It is widely believed that tourist trade has been the fastest developing trade in the world. In China, with the development of economy and the improvement of people's living standard, travelling has been an indispensable part of living. Therefore, tourism text becomes one of the most effective publicity tool to attractive tourists. A tour guide…

Acquisition and improvement of literary translation competence is an important undertaking in teaching literary translation with the aim to enable the student to translate into the target language the content, expressive power, language style, and an equal function of the literary text. This essay pursues the aim of helping to create and improve…

In this article, we take up and expand upon a number of issues of linguistic theory raised in Ursula Ritzau's recent article "Learner language and polylanguaging: how language students' ideologies relate to their written language use" published in the "Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism". The present critique is…

This article explores the implications of Hegel's theories of language on second language (L2) teaching. Three among the various concepts in Hegel's theories of language are selected. They are the crucial role of intersubjectivity; the primacy of the spoken over the written form; and the importance of the training of form or grammar. Applying…

This paper examines the key linguistic arguments underpinning Basil Bernstein's theory of "elaborated" and "restricted" "codes". Building on a review of selected highlights from the collective critical response to Bernstein, the paper attempts to clarify the relationship of the theory to "deficit" views…

There is a standard version of the history of modern mainstream psycholinguistics that emphasizes an extraordinary explosion of research in mid twentieth century under the guidance and leadership of George A. Miller and Noam Chomsky. The narrative is cast as a dramatic shift away from behavioristic principles and toward mentalistic principles…

Morphological variability and the source of these errors have been intensely debated in SLA. A recurrent finding is that postpuberty second language (L2) learners often omit or use the wrong affix for nominal and verbal inflections in oral production but less so in written tasks. According to the missing surface inflection hypothesis, L2 learners…

Two models of language contact, one concerning linguistic development and the other a general model of language contact, are suggested as a result of a recent study of written languages in India. (Author/MSE)

Literacy is examined from the viewpoint of systemic linguistics. It is proposed that "literacy" means intervening in the social processes by working with written language, and this can not be accomplished by an individual alone. "Using written language" can not be isolated from "using language." While sociologically,…

Study of the pragmatics of politeness conventionally draws on conversational data, but can be extended to some genres of written text. A framework is described that analyzes politeness strategies in terms of impositions (claims and denials of claims) and reveals some stylistic features in scientific papers and in popularizations. (Author/CB)

Problems in determining the origins of Sumerian, an ancient language, are described, and an alternative approach is examined. Sumerian was spoken in southern Iraq in the third millennium B.C. and later used by Babylonian and Assyrian scribes as a classical language. While early texts in Sumerian are considered a better reflection of the original…

The ultimate goal of reading is to construct text meaning based on visually encoded information. Essentially, it entails converting print into language and then to the message intended by the author. It is hardly accidental, therefore, that, in all languages, reading builds on oral language competence and that learning to read uniformly requires…

In discourse analysis, connectives have been widely suggested as linguistic markers to indicate the logical linkage between utterances. However, the understanding of the interactions among various kinds of connectives in discourse has been limited. A method of quantifying the overall correlation between different kinds of connectives occurring on…

Different conceptions of literacy and its relationship with oral communication are examined, and a new approach that separates literacy and orality rather than representing them on a continuum is criticized. The methodological and theoretical assumptions underlying the work of proponents of the new approach are questioned, including: (1) a narrow…

Recent research on Chinese orthography is reviewed in a discussion of the relationship between orthographic symbols and reading processes. Specifically, these issues are addressed with relation to research findings: the difficulty of learning Chinese logographs, particularly with regard to learning disabilities and biliteracy; whether reading in…