In the linguistic study of ecological issues and discourses, there is a common approach which is concerned with the classification of discourse types according to the analyst’s ecosophy and understanding of the nature of ecology. However, scholars from different cultural backgrounds with different viewpoints of ecosophy may use different criteria in their classification of discourse (text) types. Arran Stibbe in his book entitled Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By proposes that in the study of ecolinguistics three types of ecological discourse (i.e. destructive discourse, ambivalent discourse, beneficial discourse) be identified, according to the analyst’s ecosophy. This proposal is important but may not be as useful as it sounds. Based on the analysis of examples of ecological discourse, this paper illustrates that the boundary between different discourse (text) types is often indeterminate and fuzzy, which leads to the authors’ argument that the concept of cline should be used to distinguish between the discourse types, as there is no clear-cut line between one type of discourse and another type. Taking into consideration the Chinese context, the paper also argues that ecolinguistic studies in China have their own characteristics, that ecolinguistic studies are value-laden and culture-specific, and that ecolinguistic studies in China should be conducted by considering both the political, historical, cultural, social and economic backgrounds and the social practices in the Chinese context, apart from other factors.

The establishment of ecolinguistics is of great academic significance in that it not only builds up the academic connection between linguistics and ecology by western ecolinguistic paradigms, but also guides the study of language to rethink the role that language may play in its interaction with the environment from the ecological perspective. However, the underlying duality of those western paradigms renders the conceptual, methodological, and philosophical paradoxes in terms of the linguistic and metaphorical views as well as the worldview of the discipline. Alternatively, a Confucian paradigm to Chinese ecolinguistics can be interpreted as four interrelated senses: the physical sense of “Daoist Nature”, the social sense of “harmony with diversity”, the aesthetic sense of “aesthetic beauty” and the ethical sense of “unity of heaven and man”. This relational paradigm can be of crucial ecological values in fostering ecological awareness. For it can grant moral, ethical and axiological values to ecolinguistics in the international context, compared with its western counterpart. western ecolinguistic paradigms can turn to the Confucian paradigm for the transcendence of the negative influence of dualism and thus better fulfillment of the ecological mission. However, the popularization of the Confucian paradigm at home and abroad is still confronted with major opportunities and challenges. Chinese ecolinguistic circles can continue various forms of Sino-western communication and cooperation by exploring the local and international expressions of China’s voice. In so doing, Chinese ecolinguists can make use of Chinese ecological wisdom to figure out the mutual ecological themes.

Ecological discourse analysis can reflect the relationship between language and other ecological phenomena, and can awaken and change people’s awareness of nature and environment. Nowadays, with the deepening dissemination of news media, news reports not only carry social functions such as transmitting information, but also constantly change people’s values and lifestyles. Appraisal Theory, which is the development of SFL account of the interpersonal, is useful to reveal the ideology hidden in the text. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper analyzes ten news reports on America pulling out of the Paris Climate Change in terms of attitude system of Appraisal Theory, aiming to reveal Western mainstream media’s ideology of climate change and environment. Thus, the paper proves the operability and practicability of Appraisal Theory in ecological discourse analysis, especially in the revealing of ideology, calling for establishing an appropriate and beneficial ecosophy. Through the analysis, it can be found that the reporters of The Guardian have ecological awareness to some extent, and that they express concern about climate change, recognizing that climate change is mainly caused by improper human behavior, and advocating that the world should work together to cope with the ecological crisis. However, they overemphasize the value of human beings, and ignore other forms of life. Eco-linguists should pay attention to the ecological discourse, encouraging those discourses that are conducive to the harmonious development of ecology, and restrict those discourses that are not harmonious with ecology so as not to affect the public’s value judgments.

The current study of Lin Yutang’s translation in the domestic academic circles is limited to a relatively large number of English translations, that is, to mainly focus on the study of his role of introducing Chinese culture to the foreigners, and it neglects his important contribution of introducing foreign cultures to the Chinese people. The lack of research on Lin Yutang’s Chinese translation is caused by a variety of factors, which include the following objective facts. First of all, Lin Yutang’s Chinese translation works are weaker than its English translation works in terms of the number and the influence. Secondly, it is rather difficult for the researchers to finish collecting Lin Yutang’s Chinese translation works completely. Thirdly, there are a lot of flawed words or contradictory statements in the existing Lin Yutang’s anthology of Chinese translations. And the subjective fact is that Lin Yutang personally holds a less serious attitude to his Chinese translation activities while he actively and continually involves in introducing Chinese culture to the West through his English translation and English writing. It is helpful to further demonstrate Lin Yutang’s contribution to the translation of western culture by a detailed study on the lack and the upcoming prospect of research on Lin Yutang’s Chinese translation, which will lead to comprehensively understanding of Lin Yutang’s equally important achievements in English and Chinese translations.

It has long been noticed by scholars that there exists rhetorical disparity in terms of the attention paid to manner as a dimension of motion events between satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages. The degree of manner salience of a particular language can be assessed by lexical size and diversity, and specificity of manner expressions in language use across genres. One of the rhetorical differences in the description of motion events between Chinese and English is that: basic manner verbs are heavily used in Chinese, while English speakers tend to resort more to higher manner verbs that are more expressive and specific in describing how the protagonist moves. In general, basic manner verbs are productive and prominent in Chinese. The prominence of basic manner verbs in modern Chinese is greatly generated by the diachronic typological shift of motion events in Chinese form verb-framed type to satellite-framed type. This article uses the Chinese Novel Lu Ding Ji and its English translation The Deer and the Cauldron as a closed corpus to examine the use of basic manner verb Pa in Chinese, and its translation strategies in English. The study reveals that, owing to the more availability of higher manner verbs in English, the strategies of compensation and reinforcement are largely used in translating Chinese basic manner verbs to cater to the rhetorical style of higher manner salient target language. By contrast, E-C translators tend to apply the strategies of incompletion and compensation more often. The adoption of translation strategies is mainly determined by the gap of manner salience between the source and target language.

In 2017 Prof. Liuyan interviewed German sinologist Prof. Wolfgang Kubin, who had two lectures in Beijing International Studies University (BISU). The first lecture “Chinese Literature and Philosophy Translation and oversea Communication” was held on April 11 ^th, the second “The Importance of Misunderstanding: the Images of China on German Sinology” was held on October 1 ^st. They discussed Sinology interpretation, translation and communication of Chinese philosophy and literature. They also mentioned the spirit of Chinese culture, the history and special features of German Sinology, the melancholy motif in western and Chinese literature, the importance of “misunderstanding” and understanding translation. Prof. Kubin emphasizes foreign language is the door to open the world. Translation is very important to transform one cultural voice to another. Hermeneutics provides the theoretical basis to understand the potential meaning of texts. A good translator is good at listening the inner voice of the authors and texts, philosophy and the experience of writing, being proficient in his own mother tongue. Prof. Kubin also proposes German sinologists are “ferrymen” and “missionaries” to western and Chinese culture. On the one hand, they need to introduce Chinese literature and culture to Germans, to make Chinese literature to be part of the world literature; on the other hand, they introduce German culture and literature to Chinese. Different sinologists from different countries construct Chinese images with their cultural characters when studying about China. Although they may construct wrong images of China, these images present the desires of their self-consciousness and cultural reflection.

With the appearance of the media, the relationship between judicature and public opinion is always a problem difficult to settle. The tension and conflict abound between the formal rationality of judicature and the passion of public opinion. By means of juxtaposing fictional plots and historical facts, The Last Juror describes the interaction between judicature and public opinion in a contemporary American town, involving the reflection of the masses’ opinion, the media operation labeled with public opinion, and the jury—the direct judicial intervener originating from the masses and representing public opinion. The open judicial procedures absorb the element of public opinion, displaying vividly the process of integrating public opinion into judicature through multi-role and multi-field interaction. However, it leaves room for tyranny of the majority in judicial procedures, with excessive opening, unprotected judicial procedures, and the invasion of public opinion which is full of passion but lacking in rationality. The paper analyzes the merits and demerits of the interaction between public opinion and judicature in the novel, with the conclusion that public opinion should be allowed to be fully expressed, and there should be effective media for its incorporating into judicature. Besides, public opinion should keep its distance from judicature, and the latter should strengthen its defense system. Only in these ways can their effective interaction be guaranteed.

The globalization of world economy has made cross-nation exchanges more convenient and frequent. The language, as a medium of communication, especially foreign languages, has become a focus of attention by many nations. Some countries have begun to re-examine the status of foreign language education and treat it as part of their national strategic planning. In this regard, Chinese scholars have done a number of important exploratory studies, and achieved some consensuses. However, in reality, foreign language education planning is a complex system which needs a balanced, overall consideration. This paper takes Vietnam’s National Foreign Language Project 2020 as a case to discuss its initiative, objectives, missions and measures, as well as some emerging challenges in its implementation. Namely, this project depends too much on the evaluation system in Europe and the United States while paying less attention to its local context; it equalizes foreign language planning with English education planning while lack of overall consideration of other lesser-known foreign languages, and above all it neglects the fact that the current teaching force is far from being competent to do the job. It can be inferred that Vietnam’s National Foreign Language Project has important implications on China’s foreign language education planning. Finally, this paper points out issues that need to be addressed while making foreign language education planning in the Chinese context.

Chinese, an isolating language, displays some grammatical phenomena which do not belong to typical isolating languages. It is significant to account for such special and surface phenomena, which may contribute to linguistic research as in typology and crosslinguistic comparisons. Taking Transformational-Generative grammar as the theoretical framework, Professor Waltraud Paul’s new book, New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax, takes some controversial grammatical structures, such as word order, linguistic category and basic syntactic structure, as researching objects. Through careful observations and fine-grained descriptions, Paul deconstructs typological generations and makes reasonable explanations for relevant linguistic facts. According to the author, Chinese is shown to have always displayed SVO order through the diachronic development of more than three thousand years. Prepositions, postposition and adjective in Chinese are separate categories, topic in Chinese can be used to express both given information and new information, and sentence final particle in Chinese is a head of C. Finally, Paul points out that the concept of cross-categorial harmony derived from order typology is the generation of typology, which is of a fundamentally statistical nature, and therefore such typology is not a constituent part of Universal Grammar. The book greatly deepens understandings of Chinese grammar, supports that Chinese, as other languages, co-exists universality and specificity as well, and highlights the significances of Chinese in global general linguistics.