Winnie Cheng

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of English

In conversation, the participants collaboratively contribute towards both the topic subject contents and the direction and organization of the topical framework, both informed by the goals for conversational interaction and reflecting the physical, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts of interaction. Conversations are dynamic and each contribu...

In legislative texts, deontic modality helps define rights, privileges, obligations, and responsibilities. Based on a corpus of Chinese civil laws from 1949 to 2015, the study investigates the development of deontic modality in Chinese civil legislative discourse and examines the variations of deontic modality diachronically from a quantitative, fu...

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...

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...

The Internet enables hotels to advertise their products and services to the global visitors through websites. While major studies have investigated the appeal of images on hotel websites by employing the method of content analysis, discourse studies of images to map out the communicative potential of hotel images have been scarce. This study has ad...

The study extends the concept of local grammar to the study of disclaimers in company reports. It also outlines and illustrates an analytical procedure to provide a means of interpreting the local grammar of specific language use. Data analysis has identified 18 functional categories and 13 lexico-grammatical patterns in the disclaimers examined. F...

Modality and negation, as two important linguistic features used to realise subjectivity, have been investigated within various disciplines, such as logic, linguistics and philosophy, and law. The interaction between modality and negation, as a relatively new and undeveloped domain, has however not been paid due attention in scholarship. This corpu...

In this study, qualitative data were collected through 'fly-on-the-wall' case studies, with the professionals completing a Professional Discourse Checklist. The case studies aimed to examine the role of English in written and spoken professional communication in Hong Kong's Key Industries and to compare the nature, purposes and frequencies of use o...

Defamation law is a long-standing research focus. Previous studies on defamation law have pointed out the importance of balancing two fundamental issues in law, namely, protection of reputation and freedom of speech. The present corpus-based legal study, using ConcGram 1.0 as the analytical tool, examined the phraseological profile of reported case...

The paper reports on part of a larger scale collaborative and interdisciplinary project among English Applied Studies, Land Surveying and Geo-informatics, and utility specialists industry in engineering in Hong Kong. The present study interviewed 36 utility specialists in Hong Kong to find out their understanding of and perceived importance of comm...

Collaborative projects with key industries: Sharing of Hong Kong experience The talk describes a number of collaborative projects with the pillar industries in the Hong Kong economy, such as financial services, health care, surveying, construction engineering, and tourism, conducted by the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English...

A corpus-driven study of the language of hotel websites: Semantic fields and phraseology The paper reports on the findings of an on-going research project entitled ‘Multimodal analysis of hotel homepages: A comparison of hotel websites across different star categories’ (4-ZZAV) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. One of the aims of the projec...

English Language curriculum and assessment: The Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education In Hong Kong, a three-year senior secondary curriculum The Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) commenced in September 2009. One key concept that underlies the DSE is that curriculum, pedagogy and assessment should be well aligned. This paper focuses...

Data-driven learning for writing for research publication for students The talk describes a project funded by the Hong Kong UGC Language-related Collaborative Projects Initiative, 2015-2017. Data-driven learning, the direct use of corpora of text in language learning, has proven to be effective in the teaching and learning of writing skills, includ...

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has a strong English support programme in which students study reading and writing skills and strategies related to their discipline areas in their early years of study. These courses are, however, not often referred to by teachers of discipline subjects. Working with discipline subject teachers, the Writing acr...

In Hong Kong, an application-oriented elective module known as "Learning English through Workplace Communication" has been introduced to the senior secondary English language curriculum. One of the learning targets of the elective module is “to develop learners’ ability to establish and maintain relationships and routines in the workplace context”...

Most previous studies on jury instructions have been confined to legalese such as the lexical and syntactic features of jury instructions. This study, drawing on reported cases on jury instructions from the Hong Kong judiciary, aims to examine jury instructions in Hong Kong to better explore how jury instructions are given in Hong Kong, being a com...

This corpus-based study compares financial analyst reports, collected during the Eurozone financial crisis in 2011, of the BNP Paribas and Bank of China (Hong Kong), which differ in corporate history and backgrounds. The study aims to describe, first, salient semantic and pragmatic meanings characteristic of salient topics in the financial analyst...

Corpus linguistics is a long-established method which uses authentic language data, stored in extensive computer corpora, as the basis for linguistic research. Moving away from the traditional intuitive approach to linguistics, which used made-up examples, corpus linguistics has made a significant contribution to all areas of the field. Until very...

This corpus-based discourse analytical study compares the use of collocations, semantic preferences, semantic prosodies and metaphors in the news reports and Hong Kong Government press releases concerning the introduction of the school subject Moral and National Education in Hong Kong in 2012. The analysis of word co-occurrences with the phrase ‘na...

Although legal terms are conventionally considered to have self-referential, self-closed meaning independent of context, a legal term only acquires its meaning within a given context. As long as the context varies, the meaning of the same legal term as a signifier may change correspondingly. Based on case studies by applying semiotics, we argue tha...

This book is a deliverable of the project entitled ‘Enhancing students’ professional competence and generic qualities through writing in English across the curriculum (WAC)’ (2011-14), funded by the Learning and Teaching Development Grants of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (Project No. 1-421M). Fifteen colleagues from ten academic depa...

The paper aims to explore documentary evidence in legal discourse from a socio-semiotic perspective and argues there is reconstructive and deconstructive nature in legal narratives and the hegemony in legal narratives can be regarded as conventional. Based on case studies relevant to Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance in Hong Kong,...

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...

Most previous studies of epistemic modality in legal settings discuss epistemic modality as performing an interpersonal engagement or a positioning function. Via a probability test, the present corpus-driven study examined the way in which epistemic modality is employed in civil judgments to construct legal facts and to indicate legal probability....

The paper reports on the two multimodal research studies of hotel homepages. The first study entitled 'Hotel websites as corporate communication' combines the approaches and methodologies of visual grammar and critical genre analysis in the study of the homepages of twelve five-star hotels in Hong Kong, focusing on language, visual images and hyper...

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 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...

Quite different from translation for general purposes, transplanted legal discourse is often unmatchable to the target discourse community. In reality, exact equivalence could not be found in terms of translation in legal transplant, which means the major task of translation in legal transplant is to solve lacunae, discursive gaps between the sourc...

In language and communication research, a wide range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches have been employed, among which are corpus linguistics (CL), critical discourse analysis (CDA), and an innovative combination of CL and CDA.

Semantic prosody refers to the attitudinal meaning, often pragmatic, of a lexical item.

Chinese corpus linguistics has made rapid developments over the last decade in the areas of corpus building, exploration in information technology, and publicly available corpus resources, and has introduced various practical applications, primarily in education and research.

The legal term "fundamental rights" has been well recognized in international treaties and legislations. The present study investigates the stipulations on fundamental rights in the four versions (1954, 1975, 1978, and 1982) of and four Amendments (1988, 1993, 1999, and 2004) to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from a socios...

This study investigates some cases related to the interpretation of law in Right of Abode cases heard by the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong, and discusses the sharp contrast between the different versions of interpretation of the same legislative expressions as the same signs in similar cases heard by the same court. This study does not aim to...

In common law jurisdictions, the notion of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is frequently related to notions such as the belief or certainty of a judge or a juror about reality. The notion of balance of probabilities is however related to likelihood or probability. In this analysis, we link belief and proof by introducing the notion of epistemic mod...

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...

In the past decade, the use of corpora and computational tools in language education has played a crucial and critical role in innovations in language education. The current paper provides a survey of the current state of second language learner corpora in East Asia. Four types of learner corpus from four regions in East Asia are introduced, with f...

This article describes the management of disagreement found in an intercultural conversational corpus between Hong Kong Chinese (HKC) and native speakers of English (NSE). Cultural differences in value orientations towards the face system and politeness and research on the structural organization and linguistic realizations of dispreferred response...

This paper offers an analytical procedure for identifying phraseological variation within concgrams (Cheng et al. 2006), which are sets of words that co-occur regardless of constituency variation (e.g. AB and A B), positional variation (e.g. AB and BA), or both. It argues that examining concgrams takes us closer to more fully appreciating and under...

After Hong Kong was handed over from Britain to China on July 1, 1997, the language policy was modified by the Hong Kong SAR's government to “develop a civil service which is biliterate in English and Chinese and trilingual in English, Cantonese and Putonghua.” Beginning 1998, secondary schools aided by the government in Hong Kong were required to...

As a result of globalization and the internalization of trade and information, intercultural communication has become an increasingly significant topic. This is especially the case in professional communication, because participants in professional communication have to draw on more sophisticated and transdisciplinary frameworks in order to get the...

This book presents ten studies of communication practices in a variety of professional contexts. By drawing on diverse methodologies from fields such as conversation analysis, intercultural communication, and organizational studies, the essays here examine how language is constructed, managed, and consumed in various professional situations, rangin...

DOI: 10.1016/j.esp.2007.08.002 The study reported in this paper aims to provide a description of professional communication pertaining to land surveying project management in Hong Kong, achieved through a comprehensive analysis of both workplace discourse processes and products. The study situated in Hong Kong represented collaborative efforts betw...

Two interactional strategies explicitly taught to learners of English in Hong Kong are how to check that the hearer understands what you are saying as you communicate and, conversely, how to check that you have understood another speaker's message. The forms of these strategies that are taught in Hong Kong schools are fairly limited. This study see...

Simultaneous talk, meaning two or more speakers talk at the same time, is a prevalent phenomenon in conversation. This study seeks, through examining authentic spoken discourse in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), to determine the ways in which simultaneous talk is performed in real-lif e communication, compared to what is to be found...

Two interactional strategies explicitly taught to learners of English in Hong Kong are how to check that the hearer understands what you are saying as you communicate and, conversely, how to check that you have understood another speaker's message. The forms of these strategies that are taught in Hong Kong schools are fairly limited. This study see...

The paper introduces an innovative computer-based methodology, 'concgramming', to automatically identify the phraseological profile, and hence the 'aboutness', of a text or a corpus. This methodology can be employed by students and teachers of any disciplines, so that their awareness of the importance of the phraseological tendency in language will...

This paper reports on a study which aims to investigate the impact of Online Collaborative Learning and Assessment (OCLA) on the learning and teaching of content subjects taken by first-year and third-year BA undergraduates. Specifically, the paper examines students' approaches to and attitudes towards OCLA and evaluates the effectiveness of OCLA i...

This chapter examines the use of vague language (VL) across different spoken genres in intercultural contexts. It analyses representative samples of the academic, business, conversational and public subcorpora in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), which is made up of Hong Kong Chinese and primarily native English-speakers. Its aim is t...

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Uncovering the extent of word associations and how they are manifested has been an important area of study in corpus linguistics since the 1960s (Sinclair et al. 1970). This paper defines and describes a new way of categorising word association, the concgram , which constitutes all of the permutations of constituency and positional variation genera...

The study reported in this paper applies Sinclair's (2004) descriptive model of lexical items, which consists of five categories of co-selection: two obligatory categories the core and semantic prosody, and three optional categories collocation, colligation and semantic preference. The study examines a selection of spoken discourse events collected...

This paper presents an analysis of the potential problems of importing media communication in the form of a television programme from another culture. In Hong Kong, as elsewhere in the world, the local television companies frequently buy successful television programmes from, for example, the USA or Britain with the expectation that they will be si...