Computing and Language Variation

Language matters greatly in almost every aspect of human behaviour and experience. Neurally and culturally humans are powerfully equipped to acquire language and use it for a variety of cognitive and

Prof. William S-Y. Wang, an eminent linguist, has made significant contributions to the field regarding lexical diffusion, experimental phonetic studies, language simulation and modeling, and aging and language. To celebrate his 90th birthday, colleagues and friends worldwide have contributed over 30 articles to a two-volume Festschrift. The English volume includes topics such as Chinese language evolution, the relationship between language and music, and the brain processes involved in language production. This Festschrift is written by and for experienced language researchers and is also suitable for students of Chinese linguistics and those interested in Chinese culture, history, and neurology.

INTRODUCTIONSelf-Access Language Learning (SALL) has played a prominent part in language education in universities. Its role is to foster autonomous learning among students. With the wide-spread imple

Independent learning is not a new concept for language educators but while teachers, curriculum designers and policy makers have embraced it as underpinning modern notions of education, it remains a d

A number of research groups around the world have begun to study how the brain acquires and processes language, but we still know comparatively little about it. Many such groups work on very specific,

Evolution of language has evolved at multiple levels - from changes in the cognitive processes by which language is acquired in the individual, to language change by diffusion of acquired linguistic f

News under Fire: China’s Propaganda against Japan in the English-Language Press, 1928–1941 is the first comprehensive study of China’s efforts to establish an effective international propaganda system

Learning Chinese Language and Culture is an intermediate-level textbook intended to be used throughout the entire school year and designed mainly for students who have completed introductory courses o

ONE OF THE MOST SPOKEN DIALECTS in China, Southeast Asia, and globally, Cantonese was nevertheless deemed a local dialect enjoying little prestige among the intellectuals. Not much was recorded in official documents or gazetteers about the early history of Hong Kong. The Cantonese language and its origin remained much of a mystery until the mid-20th century when scholars started to accord it with increasing attention. Thanks to dedicated efforts of early missionaries, pedagogues, and linguists, we can now trace back the evolution of modern Cantonese since the 19th century— how differences in sounds, words, and grammar distinguish the old from contemporary speech today. In this book, Hung-nin Samuel Cheung, an acclaimed scholar on the study of Cantonese, offers profound insights to various firsthand century-old materials including language manuals, Bible translations, and maps of Hong Kong, with findings that will be useful for ongoing efforts to study the development of

…. to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.––Ludwig Wittgenstein(Philosophical Investigation, 1953)Whatever specific goal motivated people who study Chinese at first eventually

The Chinese language has no tense but has aspects. It relies on aspectual particles to express how an action or state relates to the flow of time. Among all Chinese aspectual particles, le (了) is the

人工智能(Artificial Intelligence)、區塊鏈(Blockchain)、雲計算(Cloud-computing)，都是影響全球權力版圖的ABC，也改變中美未來。中國在ABC領域的優勢可以加速實現社會公正。特朗普的單邊主義與國際霸凌，也使得各方呼喚另外的ABC：親和力(Affinity)、仁心(Benevolence)、與同情理解(Compassion)改變全球的心靈版圖。

Ulaanbaatar beyond Water and Grass is the first book in the English language that takes the visitors to an in-depth exploration of the capital of Mongolia. In the first section of the book, M. A. Aldr

Questions regarding whether a first or a second/foreign language should be used as a medium of instruction (MOI) in schools, and if yes, for whom, and when, have been enthusiastically debated in recen

While the teaching of Modern Chinese as a foreign language has made progress by leaps and bounds, the same cannot be said about the teaching of Classical Chinese. This is regrettable as the influence

The Kung Fu series, a set of learning material on the Chinese language, is the product of collaborative efforts of experts from mainland China, Hong Kong and the U.S. It aims at providing texts and ex

Following the ending of the First Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, Britain opened five treaty ports on the Chinese mainland in the cities now known as Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Ningbo, Shanghai, and Xiamen. Foreigners were allowed for the first time to live and work normally in these cities under the eyes of their state’s consul. In establishing this presence, consular staff and their families faced numerous challenges, including unsuitable accommodation, illness, hostile local authorities, attacks from militias and pirates, while at the same time adjusting to an unfamiliar language and culture.Henrietta Alcock (1812–1853), the first wife of the British Consul, Rutherford Alcock, was little-known until an album of sketches and watercolours depicting her life in China came to light. Acquired by the Martyn Gregory Gallery, London in the early 1990s, the works in the Alcock Album feature picturesque natural landscapes, traditional Chinese architecture, and scenes of co

The first exhaustive English-language history and analysis of the Chinese opera genre, Kunqu. In Kunqu: A Classical Opera of Twenty-First-Century China, Joseph S. C. Lam offers a holistic and interdisciplinary view of Kunqu, a 600-year-old genre of Chinese opera that has been fashionably performed inside and outside of China. The first comprehensive and scholarly book on Kunqu written in English, this book explains how and why the genre charms and signifies Chinese culture, history, and personhood. Approaching the genre from several perspectives, ranging from those of performers and producers to those of casual audiences, dedicated connoisseurs, and scholarly critics, Lam also employs a judicious blend of Chinese and international theories and methods. Herein, he establishes the significance of Kunqu not only in the sphere of Chinese music but among the cultural heritage and performing arts at a global level as well.

Studies in Colloquial Chinese and Its History: Dialect and Text presents cutting-edge research into issues regarding prestige colloquial languages in China in their spoken forms and as well as their relationship to written forms and the colloquial literary language. These include the standard regional languages and prestige dialects of the past, the influence of historical forms of spoken Chinese on written Chinese, the history of guānhuà and the history of báihuà, proto-dialects and supra-regional common languages (koines), and their relationship to spoken dialects. The various studies in this collection focus on the dialect groups with the most substantial written tradition, including Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese, in north, central and eastern coastal, and southern China respectively. The contributors explore the histories of these dialects in their written and spoken forms, presenting a variegated view of the history and development of the regional forms, including their evoluti

A Touch of Zen is one of the first Chinese-language films to gain recognition in an international film festival (the Grand Prix at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival), creating the generic mould for the "crossover" success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000. The film has achieved a cult status over the years but little has been written about it. This first book-length study of the classic martial arts film therefore redresses its critical neglect, and explores its multi-leveled dimensions and mysteries. One of the central features of the film is the enigmatic knight-lady (xia nü) whose quest for revenge leads her to cross paths with a poor scholar whose interest in military strategy seals their alliance. Teo discusses the psychological manifestations and implications of this relationship and concludes that the film's continuing relevance lies in its portrait of sexuality and the feminist desires of the heroine. Teo also analyzes the film's form as an action piece and the dir

Asian Celebrity Cultures in the Digital Age represents the first comprehensive study on the transformations of celebrity cultures in increasingly globalised and digitalised Asian societies. It discusses relations between Asian celebrities and digital media across emerging phenomena in celebrity practices, cultures, politics, fandom, and economies. Highlighting original case studies from prominent Asian societies, including India, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, and Japan, this book sheds much-needed light on the de-Westernisation and internationalisation of celebrity studies and is essential reading for scholars and students in celebrity, fandom, digital media and communication, and cultural studies.

In A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945–1997, Florence Mok, Fung Chi Keung Charles, and other contributors analyse newly released archival records from the National Archives in London, the Government Records Service in Hong Kong, and other sources across the world. This documentary collection provides an updated and improved understanding of basic aspects of the city such as governance, economy, society, and culture. It also aims at investigating topics that are under-exploited in previous sourcebooks, such as race and diasporas, gender and familial relations, medicine and healthcare, and environment and natural disasters. Overall, this book offers an innovative and comprehensive long-term perspective of Hong Kong’s colonial history.

In Socializing Medicine, Pao-chen Tang, Yuqian Yan, and Ling Zhang explore the intersections of medicine, health, and East Asian media. Interweaving archival research, audiovisual analyses, and theoretical insights from the emerging field of health humanities, the book reveals the multifaceted ways in which the mass media—from photography and film to television and live streaming—has been deployed as a tool for controlling medicine and health, privileging those with power and authority from the early twentieth century to the present. Adopting anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives, the contributors in this volume challenge the dominant mediations of health against the backdrop of imperialism, Cold War geopolitical tensions, and neoliberal capitalism. Collectively, they advocate for alternative understandings of medical culture through media productions that envision accessible and equitable healthcare practices.

This concise and authoritative work offers the latest guidance on journalism ethics for students and media professionals and will help empower news consumers to make informed decisions about the trustworthiness of their sources of information. It offers advice on all aspects of journalism ethics including accuracy and seeking the truth, representation of women, LGBTQ coverage, climate change, mental health, use of images, conflict reporting, elections, and how to use artificial intelligence. The author brings a unique perspective and depth of knowledge to the complex challenges facing journalists and news consumers in this era of fake news, disinformation, and artificial intelligence.

Psychopathology: An Empathic Representational Approach retraces the foundations of classical phenomenological psychopathology and integrates them with modern ideas drawn from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, computational science, and evolutionary biology to synthesize a comprehensive framework and provide fresh insights.This book explores how the scientific concepts of ‘information and representation’ can be used to understand subjective mental phenomena and integrate them in empathic clinical dialogues during interactions with patients. It explores key issues in clinical psychopathology coherently and systematically, illustrates advanced topics in an accessible manner using clinical case examples, metaphors and clarifying diagrams, and directly links advanced conceptual frameworks with pragmatic skills in the clinical dialogue process.This volume is aimed at a broad audience of mental health professionals, researchers, and students in psychiatry, psychology, and social work. Its

This book, the first of its kind in Hong Kong, offers insights from experts in healthcare and higher education both locally and further afield. Key learnings and recommendations are presented in three sections: disaster management and reconstruction, including what we can learn from past earthquakes; the importance of healthcare and emergency medicine in disasters and community events; and the way forward, in particular how technology and systems thinking can be used for disaster mitigation.

Voice Therapy for Children is a bilingual instructional manual that aims to maximize speech therapy students’ and clinicians’ competence, knowledge, and effectiveness in managing pediatric voice caseloads. This is a unique text that goes beyond general descriptions of therapeutic technique and physiologic principles.Designed to serve Cantonese- and English-speaking children, this manual provides a clear and systematic overview of practical issues and clinical tips, laying out the steps and criteria for therapy programs. With detailed instructions for each voice therapy session, clinicians will find answers to questions such as How can children be kept engaged in voice therapy?How can clinicians facilitate learning and performance of voicing techniques?How can age-appropriate practice stimuli and games be selected?This manual contains detailed instructions for each voice therapy session and ready-to-use clinical materials, including picture cards for eliciting stimulus and record forms

The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer TV China” culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities. Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests.Taking “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative identities and same-sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China” to explore the power of various TV genres and narratives, censorial practices, and fandoms in queer desire-voicing and subject formation within a largely heteropatriarchal society. Through ex

The pandemic left disorder and crises in its wake everywhere it struck. Drawing on disciplines including public health, politics, and socioeconomics, this book tracks the spread of COVID-19 to weave a coherent picture that explains how scientists learnt about the virus, how authorities reacted around the world, and how different societies coped. Written by a leading team of public health, policy, and economics experts, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of various countries’ responses to the onset of the pandemic, as well as suggestions to increase capacity and capability to fight future pandemics. The first part of the book provides an overview of global governance and international cooperation, economic and social consequences of the outbreak, and breakthroughs in mathematical modelling and COVID-19 vaccines. The second part of the book examines and compares specific countries and regions through the lens of good governance, social contract, and political trust. This book is e

Includes practical advice, up-to-date legal insight, and easy-to-use checklists.Suitable for people working behind and inside construction sites.Real examples and application in Hong Kong.This book is aimed at students taking occupational safety and health courses at the universities, Construction Industry Council and Occupational Safety and Health Council. It will also serve as a reference book for registered safetyofficers, safety managers, insurance surveyors, project managers, site agents,safety engineers and occupational safety officers as well as those involved in promoting occupational safety in the construction industry and preventingaccidents on construction worksites.

In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang aim to bridge the distance between the scholarship of world literature and that of Chinese and Sinophone literary studies. This edited volume advances research on world literature by bringing in new developments in Chinese/Sinophone literatures and adds a much-needed new global perspective on Chinese literary studies beyond the traditional national literature paradigm and its recent critique by Sinophone studies. In addition to a critical mapping of the domains of world literature, Sinophone literature, and world literature in Chinese to delineate the nuanced differences of these three disciplines, the book addresses the issues of translation, genre, and the impact of media and technology on our understanding of “literature” and “literary prestige.” It also provides critical studies of the complicated ways in which Chinese and Sinophone literatures are translated, received, and reinveste

Traversing from the rapidly urbanising county-level city of Fuqing to the remote mountainous kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa, Searching for Sweetness is one of the first and most extensive ethnographies linking rural-to-urban migration in China with Chinese migration to Africa. Against the backdrop of China’s national struggle for modernity and globalisation, Sarah Hanisch examines Chinese migrant women’s complex and ever-shifting struggles for upward social mobility across different generations and localities in China and Lesotho. Embedding the women’s individual portraits into larger historical contexts, Hanisch illustrates how these women interpret and narrate their migratory and everyday experiences through and beyond powerful state metanarratives on ‘sweetness’ and ‘bitterness’. In her exploration of migratory identities and projects that have been overlooked by previous studies, Hanisch brings uniquely gendered, multi-sited, and intergenerational perspectives to existing sc

This book carries decades of academic observations and the author’s personal political experience. It reviews and refects on the past trajectory of governance and administration, identifying strengths and capabilities as well as constraints and vulnerabilities of Hong Kong as a polity and society, while charting its course of ‘exceptionalism’ within a new context and under changing conditions.Hong Kong under British rule was a prime example of exceptionalism in many aspects —economic, political, and even social. It was governed under a colonial structure and yet had enjoyed a large degree of social and economic freedom, as well as fiscal self-sufficiency and autonomy from London. After returning to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong has continued to thrive as a relatively resilient city-state still known for efficiency andeffectiveness despite tensions and scepticism about its political future.This book carries decades of academic observations and the author's personal political experienc

In Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities, John Wei brings light to the germination and movements of queer cultures and social practices in today’s China and Sinophone Asia. While many scholars attribu

Hundreds of Chinese export paintings of Canton trading houses and shopping streets are in museums and private collections throughout the world, and scholars of art and history have often questioned th

As a Cultural construct, gender is fictional and imagined, yet its ideological and representational effects on the formation of self and identity are quite real. The fiction behind the fictional, which many accepts as truth, is at the core of what is most intriguing about the problem of gender. Critiquing this narrative, Gender, Discourse, and the Self in Literature unravels the strategies that writers and filmmakers adopt in their (de)construction of the gendered self in three Chinese communities: mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Writing from the vantage points of film, literature, and gender studies, contributors make an innovative marriage to Western gender discourse and the construction and representation of self and identity in contemporary China.

The digital divide and the inequalities of the availability and deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) between developed and developing countries have long been a source of co

With the development of politics, economy, science and technology, culture, etc., new words and terms emerge, and new uses of existing words and terms evolve everyday. This makes a new dictionary that

Escaping the End of Times is a book where history meets psychology. It invites readers to explore the intricate relationships between dreams, politics, and the Chinese writing system in early modern China.Thoroughly researched and written in an accessible manner, this book presents a series of historical encounters that reveal how Ming scholars countered instability by compiling and editing dream texts. Readers learn how these scholars translated their dreams into action, used the past to bolster their status, reaffirmed their preferred societal order, merged myth and history, and interpreted their dreams and the dreams of others through creative techniques grounded in scholarly tradition.By combining detailed research with captivating storytelling, this book not only brings the world of late Ming dream analysis to life but also demonstrates the relevance of the past to the stories we tell now about ourselves and our own dreams.

Over a span of 260 years, from 630 to 894, Japanese embassies to Tang China (ken-Tō shi) played a vital role in importing Tang governance and culture to Japan, significantly shaping the political and cultural landscape of an emerging Japanese state with codes of law (ritsuryō). However, the seventeenth embassy during the Jōwa period, fraught with turmoil, marked the final mission to Tang China. Alongside disasters and significant loss of life during the voyage, mysteries persist around Vice-ambassador Ono no Takamura's refusal to board the ship, the government's insistence on the mission, and the objectives behind dispatching this mission to China. In this volume, Professor Saeki Arikiyo traces the journey from departure to return, focusing on the individuals involved and the prevailing trends of the era. Drawing upon a rich tapestry of historical sources, including records from Shoku Nihon kōki and the accompanying monk Ennin's Nit-Tō guhō junrei kōki, Arikiyo delves into the arduous