In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers' choices of referring expressions: the topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the rational model that chooses a form based on the informativity of the form and its speech cost. Simulations suggest that both the topicality of the referent…

This article traces the intellectual roots and developments of the notion of competence in second language (L2) teaching and research. Since L2 teaching and research invariably concern competence of some sort (linguistic, communicative, interactional, or otherwise), there have been countless attempts to define competence from diverse theoretical…

This study examines Mood, Modality, and Attitude as a part of Appraisal theory in the Editorial News of the "Sydney Morning Herald" Interpersonal Meta function Analysis. Three methods were used, including (1) Indicative (Declarative and Interrogative) mood, (2) Modalization (Indicative Type), Probability (may be) and Usuality…

According to linguistic theory, conversational Implicature (CI) is the original intent of the speech expressed by a speaker. The assumption is that both the speaker and the receiver understand and respect the communication rules. In conversation theory, this is the significant component that has been the subject of discussion. This study…

This paper addresses the complexity of the linguistic situation in China by examining the language policy and language categorisation in the People's Republic of China (PRC), which has implications for how multilingual speakers conceptualise and practice 'language'. In addition, this paper examines the conceptual framework of translanguaging and…

Grice's Cooperative Principle has remained in the limelight especially when it comes to analyzing utterances in a conversation. Although numerous studies have looked into the violation of conversations, real or imagined, on the Gricean maxims, none has explored conversations that are posted on Facebook. This paper then attempted to revisit the…

The orientation toward a knowledge-based economy has led to the increasing need to pursue advanced degrees to further improve one's competitiveness in society. Research on postgraduate programs has thus sparked interest from multiple perspectives, among which, generated written artifacts such as dissertations have become the center of attention.…

This paper attempts to shed some light on the problem of correlation of such ontological categories as quality, quantity and relation in similes. The matter in question is significant since it relates to the problem of anthropocentrism in language. It shows the speaker's attitude to the information encoded in a simile by consciously choosing a…

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…

There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree ("Cognition" 84(1):73-111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the…

According to one view of linguistic information (Karttunen, 1974; Stalnaker, 1974), a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: (a) by "asserting" the content as new information; or (b) by "presupposing" the content as given information which would then have to be "accommodated." This…

Other-orientation (Linell, 2009) is an essential element of language in that all speakers dialogue with an "other" when communicating. They take into consideration the other's assumed perspective, knowledge, and needs, and manipulate their language in response to these assumptions. This study investigated the extent to which…

Metadiscourse refer to linguistic resources that are used to refer to the act and the context of writing about some subject matter. Study of metadiscourse provides a gateway for understanding interactional features of texts or speech, looking beyond the ideational dimension of texts at how writers characterize the world and function…

As one of the most widespread linguistic phenomena, code-switching has attracted increasing attention nowadays. Inspired by previous studies in this field, this paper addresses code-switching under the guidance of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), with the primary goal of analysing the interpersonal meanings of code-switching in three TV…