Presentational Discourse and Bilingual Presentation of Culture in Chinese and English: A Systemic-Functional Linguistic Approach

Description

This project is a comparative study of presentational discourse in cultural industries, especially museum and heritage-related texts, in Chinese and English (either translations or direct productions), within the framework of systemic-functional and text linguistics and supported by the methodology of corpus-linguistics.Parallel corpora of data will be stored, analyzed, and tagged to identify generic patterns of such discourse. Attention will be focused on (i) the presentation of factual information and attitudinal commentary on a cultural entity, (ii) the patterns used in organizing a text, and (iii) the wording and sentence structures used to highlight the focal message. Hong Kong and Nanjing will be used as the primary sources of the data. Comparable data from key heritage sites in the UK will be used as reference points.The project is expected to produce several research papers and a coursebook of relevance to bilingual education, translation studies, linguistics, and the heritage/tourism sector.