Adhering to the national strategy of “Building World-Class Universities and Disciplines”, foreign language universities in China should have a distinct vision and develop in a scientific way. Based on literature review, this paper analyzes the orientation, characteristics and strategies of foreign language universities against the background of “Building World-Class Universities and Disciplines”.This study claims that foreign language universities should have the vision of building first-class universities of different types according to their own characteristics and advantages. It also points out that the major characteristics of first-class universities include concentration of talents, sharing of resources and effective governance, which are closely related and interactive. Finally, combined with the above mentioned orientation and characteristics concerning foreign language universities, the paper presents the following development strategies: (1) to design scientifically and make development plans of different levels and types; (2) to highlight the characteristics of internationalization and attract excellent talents; (3) to expand academic impact and promote the cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries; (4) to strengthen the information construction and advance the co-building and co-sharing of resources; (5) to improve the systems and mechanisms and build distinct university culture; (6) to enhance institutional researches on foreign language universities and develop the collegial communication and cooperation.

Sentence comprehension disorders of Broca’s aphasics have been a major focus of neurolinguistic research since 1970s. Theoretical hypotheses have been brought up to explain the causes based on both syntactic theories and language processing models, but there still remain obvious limitations. Theories based on syntax help to accurately ascertain the types of disorders, yet only some of them can be accounted for. Theories in view of speech processing have better explanatory power, but they are relatively general and vague, so it is difficult to precisely describe patients’ impaired comprehension. The author believes that there exist no basic disagreements among the different theories, since they account for the sentence comprehension disorders of Broca’s aphasics at different levels from different perspectives. It is therefore possible to build a general theoretical framework, in which aphasics’ problem with cognitive resources is believed to be the underlying cause and the specific impairments in different stages of sentence comprehension as the results of different degrees of severity of cognitive processing. As a result, on the basis of a critical review about the previous theories, the present paper puts forward a tentative theoretical framework from the perspectives of both sentence comprehension process and its required cognitive resources, which may lead to a more comprehensive and reasonable explanation of the sentence comprehension disorders of Broca’s aphasics and also needs further empirical confirmation.

Aphasia is a syndrome caused by language breakdown and becomes diversified in specific types. Primary progressive aphasia (PPA), however, different from the aphasia induced by stroke or brain damage in a bulk of literature, is a special one evoked by neurodegenerative diseases, and the resulting language breakdown comes up incrementally and tends to be implicit at its onset. This paper aims to provide an introduction of the aphasia's classification (agrammatic PPA, semantic variant PPA and logopenic variant PPA), linguistic features (i.e., the language disorders on different levels of language like phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse and handwriting) and therapy approaches (like behavior interference, transcranial direct current stimulation and stem cell therapy) so that greater importance is attached to its clinical practice and linguistic researches in China’s neurology and neurolinguistics.

There has been a long debate as to whether there is tense in Chinese, an uninflected language. Some scholars hold that there exist only four aspectual morphemes including zhe, guo, zai, and verbal le, serving as time markers while others argue that the past time morpheme guo is in fact a tense marker, indicating that there is tense in Chinese. Without empirical evidence and with only theoretical discussion, the debate can hardly come to any conclusion. Against this background the linguistic studies on syntactic deficits in aphasic agrammatism may have special value since they may provide the empirical evidence helping settle the debate. A longitudinal case study was conducted, aiming at observing the recovery process of a Chinese agrammatic speaker. We examined the production of the above four morphemes by a 52-year-old male patient in a longitudinal study spanning five months. The findings indicate that guo is indeed dissociated from the other aspectual morphemes zhe, zai, and verbal le. This study has provided the empirical evidence that there may be a tense phrase (TP) node in the syntactic tree of the Chinese language, hosting guo, higher than the NegP node, which is in turn higher than the AspP node. Thus it was concluded that there may be tense in the Chinese language. This study, based upon the generative linguistics, provides an innovative perspective in proving hierarchical structure in language.

NIE Zhenzhao is a professor at the College of Humanities, Central China Normal University. He is chief editor of Foreign Literature Studies (indexed by A&HCI), vice president respectively of China National Foreign Literature Association and International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism. His research is mainly focused on English literature and comparative literature and the study of Ethical Literary Criticism as theory and methodology. Prof. NIE delivered an important speech on Ethical Literary Criticism at Beijing International Studies University in April, 2016, which was well received. Both teachers and students have been attracted not only by the originality and subjectivity of Ethical Literary Criticism, but the theoretical construction of international academic discourse with Chinese characteristics. Hence, we proposed an interview with Prof. NIE, covering issues from an overview of ethical literary criticism in terms of its theoretical framework and future prospect, the significance of constructing an academic discourse system with both Chinese characteristics and international influence, to the strategy of and way to the realization of the going-out policy of Chinese academics.

Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea has always been a primary concern for Murdochian scholars in Iris Murdoch studies. Focusing on the storyline and the narrative of The Sea, The Sea, this paper attempts to reread The Sea, The Sea by using theories of ethical literary criticism. From the aspect of the storyline of The Sea, The Sea, starting from London, the novel’s protagonist, Charles’s circular journey to the seaside house Shruff End and his later return to London from which he attempts to escape at the outset in fact symbolizes his difficult progression of ethical construction from sinking in the world to make an ethical selection and then to reconstruct his lost ethical order by actively interfering into everyday life and life of others which he used to escape from. Considering the narrative of The Sea, The Sea, as a fiction narrated and “composed” by Charles, The Sea, The Sea itself is both a product of Charles’s ethical construction and a moral guide for him. For the purpose of becoming a good man, Charles starts to compose his memoir, namely the story of The Sea, The Sea. His record of what he experienced in turn helps him have a better understanding of himself and others, and make a better choice. Therefore, from the perspective of ethical literary criticism, The Sea, The Sea not only reveals Charles’s journey from evil to goodness through ethical selection but also echoes the idea of ethical literary criticism that literary creation originates from ethics and helps to ethical enlightenment.

Nature, both in Chinese and foreign literary theory and criticism, has always been an important category. The recent hot topic “ecological ethics” ponders the moral relationship between man and nature. Academia at home and abroad, though analysing Alexander Pope’s proposition of “follow NATURE” in his masterpiece An Essay on Criticism, seldom makes a further differentiation of the relationship between nature and human’s moral values. Neither does it put forward and research on the aesthetic connection between human spirit, human expression and nature. This article plans to stand in the position of a Chinese scholar and makes a comparative study between Pope’s claim of “follow NATURE” and Chinese critic Liu Xie’s literary principle of “Original Tao” from the perspective of ecological ethics. It is found that both of the two masters embody the basic spirit of advocating nature, following the natural rules and trying to put forward artistic creation principles and ways of aesthetic production based on the essence of nature and the ethical, moral relationship between man and nature. It is illustrated that though the two writers lived in different ages, countries and societies with different cultural backgrounds, their literary concepts and aesthetic principles share in resemblance. They both, through their respective masterpieces, pursue a mental state of harmonious unity between nature and human beings, whose views still nourish and give us enlightenment.

This study aims to reassess the theoretical and practical value of XU Guozhang’s view on translation and observes his translation characterized by the use of two strategies: chanyi(explanative translation) and shiyi(restructuring in translation). It finds that XU’s theory on translation centers around chanyi and shiyi. While the former lays stress on explicitation by using more words or expressions to make explicit what is implicit in the source text, the latter aims at decomposing the source text into semantic units and restructuring what is decomposed by following the norm of the target text. So, compared with chanyi, shiyi gives translators more freedom to make use of the expressive potentials of the source language. The study also finds that XU’s view on translation and his unrivalled use of translation techniques tally well with his linguistic outlook. According to XU, language, as a tool of communication and a carrier of culture, has much message shared by its users in the language community, which leads to the existence of default meaning or default interpretation, and to the gap in cross-cultural or cross-linguistic communication. To bridge the gap, XUputs forward the strategies of chanyi and shiyi, and puts his notions into practice that proves to be effective and meaningful. This paper also finds XU’s views on translation is theoretically close to the contemporary translation theories, and it has significant implications on the efforts being made in the communication of Chinese culture with the world.

Collocation is an important category of language patterning. The concept “collocation” was proposed by British linguist J.R. Firth, referring to the company words keep. However, collocations are not at random, which means the component words in collocations usually are supposed to meet certain semantic or logical conditions. Nonetheless, in reality, in particular in literary works, certain collocations do contravene the expected semantic or logical restrictions. In fact, these kinds of creative collocations are an important aspect of the creativeness of literary works. Therefore, creative collocations are an important issue in literary translation. On the one hand, collocations, in particular in terms of creative collocations, are practically difficult to translate across languages due to systemic as well as habitual differences. On the other hand, studies of translation of creative collocation in literary works will contribute to the exploration of the creativeness issue in translation studies. Due to the above two considerations, this article explores Howard Goldblatt’s English translation strategies of creative collocations in Mo Yan’s famous novel Red Sorghum. The findings show that: (1) over half of the creative collocations in the original Chinese Red Sorghum are preserved in Goldblatt’s English version, which implies that creative collocations in Chinese literary works can be rendered into English; (2) in the meanwhile, almost half of the creative collocations are normalized in Goldblatt’s English version, which means, on the one hand, they are hard to translate across cultures, and on the other hand, the creativeness of Chinese literary works somewhat suffer losses in English translation

In Chinese discourses, from the perspective of events, packaged in a clause in the sense of systemic-functional grammar, it is found that there are linguistically represented events or elements in events featuring subjectivity and/ or that  cohesiveness between events is maintained by languages derived from subjectivity. In other words, the Chinese subjectivity is represented in discourse as subjective creation of events, identification or use of event elements, or cohering events by subjective means. This research examines the vague Chinese account of realities using words with fuzzy meaning for some pragmatic purposes, especially those unrealistically supported Chinese depictions of objects from the perspective  of unidentified persons and the use of Chinese perception verbs for the textual coherence because of their role in bridging the gap between the events narrated from the subjective and objective perspectives. It finds that Chinese narrators may leave room pragmatically for a subjective manipulation or identification of objects including emotional, temporal and spacialtical  distances between participants, objects or events. Hence, this paper concludes with two types of translation strategy after a description of Chinese-into-English translations resulting from translators’ transfer from the Chinese way of thinking to the English: (a) deleting or readjusting the whole subjectively created event linguistically; (b) deleting or readjusting the subjectively created elements in an event linguistically. In sum, this research gives a more detailed description of Chinese discourse featuring subjectivity and enhances translators’ understanding of Chinese-into-English translation strategy worded as “keeping intact the facts by discarding the subjectively created events or elements”.

Drawing on Hoey’s (2005) Theory of Lexical Priming, the paper investigates the frequencies, the collocation and colligation patterns of the English phrase “more and more” as shown in the three corpora, namely, PCCE, BNC and CLEC.It is found that a lot of the differences as revealed in the comparative results are due to the priming effects from different linguistic environments, including native vs. non-native language contexts and bilingual vs. monolingual contexts. The source text and the native-language transfer are in particular two factors that impact the above phrasal priming. It is believed that the lexical priming theory, with its distinctly psychological perspectives, can help to shed new light on the issue of “equivalence” in translation by highlighting the fact that some of the so-called apparent English and Chinese equivalents cannot be equivalently primed in syntactic positions, collocations, pragmatic associations etc. even though they might be semantically equivalent. These can probably be the de facto factors that underlie translations that are correct in terms of denotation, but not necessarily with the same or similar naturalness or style as that of the original. The study concludes by pointing out that the lexical priming theory not only can guide English to Chinese translation practice directly, but also can offer new theoretical grounds to the contrastive study between English and Chinese as an academic discipline.