On the Motivation and Reasons of Popularity of Parody in Network Language From the Perspective of Conceptual Integration Theory

The Conceptual Integration Theory was first formally put forward in 1997 by Fauconnier and Turner. According to it, there is a conceptual blending network comprised of four mental spaces： Input space Ⅰ, Input space Ⅱ, generic space, and blended space. In the process of blending, common information or structures from input spaces are projected to the ＂generic space＂. Meanwhile, through partially cross-space mapping, those structures are selectively projected to the ＂blended space＂. By means of composition, completion, and elaboration, consequently ＂emergent structure＂ comes into being from the development of blending. This theory instantly became a fresh power in cognitive research field. With the rapid development of network technology and the popularization of the internet, network language makes tremendous progresses and spreads quickly, which reflects the social and cultural development. The uniqueness and effectiveness of network language creation, to a great extent, relies on various rhetorical devices, among which parody is frequently used and plays an important role. In recent years, studies about network language somehow concentrate a lot on the construction, word transformation, and features of network vocabulary, and cognitive analysis on the mechanism of parody in network language is rather limited and requires further exploration. This paper tends to probe into the motivation and the reasons ofparody＇s popularity in network language through some examples in light of Conceptual Integration Theory in hope of a better comprehension, appreciation, and application of parody in network language

Research on the Use of Network Language in Chinese Government Microblogs

The emergence of government microblog not only widens the channels for the people to participate in politics,but also is of great significance for the government to understand public opinion and promote the process of political democratization.In recent years,the frequency of network language in Chinese government microblog has gradually increased.Taking the“Beijing release”official microblog as an example,this paper discusses the characteristics of network language,and puts forward some suggestions on the use of network language in government microblog:in terms of syllables,network language below three syllables should be selected to meet the requirements of short length of government microblog;In terms of part of speech,network terms such as nouns,verbs and adjectives can express emotional attitude and value judgment;In terms of emotion and style,emotional attitude forms such as intimacy,love and respect are selected.In addition,the norms of network language in government microblog can not be generalized.We should not only pay attention to the expression effect,but also set foot in multiple disciplines and fields.

A Quantitative and Network Approach to Alignment Effects in L2 Continuation Tasks

The present study employed a quantitative and network approach to detect alignment effects in second language(L2) continuation tasks designed on the xu-argument(Wang, 2016). The materials used in this study were 6 sub-corpora consisting of two selected input stories and two groups of L2 written production based on two continuation tasks. During continuation, the participants were required to continue in English a story with its ending removed, with one group reading and continuing the Chinese version and the other group the English version, and then switching their roles in the two tasks. Results show that the alignment effect differs across the two versions of continuation. Specifically, compared with the Chinese-version continuation, L2 learners produced more use of unigrams and bigrams similar to the input story in terms of lexical items, frequency and ranking correlations in the English-version task;on the other hand, the English-version continuation can facilitate generating linguistic networks that are much closer to the native English networks. Moreover, this research corroborates that written production in L2 continuation tasks can be influenced by input content.

Punjabi DeConverter for generating Punjabi from Universal Networking Language

DeConverter is core software in a Universal Networking Language(UNL) system.A UNL system has EnConverter and DeConverter as its two major components.EnConverter is used to convert a natural language sentence into an equivalent UNL expression,and DeConverter is used to generate a natural language sentence from an input UNL expression.This paper presents design and development of a Punjabi DeConverter.It describes five phases of the proposed Punjabi DeConverter,i.e.,UNL parser,lexeme selection,morphology generation,function word insertion,and syntactic linearization.This paper also illustrates all these phases of the Punjabi DeConverter with a special focus on syntactic linearization issues of the Punjabi DeConverter.Syntactic linearization is the process of defining arrangements of words in generated output.The algorithms and pseudocodes for implementation of syntactic linearization of a simple UNL graph,a UNL graph with scope nodes and a node having un-traversed parents or multiple parents in a UNL graph have been discussed in this paper.Special cases of syntactic linearization with respect to Punjabi language for UNL relations like 'and','or','fmt','cnt',and 'seq' have also been presented in this paper.This paper also provides implementation results of the proposed Punjabi DeConverter.The DeConverter has been tested on 1000 UNL expressions by considering a Spanish UNL language server and agricultural domain threads developed by Indian Institute of Technology(IIT),Bombay,India,as gold-standards.The proposed system generates 89.0% grammatically correct sentences,92.0% faithful sentences to the original sentences,and has a fluency score of 3.61 and an adequacy score of 3.70 on a 4-point scale.The system is also able to achieve a bilingual evaluation understudy(BLEU) score of 0.72.

A DILEMMA FOR LANGUAGE TESTERS IN A NETWORK AGE

With the rapid development of silicon chip tech-nology,web-based instruction(WBI)and computer-ized adaptive testing(CAT)will be the new trends inthe field of language teaching and testing.We assumethat only when teaching and testing share the sameview about the nature of language and language learn-ing can testing exercise a beneficial backwash effect onteaching.However,WBI and CAT prove to be basedon opposite theories of language and language learn-ing.While WBI believes in constructivism,CAT cor-responds to structuralism and behaviorism.This situ-ation places language testers in a dilemma,for if theyfollow the trend,testing will go against teaching.Butif they give up CAT,it is very difficult to substituteanother testing system possessing so many advantages.This paper illustrates in detail why WBI and CAT areto become the new trends in teaching and testing,ex-plains clearly the discrepancy between WBI and CAT intheory and their objectives and finally attempts toprovide a solution to help the language testers out ofthe dilemma.