With the aim of assisting in the high-quality development of China in the new era, this paper describes the concept of the “new liberal arts linguistics”, expounds on its connotation and points out a few urgent research directions with an emphasis on the following five areas: The first is a focus on language security research to uphold advance the holistic view of national security, while the second is on the use of language service studies to assist in China’s opening-up and high-quality development. The third focus is on emergency language studies to address the emergent rescue and disaster relief, the fourth is on language think-tank studies to assist in the CPC and the government’ decision making, and the fifth is the use of language management studies to advance the modernization of governance capabilities.

“Perezhivanie” is a crucial concept in Vygotsky’s thinking, but is also the one that lacks connotations and empirical explorations. Due to the increasing interest in the topic of emotion, the concept of perezhivanie is being revitalized; therefore, it is necessary to provide a more systematic and comprehensive account of its content. Starting from the philosophical roots of sociocultural theory, this paper elaborates on the theoretical content in the concept of perezhivanie, and explores the conceptual content of perezhivanie as a unit of analysis in the context of the dialectical unity of “emotion and cognition” and “society and the individual”. The study then examines different scholars’ conceptual and empirical interpretations of perezhivanie, and explores the paradigms and methods of empirical research guided by perezhivanie in the field of second language acquisition with a view to providing new ideas for future research.

As a sub-branch of second language acquisition, instructed second language acquisition has been gaining increasing attention. This paper provides a review of the development of instructed second language acquisition in the past ten years (2010-2019). Based on a quantitative content analysis of papers published in four international journals of applied linguistics, namely Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, Applied Linguistics, and TESOL Quarterly, the following results pertaining to general development, research perspectives, research focuses, and research methods were identified: (1) The number of high-level research articles fluctuated on an international basis; (2) most of the studies were conducted from the sociocultural perspective, although explorations using the sociocognitive framework were on the increase; (3) teaching methodologies, classroom-based interaction, feedback, and identity attracted the most attention; and (4) most of the studies were empirical, with the qualitative method dominating and the mixed-method approach on the rise. Longitudinal methods accounted for a larger proportion, but cross-sectional methods were emerging. The research subjects were mainly college students, yet the targets tended to include middle-school and pre-school students, as well as teacher-student combinations. Future research will use more scientific research methods, the research contents will be more technology based, and the research targets will be more diverse. The results described in this paper are significant to the research on instructed second language acquisition in China.

Topic, focus, and subject are the syntactic constituents in a sentence’s left periphery. The three constituents agree with the functional categories of Top, Foc, and T, respectively. Topics can be various phrases that agree with Top, such as the subject, the object, or the adjunct. Focuses can be various constituents that agree with Foc. They can be marked by the focal stress, the focus marker “Shi” or the special word order, and can be quantified. Subjects may be the external argument of the lexical category or the internal argument of the un-accusative or passive verb. Topics cannot be indefinite, although focuses and subjects can. Top is above Foc, which is above T in the Chinese left periphery.

The thesis begins by describing the Minimalist Program’s simple syntactic structure (vP>TP>CP), and then adopts the Cartographic Approach’s complex structural map to divide Chinese A-not-A questions into three types, namely lower, middle, and higher A-not-A questions, with 10 tokens of question forms. The hierarchical structures are represented according to the different semantic illustrations of the syntactic domains in which A-not-A elements are formed: Lower A-not-A questions in the lexical vP domain exhibit the situation-based agentivity property, middle A-not-A questions in the inflectional TP domain exhibit the proposition-based eventuality property, and A-not-A questions in the complementizer CP domain exhibit cognition-based speaker consciousness. Each type of A-not-A question has a different overtly syntactic derivational mechanism but the same covertly feature-checking mechanism.

“You” in the “you+NumP” construction, which mainly occurs at the end of a sentence, can indicate number or degree, and can be omitted without violating the sentence’s grammaticality. From the perspectives of language facts and pragmatics, Lv’s (1999), Liu et al.’s (2001), and Wen’s (2012) analyses on the “you+NumP” construction shed light on a new viewpoint for further discussion. This article follows a cartographic approach (one feature, one head), takes sentences “ta chi-le you san-da-wan (he ate three bows’)” and “ta zou-le you san-tian-le (he left three days)” to illustrate the categorial features of “you” and “you+NumP”, and attempts to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of “you+NumP” configuration. The results reveal that the “you” under discussion is a functional category that is base generated in the internal clause focus position; NumP, as a degree phrase (DegP), is the complement of FocP in the internal clause, licensed by the focus marker “you”.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, terminologies related to emergency language were not used consistently in academic circles, and each similar term has its own focus and definition, which is likely to cause misunderstandings and the misuse of such terms. It is therefore necessary to define the emergency language terminology and to determine its research scope, which will benefit future research. This paper first presents the definition and research scope of the terminologies in emergency language services followed by a descriptive analysis of research on the translation of terminology and the practice of emergency language. The paper then provides a comparative analysis of the current definitions related to emergency language, both in China and in other countries. Lastly, based on the examples from previous practice both in and outside of China during emergencies, this paper proposes three suggestions regarding the translation and management of terminology in emergency language services, including establishing an emergency language talent pool, planning the theoretical research and practices to facilitate the building of the emergency language terminology pool, and promoting the standardization of the translation and management processes for emergency language terminology to ensure that the terminologies used are accurate, consistent, comprehensive, and maximize the value of terminology management.

The poet Dante (1265—1361) conceived of a set of subtle and unique spatial structures for the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradiso in the Divine Comedy. This paper adopts the spatial narratology approach to analyze the integration of traditional Christian theology and Renaissance humanism in the Divine Comedy. The study finds that Dante not only employed spatial construction to concretize the vague and chaotic cosmology of the medieval period as a geometrical system, but also materialized the humanistic moral values through the description of relative positions and body postures, thus allowing the space to become a vehicle for theological metaphors. Therefore, the spatial approach is essential in order to comprehensively evaluate the artistic and theological value of the Divine Comedy.