Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

This paper analyses Kongish Daily, a Facebook page that trans-scripts local news in Hong Kong into a creative and dynamic mix of Cantonese in traditional Chinese characters, Romanisation and made-up characters, simplified Chinese, pinyin, English, Hong Kong English, other phonetic symbols, emoji and other signs and images. We trace the origin of the site and rationale for the Facebook page, and analyse it as a translanguaging phenomenon. The main objective is to understand the political motivations for the Facebook account and the social critique it offers through its dynamic translanguaging practice. In particular, we want to highlight the subversive nature of the translanguaging practice. Methodologically, it develops the participatory linguistics framework, which transformed our own understandings of the phenomenon as well as the cultural politics of translingualism and social media in Hong Kong. © 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The sensory lexicon plays a pivotal role in bridging our cognitive system to the physical world. In this role, it has been the focus of recent interdisciplinary investigations on cognition, language, culture, and their interactions. Recent studies on linguistic synesthesia and sensory modality exclusivity showed unequivocally that cross-modality usages of sensory words are the norm rather than the exception. Given the dominance of cross-modality uses, the null hypothesis that the five senses are separate but equal modules merits a closer examination. In this paper, we focus on the gustatory quality of sweetness because of its universal appeal as well as the well-attested cultural influence on the gustatory lexicon. Based on an analysis of online food reviews containing descriptions of desserts, we show that mouthfeel, a multisensory concept, is strongly preferred over sweetness. Mouthfeel is associated with words from all the sensory domains, including both sensory and abstract (e.g., mental state) concepts. The highly non-exclusive characteristic of gustatory sensation suggests that it might be the most connected sensory modality, and the cross-modality expressions indicating personal preferences further imply the subjective propensity of the gustatory sense. Our study adds to the existing literature the interrelationship among sensory modalities through language use, and further sheds light on the interactions between language, cognition, and culture.

This study examined the acquisition of English plural marking, i.e. the plural-s marker on nouns without quantifiers (lexical plural marking) and nouns in contexts with quantifiers (phrasal plural marking). It was carried out within the framework of Processability Theory. There were ten participants involved; they were young adult Indonesian learners who learned English as a second language in a formal context. Data collection was carried out at two points in time within one semester, namely at the beginning and the end of the semester. At each point of time, the participants were assigned translation tasks from Indonesian into English. The translation tasks aimed specifically to elicit the targeted morphological structures based on the PT hierarchy. The data were analysed by using distributional analysis; the findings were then examined by means of implicational scaling on the basis of the emergence criterion, the purpose of which is to determine the acquisition points of the morphological forms under scrutiny. The research finding demonstrates that the development of plural marking of the participants follows the sequences as predicted in PT; each participant first acquires plural –s marker on nouns without quantifiers, and then they acquire that marker on nouns with quantifiers. © 2020 IJLS; Printed in the USA by Lulu Press Inc.

Even though washback has been widely researched in recent years, especially on its form in various intra-and inter-national examinations (e.g. IELTS andTOEFL), research on how washback affects teachers and their teaching practices is still scarce. The aim of the current paper is to provide an up-to-date and holistic review on the theories in washback as well as to draw researchers’ and TESOL teachers’ attention to how washback should be examined with relation to language education, especially in teacher trainings. Key models in washback and several recent studies which investigate washback in different aspects are discussed,and at the endof the paper, implications and suggestions on washback for teachers and researchers areaddressed. More should be done on washback especially on how teachers should respond to the effect.

Hearing or auditory sense has particularly strong temporality and dynamicity among the five sense modalities. Taking an ontological and cognitive perspective, this study examines hearing nouns in terms of their qualia values and eventive natures utilizing Generative Lexicon Theory and the basic ontological concept of endurant and perdurant. It is shown that linguistic representation of auditory perception related items shares strong perdurant properties. This is manifested by large proportion of event nouns, deverbal nominals and coerced event episode interpretation of hearing nouns. In addition, interpretation of classifiers of the default hearing nouns, 聲音 sheng1yin1 ‘sound’, further supports the eventive nature of the auditory modality. A sound referring noun phrase typically has an eventive reading even when it is enumerated with a classifier. In this context, the meaning refers to the frequency of sound-making events instead of the counting of sound content.

This paper develops an approach to pedagogical grammar based on the notion of grammatical concepts. Grammatical concepts are based on the sort of properties that are used to explain grammatical patterns and the acquisition of grammar in formal linguistics. It is proposed that these properties can be exploited for language pedagogy as they provide teachers with a deeper understanding of issues of learnability with respect to grammar. The concepts are illustrated on the basis of the pronoun system of English, demonstrating how a range of different underlying grammatical concepts can coincide to regulate syntactic and semantic patterns in a particular morphosyntactic paradigm. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The situated nature of professional and other workplace-based communication continues to receive attention in intercultural communication research (see, e.g., Cheng and Kong 2009; Ladegaard and Jenks 2017; Schnurr and Zayts 2017). Inevitably, these studies provide accounts of the intercultural nature of such communication which go beyond ‘macro categories’ and adopt a more emic perspective (Cheng and Kong 2009: 8). Studies which highlight and seek to explain the complexities of intercultural workplace communication are the focus of this chapter. The authors provide an overview of the types of studies conducted to date, paying attention to where, and how, data were collected and the extent to which participants were involved in the analysis of the data as advocated by Sarangi (2002: 99). Schnurr and Zayts (2017: 148) describe the complexities which need to be understood if we are to better understand language and culture in the workplace. These are the dynamic norms, values, and behaviours of professionals; the nature of the professional contexts and workplaces in which intercultural communication takes place; and the specific context in which each interaction takes place. These aspects are foregrounded when the studies are reviewed and conclusions and implications for future research are discussed.