “broken Romanian” …
Politeness Strategies Among University Students in Myanmar
This present research investigates the politeness strategies used by Myanmar university students while they are trying to request something from others. To collect the primary data, the researcher conducted surveys of 200 students from 12 Universities during the 2019-2020 academic year. The collected data are classified by Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness strategies. This …
Audiovisual Translation Through NMT and Subtitling in the Netflix Series Summertime
Over the past few years, the rise of Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming platforms has made it necessary to rethink entertainment media. Accessibility to their catalogues not only offers the audience the opportunity to choose among a variety of films, series, documentaries and other audiovisual resources but also to make use of …
Production of English Consonants by Yemeni EFL Learners of English: The Case of /p/ and /v/
EFL learners commonly strive to attain near-native English pronunciation. Nevertheless, Arab learners of English may incorrectly produce certain sounds of the English language due to their first language interference. The current study examined Yemeni EFL learners’ production of the English consonants /p/ and /v/. The study employed a quantitative case study design, and its speakers …
The Views on Linguistic Imperialism in Multicultural Classroom
This study reports on a project in a Japanese university’s multicultural classes where international and Japanese students studied together. Students investigated various linguistic dominance cases throughout the world, based on ‘Linguistic Imperialism’ as originally defined by Phillipson (1992). Linguistic Imperialism involves the imposition of a dominant language, in particular, English. The negative view included in …
Building Resilience in the Classroom: Empowering Students/Teachers Against Linguistic Discrimination via Linguistic Skills
This study aims to bring Linguistics to classrooms to advocate Linguistic Equality and build resilience against discrimination. Modern linguists regard all languages and language varieties as equal in value; however, academic and social discourse practices regard standard variety as essentially superior to non-standard varieties (Collins, 1999). Such discrimination includes all native speakers, particularly the variations …
A Study of Metaphorical Expressions Based on Up Sense of Happiness in English and Vietnamese
In daily life of human beings, it seems the knowledge and experience is transferred in the ways which may not be so familiar, and even in abstract concepts. In the concepts of Cognitive Linguistics (CL), this is viewed as part of general cognition and thinking, especially in the case of metaphors. On the theoretical framework …
Pragmatics and Family Discourse in Contemporary TV Series
The present study investigates the impoliteness strategies presented in season 1 of the American TV series The Ranch (2016). The qualitative analysis this essay will provide focuses on selected excerpts; more specifically, on the utterances spoken by the main male characters of the show: Beau, Jameson and Colt. The hypothesis underpinning this paper is that …
Translating Gay Identities in TV Series: Gayspeak and Camp Talk in Looking
Today, the representation of sexual and gender diversity cuts across all media (written, audiovisual, oral; radio, film or television; radio, film or television). Representations of LGBTQ+ people and characters, in their current quality and quantity, derive from historical processes marked by political events related to the social struggle of these marginalised groups. According to Yep …
Sociocultural Issues Experienced by Adults Learning Maltese as a Second Language
The pedagogy of language since time immemorial has majored on the use of pens and other printed materials. However, there occurred a separation of the teaching culture into two major categories; the “big C” and “little c” meaning, high and popular culture. Over the years of advancement in various pedagogy techniques have made this boundary …
Embodied Interaction in Language Learning Materials: A Multimodal Analysis
The purpose of this research is to explore the potential of English-language learning materials as a source of multimodal communicative representation. In particular, this study examines the animated cartoon videos that supplement the text-based dialogues for how kinesics is made relevant in the moving images to enhance the communicative capacity of the English-language textbooks used …
A Comparative Analysis of Romeyka and Turkish Personal Experience Narratives
In this presentation, I offer a comparative study of personal experience narratives in Turkish and Romeyka, an endangered Greek dialect spoken in northern Turkey. There has been not enough research on Romeyka, and not one of them deals with Romeyka’s sociolinguistic structure. This paper compares and contrasts Turkish and Romeyka narratives produced by two Turkish-Romeyka …
Analysing Politeness Changes when Speaking Indonesian and English: A Case Study of Indonesian-English Multilingual
Being fluent in English as a foreign language in Indonesia is not as easy as learning the language itself since English is not common to use in Indonesia. However, there are some Indonesian speakers who are able to speak English fluently. Considering cultural native background and the target language cultural background, it will create different …
Dementia Patients as Discursively Constructed in Taiwanese Newspapers: Taking United Daily News Samples as Examples
As the prevalence of dementia continues to rise, improving public awareness of this disease is of growing importance. Newspapers are among the most influential sources of information on dementia, with considerable power to reinforce negative stereotypes about it. Prompted by the scarcity of scholarly literature on portrayals of dementia patients in Asian contexts, the present …
Illustration Can Be Seen as One Kind of Translation: Case Studies of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland Picture Books
Through analyzing different versions of Alice in Wonderland picture books, this paper reveals that illustration can be seen as one kind of translations. The aims of a decent translation are to reach three levels: functional – to express meanings understood as original text; cultural – to show enhanced or hidden implications under different context; and …
Pictograms and Japanese Construal in Cognitive Linguistics
Recent scholarship in cognitive linguistics reveals that Japanese speakers prefer subjective construal, while English speakers prefer objective construal. Japanese speakers conceptualize a scene subjectively, where the speaker involved is submerged in it. English speakers tend to represent events objectively from the perspective of a bystander or observer outside the scene. This paper calls this paradigm …
A Cognitive Linguistics Application for Second Language Grammar Pedagogy
Due to the complexity of the English tense-aspect system, tense and aspect constitute a major source of error for EFL learners. A Cognitive Linguistics (CL)-based approach could potentially help learners develop a more meaningful understanding of grammatical constructions due to its focus on conceptual meaning. In this quasi-experimental study, 60 participants were from three S.4 …
Error Analysis: The Main Writing Errors of EFL Learners Task 2 IELTs Academic Essay
This study sought to examine and analyze the frequency of writing errors and determine the causes behind such errors made by first time test takers of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) academic writing essay-Task 2. The four criteria specified for the IELTS Writing Band Scores (British Council, 2019) were taken into consideration. A …