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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.