Swales’ move and step analysis, which focuses mainly on the macro-structure of a text, is widely used in studies on genre analysis. However, as advertisements are texts with rich generic features and multiple modes, macro-analyses are not adequate because they tend to ignore many discursive details. By adopting a macro- and micro-approach to genre analysis based on Bakhtin’s dialogic and Fairclough’s intersubjective views of discourse, this paper intends to be a multi-modal analysis of the generic features of an advertisement from three perspectives: theme, activity type, and style. The dialogic features are ascertained on four levels: culture, context, content, and expression.

By applying Fairclough’s dialectical-relational framework, this article makes a structural and interactional analysis of the genre of governmental announcement. It is found that a type of hierarchical relationship is represented in governmental announcement by certain discursive strategies that are employed in the process of issuing and implementing the announcement from the top level of the hierarchy. It then discusses the way this announcement as governmental genre participates in social practice in comparison to the ways in which other governmental genres such as work report do, and reaches a tentative conclusion that governmental documents as managerial discourse serve as social practice in various ways, each providing useful insights to another.

Following Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper is a frame analysis of speeches made by high-ranking officials of the United States Department of State since 2011 when the “New Silk Road Strategy” was initiated. The findings show that, embedded in the deep frame of U.S. diplomatic culture and the historical Silk Road narrative, the discourse arises from the officials’ manipulative use of covert and overt elements in the surface frame. The surface frame as a whole aims to exhibit a positive U.S. foreign policy oriented toward peace, security, stability, development, cooperation, and connectivity in Central Asia, with subframes indicating different perspectives. The overt side represents the U.S. as “having made great contributions to the strategy” and the strategy as “benefiting Afghanistan a lot”, while the covert side hints that “the U.S. is a God-chosen leader of the world” and “its policy priority is to achieve and defend U.S. national interests”. The frame, as an effort to explain U.S. strategic goals, is designed to fit into the cognitive model of the Americans on one hand and to relieve Afghans’ suspicion of the U.S. initiative on the other hand.

Identity research has been a hot spot in many fields, and identities have been found to be constructed often through the manipulative use of language. This research conducts a comparative analysis of the 22 annual Policy Addresses (PA) of the Hong Kong Government (both the British Hong Kong Government and the Hong Kong SAR Government) that were delivered during the pre- and post-transition period to reveal how three kinds of temporal deixis are used as discursive strategies to construct social identities. Among the major findings are the following three observations: (1) past temporal deixis helps construct the positive Hong Kong history in the pre-transition PA but conversely constructs the negative Hong Kong colonized history in the post-transition PA; (2) future temporal deixis contributes to the construction of a transient and uncertain future for Hong Kong in the pre-transition PA and conversely a positive Hong Kong future and a positive China in the post-transition PA; (3) absolute temporal deixis “1997” in the pre-transition PA constructs a negative “1997 event” and conversely in the post-transition PA a positive “reunion with China”. The paper concludes that temporal deixis is a discursive strategy in the manipulative construction of Hong Kong identities, which provides a new perspective for the study of temporal deixis and enriches the study of identity from the perspective of sociolinguistics and pragmatics.

In the current circumstances, China is stepping up more efforts to translate and transmit traditional Chinese cultures to foreign countries. Chinese classics of science and technology are one of the main channels to convey cultures of traditional Chinese science and technology. It is, therefore, crucial to carry out holistic and systematic research into translations of Chinese science and technology classics. In this case, this paper attempts to build a theoretical framework for studies on translations of ancient Chinese science and technology classics based on the realities of ancient Chinese works of science and technology, the law of translation studies, as well as its inherent relations with other relevant subjects. This framework involves ontology, epistemology, methodology, history theory, skopos theory, and application theory of translations of ancient Chinese works of science and technology. This study aims to help excellent ancient Chinese cultures of science and technology to “go global”.

Atonement, a novel written by Ian McEwan, conveys rich ethical connotations of the Other because of its exploration of the relationship between the Self and the Other. Such an ethical affect not only springs from his ingenious plot but also from his exploration of an innovative pattern of narrative discourse that combines embedded narration, shift of points of view, and unreliable narration to disclose implication of alterity ethics as well as the relation between the ethical expression of author, narrator, and reader and style of the narrative. The author of this paper examines the function of these three narrative techniques in strengthening the expression of alterity ethics and explores how McEwan guides readers to reflect on their ethical consciousness through alterity ethics at the narrative level. With this research, the author suggests that McEwan employs the narrative forms with profound ethical connotations that, together with the content of the novel, strengthen the expression of alterity ethics in the novel. Exploring the roles played by the narrative forms in expressing alterity ethics in Atonement may fully uncover its ethical connotations as well as garner attention to the ethical dimensions of narrative arts in McEwan’s novels.

Starting with interpretation of the ecological affordances and internalization theories, this study locates compatibility between the two and constructs the conceptual internalization mechanism of English knowledge. The researchers propose that there should not only be inter-psychological affordances in the English learning environment but also intra-psychological affordances. Based on the proposed conceptual mechanism, the study then investigates two postgraduate students via narratives and interviews during class presentation activities. From the data, the researchers describe the inter-psychological and intra-psychological ecological affordances before, during, and after the presentation, and they discover that the two affordances make an active impact on the development of internalization. Meanwhile, the researchers conclude that internalization mechanism is repeatable and adjustable; they then construct the mechanism based on these two features with the aim to investigate the knowledge internalization process of presenters during presentation activities, offering some insight for English teaching.

This paper is a meaningful attempt to apply Construction Grammar to discourse analysis. Based on Construction Grammar and the characteristics of new communication outlets such as WeChat and Weibo, this paper constructs an analytic framework to evaluate relevant discourses of COVID-19. The types of discourse construction found are institutional dialogue construction, reminding discourse construction, warning discourse construction, news headline construction, and news report discourse construction. Then it discusses the discursive strategies that can be realized from these discourse constructions in public opinion governance, such as science popularization strategy, strategy in proper behaviors in epidemic prevention and control, counter-rumor strategy, psychological pacification guidance strategy, and the construction of professional image. This study shows that discourse can be regarded as a large construction, which is composed of lexical constructions and argument constructions; construction analysis can resolve difficulties caused by the fragmentary, innovative, and entertaining characteristics of new media discourse and explain its mixture of various text types and genres.