Phoenix W.Y. Lam

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This article introduces the crucial yet much overlooked dimension of verticality to landscape-related research through a case study of one of the most iconic skyscrapers in Hong Kong, the world's most vertical city. A tripartite analytic model is proposed to examine the dialogical interaction between the discursive and material landscapes in a vert...

Internet group buying has gained unprecedented popularity worldwide in a handful of years, yet little scholarly work has been done on this increasingly important sales and marketing channel. Specifically, no discourse-related studies thus far have examined the generic characteristics of Internet group buying deals. Through the examination of the 10...

The workplace has become increasingly volatile, intercultural and multilingual in the Information Age, presenting greater than ever communication challenges to employees. Accordingly, education reforms which recognise the growing significance of workplace communication competence have been put in place. In Hong Kong, an application-oriented electiv...

Discourse particles are ubiquitous in spoken discourse. Yet despite their pervasiveness very few studies attempt to look at their use in the pedagogical setting. Drawing on data from an intercultural corpus of speech and a textbook database, the present study compares the use of discourse particles by expert users of English in Hong Kong with their...

This article studies the Western perceptions of and relations with Hong Kong a decade after the reversion of the sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997. Previous studies have demonstrated that the West had a significantly negative view on the future of Hong Kong with respect to the handover. According to recent observations, however, the percept...

This study provides a rare, updated and focused account of the use of English vis-a-vis Chinese in the public sector of Hong Kong by researching the language use, needs and challenges of a cohort of freshly employed Official Languages Officers working across the government of Hong Kong. Through a mixed-method approach incorporating results from a q...

Previous media studies have largely examined the media construction of ‘leftover women’ in the Chinese-medium news media that are pervaded by patriarchal content. Yet, little attention has been given to the thematic content surrounding leftover women in the Chinese English-medium news media which seem to be more liberal in their stance. To fill thi...

Taking a center‐periphery approach, this study is a rare attempt to present a multi‐sited empirical analysis comparing three physically adjacent and connected sites in a town in Hong Kong to explore the interconnectivity, subjectivity, and dynamicity of the landscape. While all three sites can be considered bilingual or even multilingual spaces wit...

In academic writing, stance reporting is used to reflect the position of the writers towards the literature in order to establish the niche and value of the research. Cross-generic and cross-disciplinary studies of reporting verbs have been conducted on hard and soft disciplines, and yet the specific functions of reporting verbs in different sectio...

Previous research on online travel communication has paid little attention to destination forums, where thousands of travellers worldwide post and view topics related to a place. The present study examines the functions of a destination forum on TripAdvisor. Through the first large-scale corpus-assisted discourse analysis of thousands of topic-init...

Through an interdisciplinary approach combining the concepts, methods and tools in language and discourse studies and insights from marketing and tourism research, this book examines the online place branding of Hong Kong, one of the most visited cities and well-known spots in the world. Specifically, it compares discursively how the online place...

The growing incidence of mental health problems in adolescents is a significant global concern. School-based counselling, where a student meets with an individual, trained counsellor a number of times in a school setting, is a common component of holistic mental health programmes to support the well-being of students. In Hong Kong, however, profess...

Speech acts have been examined as linguistic carriers of politeness, and politeness is considered to be inherent in some speech acts. In speech act studies, particularly those that centre on cross-cultural and intercultural speech acts, English linguistic realisations and conversational strategies are often interpreted as manifestation of universal...

Although research on professional competence has has adopted a number of approaches that have highlighted the importance of practice and values in enacting a professional identity, there is currently no established framework for empirical investigations. Based on a discourse analytic framework, this paper demonstrates how ethical codes in a number...

Using language to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships contributes to effective workplace communication. Importantly, language plays a significant role in constructing professional role and identity, building solidarity and rapport, presenting comments and views, and facilitating collaboration and problem-solving in the workplace. Yet...

Branding is essentially discursive in nature and yet discourse studies of branding are surprisingly few in number. The present study is a rare attempt to examine how branding, in particular place branding, can be conceptualized and operationalized linguistically through the investigation of a corpus of marketing texts on the official branding of Ho...

Through a case study of the email messages received by a faculty member in a university account in one year, the present study investigates the pragmatic characteristics of one-to-one email requests in a Hong Kong university setting as an attempt to understand the impact of institutional role as a sociopragmatic variable on the pragmalinguistics of...

Most authorship attribution studies have focused on works that are available in the language used by the original author (Holmes, 1994; Juola, 2006) because this provides a direct way of examining an author’s linguistic habits. Sometimes, however, questions of authorship arise regarding a work only surviving in translation. One example is ‘Constanc...

E-mail has firmly established itself as a dominant channel of interaction for both social and professional purposes. Despite its importance as a communication tool, the influence of professional roles on discursive practices has yet to be thoroughly addressed, especially when e-mail is specifically used between academics, students, and other releva...

This article studies the Western perceptions of and relations with Hong Kong a decade after the reversion of the sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997. Previous studies have demonstrated that the West had a significantly negative view on the future of Hong Kong with respect to the handover. According to recent observations, however, the percept...

Representations of spoken discourse must accommodate the phenomenon of simultaneous speech. Linguists and other social scientists have employed numerous transcription conventions for exhibiting the temporal interleaving of multi-speaker talk (e.g. Atkinson and Heritage, 1984; Schiffrin, 1994; Leech et al., 1995; Carter, 2004; MICASE, 2004). Most of...

In this paper, a comparison is made between the discourse functions of two of the most frequently occurring and versatile discourse particles in spoken English, namely well and so, to provide an account of the similarities and differences between the uses of the two particles in naturally occurring data. Following a brief introduction which sets th...

This study examines the change in the representation of human rights issues in a corpus containing over 5,000 articles collected from a leading English newspaper in Hong Kong in two periods before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997 using Sinclair’s (1996, 2004) lexical item. The analysis of instances of the phrase ‘human rights’ in the cor...

This paper discusses the role of prosody in the study of discourse particles by examining the prosodic pattern of well. Intonational features which are investigated in detail include prosodic phrasing and tone unit position, prominence pattern, nuclear tone and association with pauses. Through an in-depth systematic prosodic analysis of well, the p...

Although the British National Corpus (BNC) is one of the most popular resources for linguistic research, only a small number of studies generate results from user-selected texts of the corpus, despite the fact that the BNC is designed with the intention of letting researchers choose specific texts to build their own sub-corpora (Burnage and Dunlop,...

Discourse particles have received a considerable amount of scholarly attention in linguistic research. Although their use in specific text types has been discussed, few studies have actually attempted to look at the effect of text type on their use. Therefore, how the use of discourse particles is related to the situational context in which they ar...

Linguists and other social scientists have employed many transcription conventions to exhibit the temporal interleaving of multi-speaker talk. The existence of many different systems, which are mutually incompatible, is evidence that representing spoken discourse remains problematic. This study proposes a novel orthographic transcription layout bas...

xxi, 337 p. : ill. ; 31 cm. PolyU Library Call No.: [THS] LG51 .H577P ENGL 2008 Lam Based on a large number of authentic examples from an intercultural corpus of spoken English, the present study investigates the relationship between the use of discourse particles and various linguistic, sociolinguistic and contextual factors. Variables such as the...

Discourse particles have been a topic of interest in the research community for decades. Despite the vast number of scholarly outputs dedicated to this area, it appears that little has been done on the use of discourse particles by non-native speakers. This paper attempts to address this largely neglected sector by examining the use of well as a di...