The Cognitive School was the last of the three revolutionary approaches in twentieth-century linguistic studies, and it still has a few shortcomings. Consequently, it can be revised into “embodied-cognitive linguistics” (ECL) so as to reflect Marxist-Leninist materialism and Postmodernist humanism in linguistic research. Its core principle is “reality-cognition-language”; that is to say, language is the result of our interactive embodiment (ti) of the outside world and cognitive processing (ren), with which we can criticize Saussurean transcendentalism and Chomskyan nativism. When talking of motion in the real world, we have to refer to a “physical reference point”, which is conceptualized as “the cognitive reference point” by Langacker. Accordingly, his term can be revised as the “embodied-cognitive reference point” (ECRP) in line with ECL. We believe that this is a common embodied-cognitive strategy that can help us to determine a relative concept and the relationships among concepts; it is also a popular way of thinking and a basic method for solving problems. This paper will focus on how numerous English constructions are formed based on ECRP.

The poems of Mao Zedong are highly integrated gems that combine romantic lyricism and realistic descriptions. Collectively, they form an epic description of China’s democratic revolution and socialist construction, provide a vivid representation of the revolutionary course of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and are the literary expression of Mao Zedong’s outstanding political and military leadership. Mao Zedong’s poems have been translated, published, and disseminated in foreign countries, thus communicating Mao Zedong’s literary talent to the world. The poems of Mao Zedong tell the revolutionary story of the CPC, its course of struggle and its undertaking of mission. They also set up the brilliant images of the CPC members as striving for national independence and a happy life for the people. This article divides the English translators of Mao Zedong’s poems outside of China into three groups, namely foreign translators, foreign translators and foreign citizens of Chinese origin, and translators as foreign citizens of Chinese origin. With regard to the critiques of translators’ behaviors, the foreign translators, due to their travels and experiences, could be influenced by different cultures they encountered and can often use many languages fluently, thus acquiring a basis for translating Mao Zedong’s poems. The combination of foreign translators and foreign citizens of Chinese origin could not only compensate for the disadvantages of foreign translators who could not fully understand the deeper meaning of the Chinese source texts and the disadvantages of the overseas Chinese translators who could not express the ideas in idiomatic ways that appealed to the target language reader, while translators who were foreign citizens of Chinese origin who were born and grew up in China but who pursued studies abroad, lived abroad, and formed their modes of thinking in English due to their experiences abroad, were more popular with the readers.

The Communist (Monthly) was the first theoretical journal in the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC). It published a large number of translated articles about Marxism and introduced the international communist movement to domestic workers and intellectuals, thus becoming the main channel for the ideological construction of the CPC on the eve of its founding, having an important influence on the early spread of Marxism in China and promoting the founding of the CPC. Based on a comprehensive review of the translations published in the journal, this paper investigates the main content of the translated articles in The Communist (Monthly), and analyzes various translation features, such as the distinct political purpose, the readability of the language, and the diversity of the translation methods, in order to explore the academic value of the study with regard to the group behavior of communist translators.

A “Tom Swifty” is a type of English word play that is closely related to the Chinese Xiehouyu, and its humor is achieved through a punning relationship between an adverb and the statement to which it refers. During the interpretation of Tom Swifty puns, this paper reveals that the base word is found to link two meanings, one of which is literal and the other non-literal, via the intermediate form-meaning inference of five steps. By creating a pun in the form of one form with two meanings, its plurality adds to its productivity. By means of homographic, homophonic, or homonymic processing, or the integrations thereof, Tom Swifty puns’ base words can give rise to one individual intermediate or a series of intermediates. The vertical or horizontal integrations of intermediates can constitute complicated form-meaning relations.

Economic diplomacy has increasing importance in an age in which economic globalization and de-globalization are waxing and waning respectively. As a powerful tool for diplomacy, diplomatic discourse is considered to be an abundant source for research. Hence, this paper has studied Chinese leaders’ diplomatic discourse by examining both the categories and the frequency of metaphors in their special speeches at the twelve (from 2007 to 2018) annual meetings of the Summer Davos. The aim has been to explore the form of identity that China has striven to present to the international community, and how Chinese leaders have managed to accomplish this. A small corpus of 51 767 Chinese characters was created, followed by the identification, calculation, and exemplification of the uses of metaphor in the discourses. The results indicate that the three metaphors used most frequently in the discourses in question have been building, journey, and personification, presenting China as a builder, a traveler, and as a growing child respectively, thus creating a picture of the Chinese economy as constructive, progressive, and developing. It has been found that, compared to the first phase (2007-2012), both the diversity and the frequency of the metaphors in the Chinese leaders’ special addresses increased notably in the second phase (2013-2018), accompanied by the appearance of some new metaphors with Chinese characteristics. This reflects an increasingly stronger Chinese voice in diplomatic discourse, as well as growing confidence in Chinese culture, which represents China in a more positive light in the international community.

This paper presents a brief diachronic investigation of the origins of the CP, TP, and vP layers in the English syntactic structure. The findings have revealed that the CP layer in Old English was highly sophisticated, and that its strong topic-feature aspect could cause various elements such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases to move to the front, while the TP layer in Old English remained in the formation phase and was not fixed at that stage. With the formation and development of auxiliary verbs in Middle English, the further fixation of TP layer weakened the strong CP layer, and non-finite verbs could no longer undergo V-to-I and V-to-C movements. The vP layer experienced drastic changes from Old English to Modern English: the light verb v changed from inflectional forms to independent lexical forms, and the complementation patterns of vPs became diversified. The emergence of TP layer gave rise to the change from case-licensing grammar to position-licensing grammar, and the linear order of “pragmatics-grammar-semantics”. These properties imposed restrictions on the licensing of adjuncts (adverbs and prepositional phrases) in syntactic slots, and provided motivations for the word order of adjuncts. In addition, the adjuncts added semantics to the syntax in their compatible slots.

This thesis explores the public health crisis discourse in the U.S. via an analysis of the characteristics of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s interactive metadiscourse. LancsBox 4.5 is used for the analysis of the corpus, which is based on speeches made by Trump at the White House press conferences during the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. The corpus is used for quantitative and qualitative analyses of Trump’s discourse during the public health crisis. The findings have revealed that Trump’s discourse related to the coronavirus pandemic has employed the crisis to construct interpersonal interaction resources, frequently exploited markers of self-mentions to construct his personal image, and applied attitude markers, boosters, hedges, and engagement markers to improve public support for his re-election campaign. The current public health crisis discourse in the U.S. has been analyzed because the interactive metadiscoursive features of the public health crisis discourse in the U.S. reflect the distortion of the facts that are affected by non-public health factors, which not only fails to explain the causes of and solutions to the public health crisis, but also aggravates it.

In recent years, the importance of the translation of classical traditional Chinese medicine texts has increased due to the acceleration in the pace of the dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine. As a masterpiece of ancient Chinese medical achievements, the translation and the introduction of Huangdi Neijing has a meaning that cannot be ignored if traditional classical works describing Chinese medicine are to be disseminated across the world and convey China’s unique voice; thus, they are worthy of in-depth attention in the field of translation. In 1997, the comic version of Huangdi Neijing, The Illustrated Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine, was published, providing a new multimodal path for the dissemination of classical traditional Chinese medicine treatises overseas. Historically, translation studies have centered on language studies, and have ignored the role of other symbolic resources in constructing textual meaning. This paper focuses on the multimodal translation of classical traditional Chinese medicine treatises and examines them from the dual aspects of text modality and image modality. On one hand, it summarizes the problems and shortcomings of the translation of the text part; on the other hand, it compares and analyzes the translation of image modality from the perspective of image narration. Finally, it summarizes its influence on the readers’ acceptance and the dissemination of classical traditional Chinese medicine texts, and provides suggestions for presenting the classics as comics in the hope of providing references for the translation of and introduction to traditional Chinese medicine.

Cognitive aging has become a hot topic among language processing researchers because the aging of the world’s population has become an increasingly serious issue in recent years. Research on the cognitive mechanisms and neural basis of aging in language can not only reveal the processes of language development and cognitive functions in human beings, but can also contribute considerably to the cognitive intervention for age-related decline in language ability. Reading comprehension is a complex process that involves high cognitive ability, and is essential for successful functioning in society. As readers often need to draw inferences to construct coherent mental representations of a text, the generation of inferences is crucial for the successful comprehension of texts for both young and older people. This paper elaborates on the theoretical models and hypotheses of cognitive aging, and reviews the representative empirical studies of the effect of cognitive aging on inferential processing during discourse reading. Furthermore, this paper discusses the unresolved problems and controversies in this field, and presents some suggestions for future directions. It is hoped that this review will offer valuable suggestions for future in-depth research for researchers, and will enrich the research on senior people’s inference processing during text comprehension.