Scholars in the humanities should have not only a wide range of knowledge but also commitment and responsibility. A scholar’s commitment - including to a specific discipline and to the benefits of human beings as a whole - is embodied in an intense sense of responsibility and dedication. Professor Xu Jun of Zhejiang University is such a scholar with widespread influence and personal charisma. He has made great contributions to the discipline construction of translation studies and cultural exchange between China and other countries. This paper, as an interview with Professor Xu, focuses on his commitment and contribution to translation studies, such as his emphasis on studies of Chinese translators and the importance of translation practice and translated works; his dedication to the establishment and operation of the Chinese Academy of Translation and Translation Studies, Zhejiang University; and his extensive participation in enriching campus culture and promoting international academic and cultural exchanges. Professor Xu’s own translation thoughts are briefly discussed in the end of the interview. The sense of commitment and responsibility shown by scholars like Professor Xu should be inherited by young scholars who are pillars of future academic world. It is hoped that this interview might shed some light on the overall development of young scholars.

This paper has an exploratory discussion on the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and foreign language teaching (FLT) and argues that AI, as the trend of education informatization, has produced many of its own concepts over its development. Based on that argument, the paper explores and demonstrates the application of some of the AI key concepts in FLT. To apply AI technology effectively to FLT, schools are supposed to establish SMART classrooms in a well-planned way and try to build up FLT teachers’ IT competence in FLT practice, learning to make smart use of teaching materials and AI technology software in their teaching activities.

To be adapted to Ecological Discourse Analysis, this paper examines and extends the cohesion and coherence theory within Systemic Functional Linguistics from an ecolinguistic perspective. The research shows that the ecological cohesion and coherence system involves three conjunctive sub-systems. The first is the ecosophy of ‘Diversity and Harmony, Interaction and Coexistence’, which is the basis for the judgment of eco-orientations of discourse. The second is the outside cohesive resources to be judged for eco-orientations of discourse, i.e., the three parameters of register - field, tenor and mode. The third is the inside cohesive resources to be judged for eco-orientations of discourse, including transitivity, mood, tense and voice, reference, substitution and ellipsis, conjunction, repetition and collocation, rhetorical devices, and pronunciations and intonations, which play a significant role in the organisation and progression of discourse, and the use of which either conveys certain eco-orientations or heightens or weakens degrees of eco-orientations. To illustrate the applicability of the extended cohesion and coherence theory in Ecological Discourse Analysis, this paper provides a few examples and explains how cohesive devices are employed to organise texts and to convey eco-orientations. But it should be noted that experiential and interpersonal meanings are the prerequisite for the existence of textual meaning. Therefore, analysts of discourse are expected to be familiar with extended transitivity, mood, modality and appraisal systems from the perspective of Ecolinguistics before analysing discourse based on this extended cohesion and coherence theory.

Since Long put forth the Interaction Hypothesis, there have been numerous studies on interaction, with the relationship between task-based interaction and second-language (L2) grammar acquisition as the focus. To better understand the results of those studies, sometimes with conflicting findings, this paper synthesised 11 empirical studies concerning the relationship between task-based interaction and L2 grammar acquisition in the past decade. This meta-analysis yielded the following findings: (1) task-based interaction has an upper-medium level of effect on L2 grammar acquisition; (2) all types of tasks facilitate L2 grammar acquisition but with varying effect sizes; (3) task essentialness has a greater impact on acquisition than task usefulness; (4) the effects of acquisition vary according to the types of tests used, with better effects from written tests; and (5) learning environment influences acquisition, with the foreign language learning context being better than the L2 context.

Hidden negation is a special linguistic phenomenon. On the lexical level, hidden negation refers to the fact that some words, in spite of their often-used affirmative senses, can be used in a certain context to convey negative meanings. This paper probes into hidden negation in English from the perspective of embodied cognition in cognitive linguistics. The research results show that English hidden negation can be divided roughly into location negation, scope negation, distance negation, loss negation, want negation, point negation, and dimension negation. The hidden negative meanings of such English words are actually the new meanings extended from the affirmative senses, which are both empirical and emotional. The establishment of hidden negation, therefore, is attributed to the combination of the empirical coexistence of people, the solidification of language use, and the experience of people’s feelings; both the body and mind play an active role in the generation of the hidden negative meanings. In addition, the metaphoric projection also plays an important role in the formation process of these words’ negative meanings, and this process mainly entails spatial metaphor, existential metaphor, and numerical metaphor. This study may illuminate a new approach for the exploration of meaning extension of these special words. .

Many traditional critics tend to relate the supernatural images in Macbeth with the three Fates and thus ignored the dimension of psychological reality in the play. By applying Lacanian and Žižekian psychoanalysis in the interpretation of the supernatural images of the three witches in Macbeth, this paper concludes that the three witches are no more than the rhetoric of Macbeth’s inner desire, and their prophecy is the metonymy of Macbeth’s unconscious. Different witch imagery in different versions of Macbeth allow new interpretations of the play. Macbeth saw Lady Macbeth’s gaze on the three witches, and his desire was established through Lady Macbeth’s desire. Macbeth tried to respond to the emptiness of ‘the Other’ by filling up the emptiness of his inner desire but he lost himself in the pursuit of power. Lady Macbeth indulged herself in ‘surplus-enjoyment’ derived from Macbeth’s supreme royal power. However, when Lady Macbeth failed to satisfy her desire with surplus-enjoyment, she was doomed to lose her reason and perish. By describing the supernatural images and Macbeth’s uncanny dreams, William Shakespeare displays Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s profound inner worlds, which reveal his concern about humanism to a greater extent.

In Our Mutual Friend, Eugene’s identity as a dandy has frequently been misinterpreted or ignored. Through textual analysis and historical exploration of Dickens’s association with Bulwer Lytton in his social life and writing career, the paper discloses Dickens’s partial identification with aristocratic and dandyish culture, which probably accounts for the author’s positive treatment of Eugene as a dandyish gentleman. Eugene demonstrates a dandyish tendency in his witty remarks, calm manner, indolent way of living, and playful attitude toward life and middle class morality. With those dandyish characteristics, Eugene displays different ways of seeing and living, and his deviance from social norms is endowed with cultural significance in accordance with the overall attack on middle-class culture in the novel. Eugene is markedly different from the debauched dandies in Dickens’s prior works. To accept the character of Eugene as a dandy in a favorable light will help readers to discern the complexity of and consistency in the characterization. Dickens’s sympathetic attitude towards dandyism, though much ignored by critics, is displayed fully in this novel.

This paper investigates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influence on Donald Davidson’s thoughts in “What Metaphors Mean”. By analysing Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s key philosophical writings, we argue that such influence can be generalised into four points: (1) there is a connection between Davidson’s division of metaphor’s meaning from its application and Wittgenstein’s demarcation of the “sayable” and “unsayable” in his Tractatus; (2) Davidson’s idea of categorising the understanding of the meaning of metaphor into the realm of metaphor’s actual application is in accordance with Wittgenstein’s later views on semantics; (3) the essential argument behind Davidson’s refutation of the conception of metaphor’s “cognitive meaning” and Wittgenstein’s critique of “the inner-object conception of sensations” is “anti-mentalism”; and (4) both Davidson and Wittgenstein thought that the interpretation of the meaning of language (metaphor) can be regarded as an “insight” in philosophy. All in all, “metaphorical meaning” and “cognitive meaning” are empty concepts, and the interpretation of metaphor’s meaning should always be placed in the specific context where metaphor occurs.