Intercultural and Interlingual Discourse in Chinese & English

Catalog description

This course addresses the structural and cultural aspects of language use with focus on dual-language communication involving Chinese and English. Interlingually, the course will explore given structural differences between Chinese and English, including aspects of speech habits (phonology), word-formation (morphology), vocabulary (lexicon), phraseology, and sentence structure (syntax); interculturally, the course will examine how dual-language speakers (and translators) negotiate and shape Chinese and English in the dynamic of time-and-place communication, including the navigation of different discourse styles, conventions governing idiom, coherence, or logic, and assumptions about gender relations, and power and status that determine who speaks when, who gets interrupted, and how rhetoric and voice are expressed in code switching and mixing between Chinese and English. In identifying rule-governed variance and strategies used to mediate differences in communication, students will also develop an articulate understanding of how the two languages function in their separate and yet intertwined evolution.