The focus of this research is on the semantic behaviors of the Chinese character 既 (ji) in Archaic Chinese (11^th century B.C. – 3^rd century B.C.). It demonstrates how the lexical and grammatical meanings of this character are captured by diachronical studies, sorted by contempoary grammaticalization thoeries, and made accessible to the English academic world with the aid of the monumental translation work of James Legge. It is found that ji in this period is mainly an aspectual marker of combined resultatives, which is the overlapping area of objective resultative and passive perfect, concerning the resultant state of a situation that has happened with regard to another situation or another time. The syntactic relations play an important role in decihpering the semantic subtleties of ji. With regard to Chinese/English translation studies, it is evident that translation of classic literary works, as part of the noble goals of intercultural communication for better human understanding, can often turn the dusty opaqucity in one language into clean transparency in the other language. This will help to build a bridge between the past and the present for contemporary readers of both languages to comprehend and appreciate the ancient language data in the light of contemporary linguistics.

Iconicity is the overt or covert similarity between form and meaning, present in different modalities of expression including language, music and the visual media. For example, onomatopoeia overtly represents natural sounds, while photography overtly represents the world. On the other hand, music covertly evokes mood through universal melodic patternings of sound. As argued by Masako Hiraga (2005), the medium of poetry is a modality which heightens verbal iconicity. Like a piece of music, a poem has a hidden structure which is achieved through a patterning of sound. This patterning works on many levels, including both overt and covert sound patterning, and visual imagery. While the presence of such structure is well known (e.g., rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, simile and metaphor), the specific correlation between the form and meaning characteristic of each individual poem is less well studied. This paper argues that such a correlation exists, and constitutes a hidden iconic pattern or fingerprint of each individual poem, which is present inside it as a trace of the act of its creation. This hidden iconicity is what makes a poem memorable and difficult to translate. The poem The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost (see the Appendix), evokes a strong visual metaphor of a fork in the road representing a choice of direction in the journey of life. This metaphor is not unique to Frost but has been identified in the framework of the theory of cognitive metaphor (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; Turner, 1987; Turner, 1991; Turner, 1996) as the cross-culturally ubiquitous metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. The meaning of the poem, which emerges from a detailed analysis of this metaphor, is iconically reinforced on every level of the language system – phonetic, lexical and syntactic.

This paper focuses on the increasing role of English as a global lingua franca and its impact on the familial structure of American-born Chinese families. This study examines the struggles they undergo from reconciling their need to preserve their Chinese culture while acclimating to their English-speaking environment. For example, the growing use of English by the younger generation can create a negative rift in the family dynamic of English-speaking children and parents or grandparents who speak very little or no English. This paper examines the factors of this complex situation via interviews with American-born Chinese, and attempts to identify the reasons why certain American-born Chinese are able to retain their parents‟ mother tongue. The study poses three questions: Is there an impact of English as a global lingua franca between the youngest generation and their parents? Is there an impact of English as a global lingua franca between the youngest generation and their grandparents? What are the factors allowing the youngest generation of American-born Chinese to retain their mother tongue?

This is a qualitative interpretive case study research exploring the writing practices of L2 writers with specific reference to a group of university students studying at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) who enrolled in Self-access Writing (SAW). In particular, this study has two major objectives: 1) To explore how my learners experienced the writing course that I designed for this study using learning journals as a reflection tool to help develop their thinking and writing. And 2) to explicate the concept of reflective teaching when I tried to turn this writing course to a site of reflective practicum. The findings connect in particular to the notions of reflective learning, reflective teaching and self-reflexivity.