William Dezheng Feng

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Verified

William verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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

The 7th International Conference on Multimodality was held June 11 to 13, 2014 at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The theme of this conference was “Past, Present and Future of Multimodality”. The seven keynote speeches represented the state of the art and future direction of multimodal studies: developing a cross-disciplinary theoretical fram...

The One Country, Two Systems policy (OCTS), which is the cornerstone for the establishment of the Hong Kong SAR in 1997, has been subjected to varying and changing interpretations and opinions in Hong Kong society. Against this backdrop, this study examines the attitude variations and changes towards OCTS in three major Chinese newspapers in Hong K...

Supervision lies at the heart of research-based doctoral education. Existing scholarship has recognized the role of supervision in students’ academic socialization and identity construction but presented little empirical evidence based on prolonged observations of actual supervisory interactions. Addressing this gap, the present study adopted a dig...

This chapter seeks to unravel the intricacies of pseudotranslation in danmu subtitling from a multimodal perspective. It focuses on the danmu subtitles for Pingu, an animation series that features a fictional language, Penguinese. Many of the danmu subtitles for the series are pseudotranslation, as no genuine meanings of the source text (the fictio...

This study aims to provide an LLM (Large Language Model)-based method for the discourse analysis of media attitudes, and thereby investigate media attitudes towards China in a Hong Kong-based newspaper. Analysis of attitudes in large amounts of media data is crucial for understanding public opinions, market trends, social dynamics, etc. However, co...

Drawing upon the theoretical framework of learning and identity work through boundary crossing, this study examined how Chinese university English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers negotiated their researcher-teacher identities through attending professional doctoral programs in education and applied linguistics. Adopting a case study design, da...

Through the lens of identity, this study explored the lived experiences of two Chinese university English-as-a-foreign-language teachers who were doing a professional doctorate for professional development. Adopting a narrative case study design and informed by activity theory, the study drew on a rich dataset comprising narrative frames, interview...

The term “wanghong women” has been in a state of flux in China’s public discourse since its inception in 2015. In particular, the COVID-19, while causing major economic setbacks across the world, has, to some extent, boosted the growth of the wanghong industry and altered public attitude towards wanghong women in China. Against this background, thi...

The paper examines the construction of China's country image in the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games. It demonstrates how a country that has no winter sports tradition used the mega-event to showcase its national narrative and to promote winter sports industries. A semiotic framework is developed to model China's country im...

This study examines Chinese parents' English naming practices for their children through the analytical lens of translanguaging and transculturality, with the former conceptualised as the linguistic manifestation of the latter. A survey was conducted with 416 Chinese-speaking parents living in four metropolitan cities in the Chinese mainland: Beiji...

This study provides an account of how the representation of China has changed diachronically in the South China Morning Post ( SCMP ), the leading liberal English-language broadsheet in Hong Kong, since the sovereignty transfer in 1997. Adopting a corpus-based approach to critical discourse studies, we analyse two corpora of news reports about Chin...

This study examines how supervisory feedback facilitates doctoral students' academic literacy development in their situated practice of writing for publication (WFP). Multiple-sourced data collected from one supervisor and his four doctoral students were analyzed, including drafts with written comments added, feedback dialogues around text developm...

Despite extensive discussions about Hong Kong’s sentiments towards the Chinese mainland since the sovereignty transfer in 1997, there has been a lack of large-scale empirical analysis of attitude change in the mainstream media, which both reflect and shape sentiments in society. To address this gap, the present study employs an optimised semantic-b...

This study investigates the identity construction of a university EFL teacher in China through narrative inquiry in ethnography, probing into the tensions she experienced as a teaching-focused academic as well as her renegotiations of her professional self in face of these tensions. Narrative data were collected through in-depth interviews and info...

While peer review has been widely incorporated in assessing digital mul-timodal composing (DMC) to provide formative feedback, how students perceive its benefits and problems remains inadequately investigated. Drawing upon the concept of student feedback literacy, this study applied semi-structured interviews to explore students' perceptions toward...

This paper provides an integrated social semiotic framework for analyzing intertextuality in multimodal advertising discourse. Following the distinction between manifest intertextuality and interdiscursivity, our model entails the three interrelated components of explicating what the intertextual sources are, how they are constructed with multimoda...

This book helps readers to understand communication and society in contemporary China through systematic analysis of multimodal discourse at the national, institutional and individual levels. China has undergone profound changes during the past decade or so. Politically, the Chinese government has been more proactive in domestic governance and fore...

This study develops a framework that integrates multimodality and translanguaging to analyze meaning-making in an online English teaching video. We consider pedagogy as more than teaching approaches and methods, but as a process of design that is realized by the orchestration of multimodal semiotic resources. In terms of multimodal analysis, we sys...

: This study investigates the selection and design of authentic material in EFL textbooks from primary to secondary school years in Hong Kong. The analysis of authenticity included three aspects of content choice, namely, choice of topics, text types, and types of interaction. Analysis of the 19 textbooks from Primary 1 to Secondary 4-6 showed that...

Social media have facilitated the development of a new wanghong profession and the burgeoning social commerce in China, where young women capitalize on their femininity to promote beauty products. Against this background, this study aims to investigate how Chinese wanghong women craft their identities in their self-branding videos on the leading so...

This study examines the visual representations of “leftover women” (unmarried women who are 27 or above) in the Chinese English-language news media by employing multimodal discourse analysis. The findings show that both conservative and gendered discourses are constructed by different visual resources in relation to “leftover women’s” actions, reac...

Influenced by the global neoliberalization of higher education, academic entrepreneurialism has become a new paradigm of university development and has brought about profound changes in various types of university discourse. Against this backdrop, this study investigates the transformations in the visual depiction of academics in the annual reports...

This study examines the representation of values in a set of popular Business English (BE) textbooks used in Chinese universities. Three types of values are identified, namely, business-oriented values, society-oriented values, and cultureoriented values. These values are verbally realized explicitly by attitudinal lexis, and implicitly by the reco...

This introductory chapter maps out the field of research on cultural knowledge and values by focusing on three main themes, i.e., representation, multimodality, and stakeholders. It first overviews the relevant research literature on the representation of cultural content in English language teaching (ELT) materials with regard to theoretical ratio...

This study explores the trajectories of Chinese College English teachers’ identity reconstruction throughout a visiting study program. Three teachers in a one-year program were followed and data were collected through interviews and observations. Analysis shows that a research dimension was either reinforced or added in their professional identitie...

This study investigates the selection and design of authentic material in EFL textbooks from primary to secondary school years in Hong Kong. The analysis of authenticity included three aspects of content choice, namely, choice of topics, text types, and types of interaction. Analysis of the 19 textbooks from Primary 1 to Secondary 4-6 showed that t...

Critical attitudes involve the systematic analysis of wrong ideas and behaviors so as to achieve the purpose of effective refutation. This article proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the discursive construction of critical attitudes, including its semantic system and ways of expression.

The academic capitalization in higher education has aroused much public attention with its impact on every aspect of universities. To survive in the market, universities in Hong Kong have been striving to build desirable images among stakeholders in public communication. Drawing upon critical genre theory and the notion of interdiscursivity, this s...

Filial piety is one basic value in Chinese culture and has been a prominent theme in China’s televised Public Service Advertisements (PSAs). This study takes a multimodal discourse analysis approach to study such PSAs promoting filial piety. We consider filial values as represented through characters’ emotions and attributes, which are realized by...

This article examines the multimodal construction of ideal manhood in male participants’ self-introduction videos in a Chinese reality dating show. A framework is developed to model identity as evaluative attributes and to explicate how they are constructed through linguistic and visual resources. Analysis of 91 videos shows two versions of idealiz...

The massive introduction of face-masks across the world after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed how they are designed and branded. Instead of merely focusing on functional qualities, face-mask producers have started to draw upon symbolic values in their branding discourse. Against this background, the present study investigates...

In the digital age, cities around the world are mobilizing various symbolic resources to rebrand their images through social media. Against this background, this study investigates how Xi’an, a second-tier developing city in China, constructs its digitalized urban imaginary using the popular social media platform of TikTok. A semiotic framework is...

This study investigates the generic structure of PowerPoint slides for linguistics courses and their multimodal design. In terms of generic structure, the moves of [Headline]^[Outline]^[ConceptDefinition]^[Explanation]^(Exemplification)^ (Exercise-Answer)^(Assignment) are found. Analysis of the structure indicates that most lessons are preoccupied...

This chapter takes a multimodal approach to analyze the intersemiotic shifts in the English subtitle translation of a Chinese costume drama. The popular Chinese costume drama Zhenhuan Zhuan is one of the first of its kind that was exported overseas and received considerable attention. Though it contains rich multimodal resources, scholarly attentio...

Science education is widely considered a crucial site for teaching environmental values (e.g. Littledyke 2008). This study aims to contribute to the field by introducing a multimodal discourse analysis framework and analysing the environmental values in online ecology animations for children. Based on Martin & White’s (2005) attitude system, this s...

Nowadays, discourse analysis deals with not only texts but also paratexts and images, so do translation and interpreting studies. Therefore, the concept of "multimodality" has become an increasingly important topic in subject areas of linguistics, discourse analysis and translation studies. However, up to now, not much research has been done system...

This paper investigates how politeness is treated in interpreter-mediated events and how the treatment is related to interpreters' pragmatic competence. An empirical study was conducted for this purpose, in which twenty-two professional and student interpreters were asked to work in a liaison interpreting mode. An analysis of the interpreters' cogn...

This paper investigates the representation of social values and their ontogenetic development in English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks in Hong Kong. Adopting a social semiotic perspective, it considers social values in textbooks as complex semiotic discursive constructs, and system networks are developed to provide an explicit metalanguage...

Heavy metal as a music culture has immense social influence across the world. In recent years scholars have started to scrutinise metal music from a sociocultural perspective; yet many studies lack quantifiable supporting evidence. For a thorough understanding of band members’ self-constructed identity, this paper analyses a corpus of lyrics from 1...

The joint force of social media and marketization has transformed university communication in terms of style, discourse structure, and communicative purpose. To understand its new features in comparison with print media (e.g. Xiong 2012), this paper analyzes a corpus of universities’ recruitment posts on WeChat in China. Using the method of genre a...

This paper examines the motivations of Chinese learners of Japanese across three different grades through Elicited Metaphor Analysis and semi-structured interview. Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 Japanese majors (55 in total) in a Chinese university were asked to produce metaphors that reflected their motivations to learn Japanese. The metaphor data were...

This study investigates Barack Obama’s attitudes towards Republicans and Democrats by analyzing a corpus of 249 Presidential weekly addresses. Analysis shows that Obama’s attitudes towards the Republicans are characterized by a negative judgment of propriety, creating a negative image of the Republican Party, whereas when Republicans and Democrats...

Interpreted political discourse has remained underexplored in spite of the significant role played by interpreting in the recontextualisation of political discourse across languages and cultures. The present study, based on a corpus of interpreted political discourse from China, explores how the stance of the Chinese government is interpreted from...

The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and caused an unprecedented division of opinion in society. Reports about the event in local Chinese media were remarkably different in stance and attitude. To understand the ideological dissonances and their linguistic construction, this article analyzes a corpus of 120 re...

Extended Abstract: As one of the specialization courses for senior year English majors in China, general linguistics has been taught through English in most universities since the 1990s. However, because the subject is within the English language curriculum, it is not considered by CLIL or ESP researchers. At the same time, it also falls out of the...

Most of the metaphtonymy studies have been concerned with linguistic manifestations with only a few addressing multimodal metaphonymy highlighting the fundamentality of metonymy. Little attention has been devoted to its social and pragmatic function, let alone systematic exploration of its multimodal construction of given topic. This paper examines...

This paper introduces a classroom teaching design based on the multiliteracies pedagogy. Using the example of an English linguistics lesson, it provides a detailed discussion of the steps of multiliteracies method, and discusses the implication for the teaching of linguistics based on the process and effect of the multiliteracies teaching. The pres...

作为一个新的研究领域，多模态语篇分析仍然面临诸多挑战。一方面，多模态研究在传统语言学领域的地位仍然受到质疑；另一方面，有些学者对多模态语篇分析的理论和方法的认识存在误区。因此，本文对多模态研究的基本问题进行系统梳理，简要介绍了这一领域存在的理据与价值，理论与方法，局限与误区。我们进一步指出研究者需要有跨学科意识、实证意识与应用意识。正确把握这些基本问题对多模态语篇分析发展成为一个具有强大理论支撑与严谨方法保障的新兴学科具有重要意义。

Studies on Rhetorical Structure Theory over the last thirty years have been mainly concerned with linguistic text and ignored the rhetorical structure in multimodal discourse. With the increasing recognition of the multimodal nature of discourse and communication in contemporary society, it is a logical next step for multimodal analysts to extend R...

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The CCTV Spring Festival Gala not only entertains hundreds of millions of Chinese people on their most important holiday, but is also used to promote moral and ideological values. Complementing relevant communication and media studies which focus on the (critical) cultural interpretation of these values, this study provides a social semiotic framew...

Extending cognitive theories on multimodal metaphor and multimodal metonymy, this study adopts a social semiotic approach to investigate how conceptual metonymies are realized in visual images. Drawing upon Radden and Kovecses’ (1999) classification, this paper proposes two types of visual metonymic mappings, namely, the partial representation of r...

Addressing the need for multiliteracies in language education, this paper investigates the visual construction of knowledge in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks in Hong Kong and develops a social semiotic framework for infusing the senior primary (P4-6) and the secondary (S1-4) English language curricula with multiliteracies. By explica...

With the increasing use of film, animation, software and the internet in English language teaching in China, investigating classroom teaching in the new media context has become an urgent task. As a collaboration among a linguist, an education researcher and a government official supervising primary school English language education, this paper rep...

由Clare Painter、Jim Martin、Len Unsworth三位著名系统功能语言学者历时十年完成的力作《解读视觉叙事：儿童图画书的图像分析》是自Kress & van Leeuwen（1996）的奠基之作以来对视觉图像分析理论最显著的发展。在Kress & van Leeuwen（1996）单个图像分析框架基础上，该书提出了系统分析由多个图像组成的视觉叙事的元功能框架。该书细致的系统建构对我们进一步理解视觉语法，更加系统地分析图画书、漫画、电视广告、电影等复杂多模态叙事语篇具有重要意义。本文将简要介绍该书中的视觉叙事分析框架并结合相关理论与漫画实例分析阐释其在多模态语篇分析中的应用。

The new English Curriculum Standard published by the Ministry of Education in 2011 clearly stated the humanistic aspect of English language teaching. Therefore, how to make use of multimodal resources to implement humanistic and moral education in English classrooms is an important task for researchers. This paper first elucidates the multimodal co...

图像隐喻是是平面广告创意的重要特征，也是多模态语篇分析的重要研究内容。然而，纵观国内外广告图像隐喻研究，大多都是基于对几个例子定性分析的理论探讨，而很少有研究对某一类型广告的大量语料进行定量分析，对其语篇特征得出具有说服力的结论。鉴于此，本文通过对一定量的的广告图片分析，建立隐喻系统，阐释广告意义建构的多模态语篇机制。

During the last twenty years, most research in Appraisal have focused on linguistic discourse analysis, but few studies have examined multimodal discourse. From a social semiotic perspective, in multimodal discourses such as images and films, vocal features, facial expressions and gestures are all important resources for constructing Appraisal mean...

This study adopts a social semiotic approach to model the dynamics of character emotion and the discursive mechanisms of viewer engagement in film narrative. Drawing upon the systemic functional semiotics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), this paper proposes a metafunctional framework to elucidate how film characters’ emotions are ideationally cons...

From the 1990s, the multimodal turn in systemic functional linguistics and discourse analysis makes multimodal discourse analysis a popular topic in linguistics and communication studies. In recent years, multimodal studies become to focus on the inter-disciplinary systematic analysis of multimodal meaning making resources and empirical studies, ra...

Complementing cognitive theories which attribute the understanding of visual metaphors to situational and cultural context, this study adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate how visual images themselves are constructed to cue conceptual metaphors. The visual realization of metaphor in representational, interactive and compositional mea...

This study provides a semiotic theorization of how emotion is represented in film to complement the cognitive approach, which focuses on how film elicits emotion from viewers. Drawing upon social semiotic theories and cognitive theories of emotion, we develop a multimodal framework in which filmic representation of emotion is seen as combinations o...

Complementing cognitive theories which attribute the understanding of visual metaphors to situational and cultural contexts, this study adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate how visual images themselves are constructed to cue conceptual metaphors. The visual realization of metaphors in representational, interactive and compositional m...

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2013n64p85 This study explores the complementarities between systemic functional and cognitive metaphorical approaches to multimodal discourse analysis. Their common concern with the construal of human experience and their shared theoretical foundation of viewing language and other semiotic systems as meaning-ma...

This study examines how emotive meaning is represented in visual images using the semiotic resources of facial expression, touch and body orientation. Complementing the cognitive metaphorical interpretation, the visually represented emotive behaviors are theorized as partial iconic representations of real life behaviors, which are in turn indexes o...

By analysing multimodal TV advertisements, this study aims to show how intertextual voices are exploited in advertising discourse to enhance persuasive power. Taking as their point of departure the assumption that all discourses are intertextual recontextualizations of social practice that draw on external voices from both specific discourses and d...

In this chapter the epistemological status of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) claim is explored from a cognitive perspective. Specifi cally, the question ‘how do we know’ is addressed by consideration of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980).