Personification in Chinese Diplomatic Discourse and the Construction of National Identity Based on Corpus:A Case Study of the Regular Press Conference of Ministry of Foreign Affairs

With the development of the major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics,diplomatic discourse,as an important part of building China’s international discourse power,has attracted much attention.Personification is a common means in diplomatic discourse.By giving anthropomorphic expressions to countries,regions,institutions and policies,the purpose of building national identity and establishing national image can be achieved.Based on conceptual metaphor theory and national identity theory,this paper focuses on personification in diplomatic discourse with a case study of the regular press conference of Ministry of Foreign Affairs.It is found that the spokesperson skillfully constructed China’s positive national identity,such as peace-loving,openness and inclusiveness by using a large number of body metaphor,kinship metaphor and role metaphor.

From Mirror Theory to Oedipus Complex:A Lacanian Interpretation of Night,Mother

Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud’s psychoanalytic theory based on Saussure’s linguistics,and his theories such as the Mirror stage and the Oedipus complex had a significant impact on contemporary psychoanalysis.In the play Night,Mother,the reasons for Jessie’s tragedy are diverse,among which the excessive protection of Jessie by her mother Thelma is an important reason for Jessie’s tragedy.Starting from Lacan’s Mirror stage theory and the Oedipus complex,this paper will explore how this intimate but heavy maternal love influenced Jessie’s path to finding her true“ego”.

On the Identity Construction in Question Methods and Answer Methods of Speakers： For the Discourses in Antigone

Linguistics classifies question methods into certain types. There are kinds of question methods, such as alternative question method, yes-no question method, specific question method, direct question method, indirect question method, echo question method, tag question method, miracle question method and so on. And this paper will set the characteristic discourses of protagonists in the drama of Antigone by the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles as a research example, so as to analyze the protagonist＇s pragmatics motivation in the conversation strategies when communicating with three people in different social identity, that is to say, this paper will analyze the way that the selected question and answer methods used by the protagonist to achieve the effect of being recognized as king identity but not as a tyrant in fact. According to the dramatic text, this paper tends to make a further research on the characters＇ self-identity construction ground on the discourse characteristic of the characters. And from the perspective of modem linguistic, it is the analysis of the motivation in question methods, and the advantage and disadvantage on the discourse right implied in answer methods, that contribute to the further research on how the social identity construction and the classic character image are successfully made.

Identity Construction in Academic Writing of Student Writers Who Use English as an Additional Language:A Literature Review

Academic writing is social interaction between writer and reader,during which writers can employ discursive and non-discursive features to construct their identities.However,many student writers who are users of English as an additional language(EAL)may find it challenging to construct their identities in academic writing.Properly constructed identity in academic writing can help EAL student writers develop a stronger sense of self,exercise their agency,and negotiate the academic discourse.Therefore,this paper reviews empirical studies on EAL student writers'identity construction when they write in English to investigate the features of identities that EAL student writers construct in texts and the factors that influence their identity construction.The findings show that,compared with expert writers and native-English-speaking(NES)counterparts,EAL student writers tend to present a weak authorial identity.Furthermore,EAL student writers tend to be more engaged with texts than with readers and lack commitment to their claims.The identities that EAL student writers construct in academic writing are also interwoven with EAL students'English proficiency levels,educational experience,disciplinary conventions,genre affordances,and audience awareness.The findings of this literature review can help teachers and educators raise EAL students’identity awareness and facilitate students in strategically constructing writer identities in academic writing.

The Construction of Irish Cultural Identity in Yeats’s Poetry

W.B.Yeats(1865-1939),Noble Prize winner for literature in 1923,is an influential Irish poet,playwright and critic.This paper will discuss that Yeats is devoted to seek and construct Irish cultural identity in his poetry because of the Irish cultural and identity crisis as well as his own identity anxiety.Yeats endeavours to establish a distinctly Irish cultural identity through reviving Irish traditional folklore,myths and legends,hybridising English language,and absorbing oriental culture in his poetry.

The Third Space Identity Construction： A Narrative Inquiry into a Chinese College EFL Learner’s Experience of Online Intercultural Writing Exchange

Drawing on in-depth interviews with a Chinese EFL learner, this qualitative study explores her identity changes throughout her engagement in the third space-the online intercultural writing exchange. The findings show that her productive construction of the third space is marked by a transformation from a reticent student to an open thought sharer and her claim of a legitimate ownership of using English as a global language. A split is exposed between her newly acquired English rhetorical conventions and her deeply rooted perceptions in the Chinese context. It is suggested by the study that EFL learners be provided greater opportunities to explore language as both a linguistic system and a sociocultural practice where they can exercise their agency and expand the range of identities.

Norma Jean’s Identity Pursuit in “Shiloh”

Bobbie Ann Mason is one of the representatives of American new southern writers.Her short story“Shiloh”is about the broken marriage of a southern American family.Starting from the family reasons and under the background of the times,this paper reveals the identity crisis faced by the heroine Norma Jean under the pressure of her broken marriage,economic pressure,and the social transformation of the Woman’s Liberation Movement.In order to get out of the identity crisis,Norma Jean is struggling in pain and seeking identity in confusion,which challenges the traditional male hegemony.The heroine Norma Jean’s identity construction shows her awakening of female consciousness.Woman’s self-identity and self-independence have been realized,and the transformation from traditional women to new women has gone through the process of awakening,growth and independence.

Identity Construction Discourse in the Perspective ofInter-Subjectivity-The Case of Address Forms

In daily social communication,people mainly construct their own and others'identities through discourse,and the most representative and widely used of identity-constructing discourse is address forms.In this paper,we focus on the identity-constructing function of address formsand the cognitive collaboration of their subordinate categories at the conceptual level,where different forms of address formshave obvious selection preferences in expressing specific discourse functions.Addressing has a discourse function other than the referential function,and inter-subjectivityis its underlying motivation.

A Study of Identity Construction in Husband-wife Conflict Talk-A Case Study of Television Interview Program Battle of Love

Based on Pragmatic Identity Theory,this study uses qualitative and quantitative research methods,and analyzes the conflict talk corpus collected from the television interview program Battle of Love,and investigates the identity construction and the use of linguistic resources in husband-wife conflict talk.The results show that in the conflict talk,the two sides of conflicts construct self-identity,the other party’s identity,and the third party’s identity.In these three types of identities,the most frequently constructed identity is the other party’s identity,followed by self-identity,and finally,the third party’s identity.

Transportable Identity Construction in Single Mother Family

This paper studies single-parent family conversation mainly,the researcher takes 10 hours of recordings in a single-parent family in Shenzhen as data to study conversational identity construction.

Identity Crisis and Construction in The Magic Barrel

Based on a detailed analysis of the text of the short story-The Magic Barrel,this article aims to explore the identity crisis and construction of the Jewish nation.Using Leo’s moral choices and dilemmas as clues,it showcases the development of Leo’s spiritual world,explores the protagonist’s love pursuit and sacrifice spirit,and includes discussions on the Jewish classic themes of suffering and redemption,which is hoped to provide a new perspective for the study of this short story.

Cluster synchronization of community network with distributed time delays via impulsive control

Cluster synchronization is an important dynamical behavior in community networks and deserves further investigations.A community network with distributed time delays is investigated in this paper.For achieving cluster synchronization,an impulsive control scheme is introduced to design proper controllers and an adaptive strategy is adopted to make the impulsive controllers unified for different networks.Through taking advantage of the linear matrix inequality technique and constructing Lyapunov functions,some synchronization criteria with respect to the impulsive gains,instants,and system parameters without adaptive strategy are obtained and generalized to the adaptive case.Finally,numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.

An Ecological Interpretation of Consumer Culture in Willa Cather's The Professor's House

The Professor's House presents the readers pictures with striking consumer culture characteristics. With abundant goods of sign values, conspicuous consumption, swelling-desire-stimulating power and the individuals' efforts to construct their identities through consumption as dominant features, consumer culture exerts negative and even devastating effects on the characters in the novel. Theories of ecocriticism shed new lights on the interpretation of consumerism reflected in the novel, especially on analyzing how the consumer culture makes the characters suffer from split personality, alienation from nature, society, and even from themselves and their spiritual ecology.

Academic Identity Construction in Writing the Discussion & Conclusion Section of L2 Theses: Case Studies of Chinese Social Science Doctoral Students

There has been an increasing interest in studying thesis writing genre in the past two decades, however, the study on how social science doctoral students construct their academic identity in 12 thesis writing still remains underexplored to date. This paper attempts to fill the gap by examining the ways in which a cohort of Chinese social science doctoral students constructed their academic identity in the process of drafting, revising, and shaping the Discussion ＆ Conclusion section of their L2 theses. The study adopted multi-case approaches and in-depth interviews. It found that the process of the students＇ academic identity construction was fluid and dynamic. These students gradually evolved from novice student writers at the initial stage to more skilled academic writers at the later stage. The findings generated from this study offer significant implications for L2 writing pedagogy in China.

National Identity in the Era of Globalization: Crisis and Reconstruction

The era of globalization is posing a variety of challenges to national identity. In order to meet these challenges, it is important to offer theoretical scientific interpretations of them. A scrutiny of national identity as a concept reveals that national identity is actually a ＂four in one＂ combination of institutional identity, interest identity, cultural identity and non-national community identity, with formative mechanisms characterized the unity of the primordial state and the constructive, expressive forms characterized by the unity of consciousness and action, content characterized by the unity of politics and culture, and maintenance mechanisms characterized by the unity of emotion and self-interest. In the global age, national identity crisis usually arises in political, economic and cultural levels. The root cause for national identity crisis lies in the ineffectiveness of nation states＇ self-governance. In order to promote the construction of national identity in the global age, we need to： （1）promote reform of the political system, explore democratic models of governance, and create the institutional preconditions for national identity; （2） promote economic development, ensure fairness and justice, and guarantee interests in national identity; （3） develop national culture, strengthen value integration and enrich the cultural significance of national identity; and （4） recognize different levels of community development and promote community integration in national identity.

An Exploratory Study of Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers' Professional Identity Construction in a Globalizing China

Employing one-to-one interviews,this study explores,from a poststructuralist view,how Chinese English Teachers(CETs)struggle to construct their professional identity within the dominant ideology and disempowering discourses of native-speakerism in a globalizing China.Twenty-five CETs were interviewed,and the results have shown that applying human agency and subjectivity,CET participants manage to counteract the disempowering discourses and reach a relatively balanced power relationship with their native speaker(NS)counterparts mainly through four ways:Othering the NSs;exploring their own unique strengths;taking special roles in ELT;and establishing their credibility through hard work.The Chinese culture of learning,specifically,Confucian values,also plays an important role in CETs’professional identity construction.

Writer Identity Construction Revisited: Stance, Voice, Self, and Identity in Academic Written Discourse

Recent research on academic discourse has revealed the intersection of writing and writer identity construction. However, some terms that are being used in writer identity study are sometimes not only interchangeably used without making an explicit connection between them but also used in a way that may cause misunderstanding. The paper is intended to tease out four key terms, namely, stance, voice, self, and identity so that the respective role that each plays in academic written discourse can be differentiated on the one hand, and their interrelationship can be clarified on the other. It is hoped that such a panoramic picture can offer some pedagogical implications for academic writing teaching and research and provide some insights into the research on writer identity construction in academic written discourse as well.

“We Were Not at School Today”: First-Person Pronouns and Discursive Construction of Identities by Emerging Middle-Class Chinese Parents

In the process of China’s dynamic social changes over the past decades, the young-parent identity construction of an emerging middle class and the resulting changes of social-cultural values in this context have attracted the attention of academic research in recent years. With the focus on the discursive construction of parent identity, this study examines the utilization of first-person pronouns in three different interactional contexts, namely, parent-teacher interaction, parent-parent interaction, and parent-child interaction. The study further explores the patterns of alignment between the parents and their children, parents and teachers of their children, and peer parents during the process of identity construction, followed by a discussion of the implication that young, emerging middleclass Chinese parents fundamentally shape themselves as "concerned" and "involved" parents and the change of values between collectivity and agency. The study not only demonstrates the dynamic and pluralistic nature of parent identity but also deepens our understanding of the indexical roles of first-person pronouns in the discursive construction of emerging middle-class Chinese parent identity and its relationship with the recent social-cultural changes in the Chinese context.

Nuisance species:beyond the ecological perspective

Introduction:‘Nuisance species’(or‘invasive’species)are often proposed to be the second most important concern in the context of the current biodiversity crisis.Despite increasing evidence that exotic species do not always become invasive,this perception is still common in the scientific community.This suggests that other issues are at stake in the concept of nuisance species rather than just the problems they raise,grounded mostly in ecological or economic arguments.Methods:We retraced the evolution of pigeon representation in France through an extensive review of ancient texts related to pigeons and reviewed more than 240 source texts,dating from the seventh century to the 1990s.We completed these data with literature on human-animal relationships and animal conceptions in religious,philosophical,scientific,and political currents of thought that were representative of Western and,specifically,French tradition.Results:We used the heated debate over pigeons(Columba livia)as pests as a case study by analyzing the ecological,social,economic,and political relations regarding pigeons.Through a historical perspective of the debate about and understanding of pigeons,we propose a new and complementary explanation for the modern thinking of pigeons as a nuisance species,based on what we termed their socio-nature characteristics.In particular,we used social representations theory to highlight the issues of human identity construction at stake in the construction of pigeons as a nuisance species.Conclusions:We invite the reader to consider the impact of such human self-definition on environmental stances,as it could constrain further developments or improvements of conservation perspectives.

“The Monkey King Meets the Spiderman”:Narrative Inquiry into Chinese Students’Academic Socialization Experiences in a U.S.University

This narrative study explores four Chinese students’academic socialization experiences in one research-intensive public university in the US.By drawing upon Wenger’s(1998)communities of practice and Gee’s(2000)theorizing on identity as the synthesized theoretical framework,this research uncovers four Chinese students’academic socialization stories nestled in the shifting cross-cultural landscape.Meanwhile,this study reveals that the Chinese students’academic socialization intersects a matrix of factors,which can be categorized into“personal landscape”and“professional landscape.”Last,this narrative case study concluded that the Chinese students’academic socialization involves the continuous negotiations of their multiple identities embedded in the cross-cultural contexts.