Language for Professional Communication - Department of English

Language for Professional Communication: Research, Practice & Training

Edited by Vijay K Bhatia Winnie Cheng Bertha Du-Babcock Jane Lung

Asia-Pacific LSP and Professional Communication Association

Language for Professional Communication: Research, Practice and Training Edited by Vijay K Bhatia, Professor, Department of English, City University of Hong Kong Winnie Cheng, Professor, Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Bertha Du-Babcock , Associate Professor, Department of English, City University of Hong Kong Jane Lung, Associate Professor, School of Business, Macao Polytechnic Institute Copyright@2009 The Hong Kong Polytechnic University All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher. Jointly published in Hong Kong SAR China in 2009 by City University of Hong Kong, Asia-Pacific LSP and Professional Communication Association, and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University ISBN 978-962-367-652-6

Language for Professional Communication: Research, Practice and Training

Edited by Vijay K Bhatia Winnie Cheng Bertha Du-Babcock Jane Lung

Copyright@The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 2009 ISBN 978-962-367-652-6

Contents

1

Preface

6-10

Christopher N Candlin 2

Colour Metaphors in Business Discourse

11-24

Li Lan & Lucy MacGregor 3

In My Own Words: Metaphoric Identity Across Academic Domains

25-36

Davide Simone Giannoni 4

Fear in Stock Market Crash: A Corpus-based Metaphoric Study

37-49

Janet Ho 5

Hedging Expressions Used by the Former Financial Secretary in Hong Kong

50-60

Leung Chi Kong 6

Stance and Engagement in Writing: Japanese and American Editorials

61-70

Nagiko Iwata Lee 7

The Use of Politeness Marker Po in Television-Mediated Political Campaign Advertisements

71-82

in the Philippines Paulina M. Gocheco 8

Recent Linguistic Changes in Romanian Workplace Communication

83-95

Răzvan Săftoiu, Mihaela Gheorghe & Stanca Măda 9

Semantic Network: Strategies for Assessment in News in English

96-110

Ayako Ochi 10

Self-Representation of Five Star Hotels: A Digital Genre Analysis of Hotel Homepages

111-130

Amy Suen 11

Humor as an Indicator of Workplace Socialization

131-145

Stephanie Schnurr & Bernie Mak 12

The Impact of Culture on Media Choice: The Role of Context, Media Richness and

146-160

Uncertainty Avoidance Marinel Gerritsen 13

From Research Idea to Workplace Project: Gaining Access to the Corporate World

161-174

Janet Brady 14

Quality Management Through Professionalization and Didactics in Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Research Alliances Annikki Koskensalo

175-188

15

How English Competence Impacts on Chinese Expatriate Adjustment in International Business

189-201

Xu Xiaofei 16 Managing Meetings in BELF (Business English as a Lingua Franca)

202-216

Anita Wolfartsberger 17 Talk at Work: Interactional Challenges for Immigrants

217-234

Janet Holmes & Nicky Riddiford 18 Business Internship Program Development in Light of Professional Communication Research:

235-249

Kevin’s Company at Kanda University of International Studies Kevin Knight 19 From a Language Learner to a Language User: An Alternative Approach to ESP Teaching

250-257

K. Okamoto, Y. Yasumuro, E. Yamamoto & M. Fuyuki 20 Transdisciplinary Approaches to ESP for Graduate Students in Architecture

258-269

Trinidad Fernández & Pam Peters 21 Using English for Workplace Communication: A Study of Novice Professionals

270-285

David D. Qian 22 An Empirical Study on Literacy: Diversity in Minority Context Marie Josée Berger, Georges J. Sefa Dei & Renée Forgette-Giroux

286-297

Preface

6

Preface Christopher N Candlin Department of Linguistics Programs in Communication in Professions & Organisations Macquarie University Sydney

This is a remarkable book in many ways: not only does it present a widely diverse set of papers from an equally diverse geographically and institutionally-based authorship but it represents the first of what we hope will be many similar collections and publications that lie under the aegis of the newly-formed Asia-Pacific LSP and Professional Communication Association1. Some history might be useful here. In 2006, Vijay Bhatia and I conceived of the idea that it would be worth floating the concept of such an Association, reflecting both the extraordinary growth and present development of its themes in the Asia-Pacific, but also as a valuable partner with the much longer standing European Association for LSP. At the same time, we wanted to see if it might be possible to marry the long-standing interests in LSP with those of professional and organisational communication. Typically, the former has resided academically in the world of Applied Linguistics while the latter, much more diverse, has had its centre in a range of professional and organisationally specific arenas, together with some more general focus on communication as a central construct. In short, Asia-Pacific LSP and Professional Communication was to be not only new in its location, but also in its intellectual and practical domain. Following some enthusiastic responses from scholars in the region to the idea of a preliminary scouting meeting to be held at Macquarie University, Sydney, and already heartened by the strong support and interest of colleagues in Hong Kong, notably Winnie Cheng at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and others in the region, for example Azirah Hashim in Kuala Lumpur, the Macquarie meeting discussed and determined that an Association of the kind proposed would be both well received and valuable, with its three foci of Research, Practice and Training. In short, the way was open. Following that meeting, an interim committee was established with the aim of developing a constitution, and after intensive canvassing of opinion both in the region and in consort with the European Association, the draft constitution was to be presented at the initial conference of the Association, organised jointly by a team in Hong Kong from the City University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Hong Kong Institute of Education. That conference, held in Hong Kong in December 2008, and supported by both the City University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, was a very great success, with speakers coming from a wide range of Asia-Pacific centres but also from Europe, North America and Latin America. This edited collection of papers from that conference is one outcome. Most significantly, it

1

For information about the Association go to the website at http://www.english.cityu.edu.hk/aplspca

Preface

7

also represents the birth of the new Association and heralds what will become a force for exchange and innovation in all three aspects I refer to above: Research, Practice, and Training. So much for history. What about ideas and practice? The study of language in the context of professional communication, for example in the domains and fields of law, education, business, healthcare, social welfare, bureaucratic processes, media – from the perspective of language and communication (in the broad sense of discourse) has a long-standing history, beginning with the mid nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. We can group this body of literature generally under three categories2: (i)

descriptive, genre and text-based studies focusing on specialised registers, mainly involving written texts, but extending increasingly to multimodal and semiotically varied realisations, originally, but not exclusively, from the context of education, especially the academy, but now extending across a wide range of domains;

(ii)

interpretive studies of talk and interaction in professional and organisational sites and settings, sometimes involving critical moments in crucial sites such as those that occur in team meetings, cross-examination of witnesses in courtrooms, contexts of risk in social care, the delivery of bad news in healthcare contexts, business negotiations, job interviews and performance appraisals etc, and especially in intercultural contexts;

(iii)

problem-centred, interventionist studies in the spirit of pursuing relevant applied linguistics and communication research, often involving close collaboration between discourse analysts/applied linguists/communication specialists and members of various professions and organisations, where research is focused, in part at least, on exploring the potential for systemic change in structures or in delivery, through interactional studies of focal themes.

It is clear that such categories, while emphasising the importance of domain or field of study, extend beyond this to a consideration of the particular conditions of site. It is also clear that such conditions cannot only be studied descriptively in terms of their objects – their texts, their interactions – but require interpretive engagement with the meanings made in such sites and through such texts, involving all participants. At the same time, such descriptions and interpretations, focused as they are on the micro of the interaction order, need connecting with the macro conditions of the institutional order, seen both historically and social structurally. Nor should one be so focused on the 2

The argument and exemplification here owes a good deal to discussions and formulations with Professor Srikant Sarangi of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University UK in the context of our joint research and publishing work in professional communication research; with colleagues and research students at Macquarie University in the Program in Communication in Professions and Organisations, notably Dr Alan Jones and Dr Sally Candlin; in the context of developing a multiperspectived research methodology with Dr Jonathan Crichton at the University of South Australia; with colleagues who are members of the European LSP Association, notably Professor Maurizio Gotti of Bergamo, Italy; and with the editors of this book over a long period of time in relation to a range of research projects and initiatives.

Preface

8

particularities of the given domain and site that one ignores the considerable potential for crossdomain and cross-site parallels and influences, both in terms of cross-cutting themes and of relevant methodologies. Indeed, it may be said that one of the notable new orientations of professional communication research and practice is precisely to engage with such inter-domain and inter-site constructs, such as Trust, Risk and Quality which are salient in many, if not all, professional domains and sites, which are characteristically discoursed, and which offer the occasion to refocus our research and practice on underlying theoretical issues as diverse as: •

Agency: (in the micro and/or the macro context)

•

Identity: (involving gender, class, age, ethnicity, culture)

•

Role: (role shifts, participation management, negotiation, (dis)enfranchisement

•

Knowledge management: (control, data sourcing, differential expertise, risk and outcome assessment)

•

Interpretive repertoires/perspectives: ((mis)framings, lay versus expert stances, researcher and participant perspectives)

•

Reasoning: (lay and professional explanations and conceptualisation)

•

Ethics: (moral behaviours, constraints and expectations)

Research in professional communication can thus make a significant contribution to our understanding of communication processes, participants and their roles, their objectives and goals, and the communication contexts within which knowledge-based professional practice takes place. This research will inherently become (and has indeed already become) an interdisciplinary undertaking, privileging a broad view of language and communication to include in its linked, and in some cases integrated methodologies formal studies of texts, genres and discourses in a range of semiotic modes, grounded ethnographic studies of contexts of use, more social psychological studies of participants’ attitudes, identities and interpretive processes, all linkable to organizational studies of institutional and professional structures. Such a professional communication-oriented perspective can not only build on the cumulative insights gained from discourse based studies and the body of literature in the sociology of professions and the sociology of work, it can also foreground a problem-orientation, deeply embedded in methodological and analytical challenges, so that research outcomes are made practically relevant. This, what has been called the “’So what?’ factor”, is central to our field and to our study. A particular challenge for researchers and practitioners in professional communication is how best to explore ways of accessing the tacit knowledge base that underlies professional practice in our chosen sites of engagement, and how to make a reflexive approach both for ourselves and for members of our target groups an indispensable part of our practice and our training endeavours. So much for what drives our activity and our work. Where does this book make its contribution?

Preface

9

Taking a position on how these papers might be ordered is always a fraught endeavour for any editors (and of course these like any other groupings are in the last analysis arbitrary, and readers will reconstitute the contents according to their own preferred interests and motives) we can perhaps suggest some connections and linkages among them. For example, we can note how the paper from Li Lan and Lucy MacGregor with its focus on metaphor links with that of Giannoni, although of course in different cultural settings and sites, and again, with that of Janet Ho, thus identifying metaphor as an increasingly powerful construct in professional communication research. Leung Chi Kong’s paper on hedging highlights the importance of the interpersonal focus on tenor, as does Nagiko Iwata Lee’s cross-culturally focused paper on stance and engagement in writing, and Paulina Gocheco’s work on politeness in television-mediated political campaigns in the Philippines. The need for careful linguistic description of lexico-grammatical change is evidenced by Răzvan Săftoiu, Mihaela Gheorghe and Stanca Măda’s paper on Romanian workplace communication, and how semantic networks in a SFG tradition can suggest ways in which the broader institutional context can be linked via the construct of networks to the textualisation in the lexico-grammar is the focus on Ayako Ochi’s paper on news broadcasts in English. That such constructs as personality and identity can be the property of institutions and not just persons is a way in which we can place Amy Suen’s paper on the self-representation of hotel homepages. Often less appreciated than it should be is the focus in Stephanie Schnurr’s and Bernie Mak’s paper on humour in the workplace, mediating if you like, metaphor, pragmatics and workplace culture. Exploring how culture now seen more ethnolinguistically impacts on media choice and media content is the focus of Marinel Gerritsen’s paper, serving to make the connection between genre, textualisation and context in an intercultural frame. Papers which privilege and focus our attention of particular domains, especially highlighting the pathway from research idea to research project and the stance of the researcher, include Janet Brady’s account of her study of accessing the corporate world, and Annikki Koskenssalo’s focus on what she terms the transdisciplinary and transcultural research alliance, the latter opening a means whereby, despite its wide geographical and cultural distance, we can explore Xu Xiaofei’s paper on the adjustment of Chinese expatriates to the English-mediated world of international business. Getting down to the interactional ground in such a world, Anita Wolfartsberger’s paper on meeting management suggests a way to cross the bridge from research to practice allowing us to appreciate the field research underpinning Janet Holmes’ and Nicky Riddiford’s paper, drawing on their extensive Workplace Language project, on the interactional challenges facing migrants to New Zealand. Inherent in many of the papers is the commitment to training and professional development that we highlighted earlier as one of the poles on which the Asia-Pacific LSP and Professional Communication Association was founded. Some papers, however, have that focus as a central theme: Kevin Knight’s account of the professional communication underpinning of a business internship program is one such, as is that of Okamoto, Yasumuro, Yamamoto and Fuyuki (both papers incidentally from Japan), Trinidad Fernández and Pam Peters’ study on providing ESP courses for

Preface

10

architecture students drawing on what they refer to as transdisciplinary research, and David Qian’s account of a program targeting the needs of novice professionals to develop specific English language competences. Finally, the overriding focus on diversity within the LSP and professional communication paradigm is perhaps best exemplified by the paper from Marie Josée Berger, Georges Sefa Dei & Renée Forgette-Giroux, which, although sited in a school-based context and not in the workplace, shows how themes such a multi-literacy and the construction of knowledge are central to providing opportunity and access, both concepts which transcend country, institution and professional site. The four editors of this remarkable volume are to be congratulated for the way in which they have not only provided a remarkable re-collection of an inaugural conference but also for enabling such a clear focus on its agenda and that of the Association which was its host.


11

Colour Metaphors in Business Discourse Li Lan and Lucy MacGregor The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Abstract Colour terms are widely used both literally and metaphorically in different language genres, and they may also reflect cultural identities of the language user. This paper takes a corpus-driven approach to compare colour terms in business English between Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Two specialised corpora were chosen for analysis: a Hong Kong finance corpus (HK-F) and the financial texts from the British National Corpus (BNC-F), each comprising approximately seven million words. The discussion focuses on eight basic colour words: black, white, green, red, yellow, blue, brown and grey. All eight colours were used literally and metaphorically in both corpora but quantitative and qualitative differences were apparent. Colour words appeared more frequently overall in the BNC-F than in the HK-F with the exception of yellow but more often as metaphors in the HK-F with the exception of red. The ratios of literal to metaphoric use of colour terms showed large variation between colours and corpora. We discuss a number of the colour metaphors in business discourse and suggest cultural reasons for differences in usage between the corpora. Key words: metaphor, colour, business discourse, corpus 1.

Introduction ‘Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’

(Lakeoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 3). Writers and speakers use metaphor to express abstract, difficult-totalk-about concepts in terms of concrete entities which are easier to understand (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1993). This can be further depicted by one of the twelve metaphor functions proposed by Goatly (1997), a function termed ‘explanation’, which includes ‘filling lexical gaps’, ‘reconceptualisation’, and ‘expressing an emotional attitude’. Cognitive linguistics provides a framework within which metaphors can be described and understood. Cognitive linguistics is underpinned by the assumption that language reflects thought; a specific aim is the analysis of linguistic metaphors to make inferences about underlying conceptual metaphors which are then used to make inferences about thought (Cameron & Low, 1999, p. 18). Analysis of linguistic metaphors requires identification of the underlying source domain whose (tangible) properties have been transferred to a target domain. Cognitive linguistics has had a significant influence on metaphor theories (e.g., Gibbs, 1994; 1992; Kittay, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), but is not without its critics who argue that it relies heavily on researcher intuition and that metaphor must be considered in its context (e.g., Cameron, 1999; Deignan, 2008). Such criticisms can be addressed by the use of corpus approach. Corpus linguistics is the study of authentic language in context. It enables claims about language use to be made from real-life data rather than relying on intuitions which are unreliable (Sinclair, 1991; Teubert, 2005, p. 1) or on data that is experimentally elicited in psycholinguistic studies and which may be atypical (Deignan, 2008).


12

Corpus linguistics is the study of language in context. Nowadays, the corpus is considered the default resource for almost anyone working in linguistics. ‘No introspection can claim credence without verification through real language data’ (Teubert, 2005, p. 1). Authentic data analyses enables the description of words in terms of collocation, colligation, semantic prosody and semantic preference (Sinclair, 1991) in an attempt to uncover the patterns of word co-occurrence and reveal meaning in context. Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) is an approach to metaphor analysis that aims to reveal intentions of the language users. It integrates corpus linguistics with cognitive linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, and has three stages: identification of candidate metaphors, interpretation of the conceptualization underlying the linguistic metaphoric forms, and explanation of the metaphoric uses in terms of their discourse function or rhetorical motivation (Charteris-Black, 2004). Many researchers claim to have used corpora in metaphor analysis, but they mainly used quotations from the corpora, or only worked on a list of potential figurative items. There seems to have been little attempt to draw a fuller picture of metaphor use in a corpus. The present study uses a corpus-driven approach to investigate metaphorical language in business discourse. Specifically, the aim is to compare the way in which colour terms are used metaphorically or as part of metaphorical expressions in Hong Kong and British English business discourse. A number of studies have investigated the metaphors in business discourse (Smith, 1995; Eubanks, 1999; Boers, 2000; Black, 2000; Charteris-Black, 2000; Henderson, 2000; Li & Bilbow, 2002; Koller, 2004; White, 2003) and identified a wide range of metaphors. In business discourse metaphorical language can be particularly useful in making concepts more imaginable and ultimately more accessible, interesting and persuasive to readers (Black, 2000; Smith, 1995). Black (2000) identifies several conceptual metaphors frequently found in economics discourse. For example, the target domain ‘economy’ is conceptualised as an organism (e.g., economic growth, infant); and as a patient (e.g., healthy economy and economic depression); economic organization are people (e.g., giant, holding company, infant company, and sister company); the market is animate (e.g., the market is falling, and the marketing is bouncing); types of traders are types of animals (e.g., bear run, bearish, bull run, bullish, and bear trap). Overall, he uses the metaphors to argue that economists consider capitalism to be conceptually similar to natural selection in terms of the notion of the struggle to survive and survival of the fittest. Some previous research has considered cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences. Black and Ennis (2001) compared the metaphorical language between English and Spanish financial news reports during the 1997 stock market crash. Broadly speaking, their findings emphasised similarities between the two languages. For example, the economy is conceptualised as an organism, market movements as physical movements and sharp downward market movements as natural disasters (Black & Ennis, 2001, p. 249). Li and Bilbow (2002) compared Chinese and English business discourse in an attempt to discover whether the greater differences between the linguistics of English and Chinese and cultures of East and West would be reflected in the metaphorical language. It was


13

found that the two corpora utilised broadly similar metaphorical source domains for business, conceptualising them as war, as a plant, as a person, as a building and as a machine. However, differences did exist in the linguistic realisations of these underlying conceptual metaphors. For example, both English and Chinese conceptualised BUSINESS IS A PERSON but one linguistic realisation of this personification, shrug off, exists only in English, and not in Chinese. Despite the interest in the metaphorical language of business discourse and the identification of a number of well-illustrated source domains, little consideration has been given to the use of colour as a metaphor (Smith, 1995; Allan, 2008). Colour terms, when used literally, describe perceptual experiences. However, they also have connotative meanings which can be specific to particular areas of life and can differ across cultures. The majority of connotative meanings of colour relate to emotions (Berlin & Kay, 1969; Phillip, 2006). For example, red is the colour of passion and the life force of our blood, but it can also be angry, aggressive and harsh. Yellow is fresh, alert, and optimistic. It can also be superficial, hasty and critical. The spirit of green is tolerant and compassionate. It can also be greedy, envious and bitter. The spirit of Blue is reflective, faithful and peaceful. It can also be egotistical and argumentative (Phillip, 2006). A number of other studies have focused on cultural differences between the symbolic values and meanings of colour terms (Gage, 1993, 1999; Davis, 1998; Trim, 2007). Figure 1 shows Trim’s (2007) portrayal of the cross-cultural differences between the symbolic meanings of five colours.

Figure 1. The cultural colour web (from Trim, 2007, p. 61). Given that colour terms are known to portray symbolic meanings which may differ across languages and cultures, the present study considered whether such differences would be apparent in a comparison of English business discourses from Britain and from Hong Kong. The aim was to investigate how colour terms are used metaphorically or as part of metaphorical expressions in


14

business discourse. What meanings do colours convey? Are there any ‘colourful expressions’ which seem specific to business discourse? What similarities and differences exist between British and Hong Kong English business discourse and how can these be related to cultural differences? 2.

Research Methods

2.1

The Data The British finance corpus (BNC-F) comprises of 284 files of commerce and finance domain

in the British National Corpus. The BNC-F has a total of 7,462,591 tokens, with 48.4% taken from published books, others from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals, published and unpublished letters and memoranda and other business related texts (Noor, 1998). The eight-million word Hong Kong Financial English corpus (HK-F) was a compilation of three corpora: PolyU Business Corpus (PUBC), the Hong Kong Financial Services Corpus (HKFSC) and business reports of South China Morning Post. The PolyU Business Corpus comprises texts from various categories of writing encountered in a business environment, for example corporate annual reports, newsletters, and minutes. Texts were taken from the World Wide Web, printed company materials, government institutions, and library online databases (Li & Bilbow, 2002). The Hong Kong Financial Services Corpus comprises written and spoken language from professional associations and private organizations across the financial services sector in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2006 (http://languagebank.engl.polyu.hk/hkfsc). The business reports of South China Morning Post are financial news stories on Hong Kong and world economy. 2.2

Choice of Colour Terms Based on Berlin and Kay’s (1969) cognitive analysis of colour1, we chose eight colours, white,

black, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, and grey, for analysis. In their seminal paper, Berlin and Kay (1969) proposed eleven basic categories of colour in English, which are depicted in Figure 2. It has been argued that there is a highly consistent order with which cultures identify and name basic colours (Berlin & Kay, 1969; Phillip, 2006; Allan, 2008). Black and white are universal colour terms, and the most common in world languages. If there is a third colour in the language, then it will be red. A fourth colour in the language will be yellow or green, and fifth the other of the two. Sixth is blue and seventh brown followed by pink, purple, orange and grey.

yellow white black

gr ee n

r ed

blue green

brown

pink purple orange grey

yellow

Figure 2. Basic colours in English (Berlin & Kay, 1969).

1

There is some debate surrounding the theory of Berlin and Kay (1969) but the arguments are not relevant here.


15

Colour terms including inflections and derivations were identified using WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott, 2008). Concordance lines were generated and examined to determine, for each item, whether it was used literally or metaphorically. Compound words including colour terms were excluded (e.g., blacksmith) as were proper names (e.g., Mr White, White Horse Pub, and The White House) and literal non-colour meanings (e.g., cricket green, golfing green fees, and greens). All other expressions that contained colour terms were analysed, including some which were arguably idioms or could be considered metonyms rather than metaphors. 3.

Results and Discussion

Although colour terms are strongly literal, many of their uses in business texts are often metaphorical as shown in the following concordance lines: 1

valid client.

Auditors deal with the black and white of reconciling company books and

are il

2

n dollar bombardment of the public with evocative black- and-white

3

dge funds were not transparent, and came

from a "black box", based offshore in the Cayman Islands or the

4

can be substantially reduced through the

use of "black boxes" and the removal of the intermediary, has al

5

quite sufficient to restore our

s of the city, a lilting ballad and a

finances to the black. For that year I am forecasting a modest deficit o

6

$396.9 million, which helped keep the bank in the black.

``If we see no big changes in the operating envi

7

T Ford: you can have any colour as long as it is black.

In short, the local industry is at last catchin

8

ded and, in the case of 68 agents, the HKFI put a black mark on their

9

ion is usually 1 per cent to 5 per cent above the black market

10

g fake customs

11

by then.

records, indicating their performan

exchange rate for the yuan and Hong Kong d

documents and has clamped down on black market activities.

(SCMP190300)

(1249)

Black marks for black market CLARA LI

Despite strong imports, the ma Hundreds of millions of dollars

12

ential between the official exchange rate and the black market is also a factor.

13

ith margins between the official exchange and the black market rate at 7 to 8 per cent, savings can be

14

anshark had left by then.

(SCMP190300)

(1249)

15

S you may find some people being

16

ith."

17

sult of a Number 8 Typhoon Signal or higher or a

With margins between th

Black marks for black market CLARA LI

referred to as "black people". Well, I do not personally like such refer

However, he added that China still raised black questions marks in the black rain storm.

minds of foreign investors

warning or other similar event, the p

18

Calculator is based on both the Binomial and the Black-Scholes option pricing models.

19

77 per cent in the past

20

IONS

1.

si

Hundreds of mil

While these models

year, but stayed in the black thanks to one-off gains from selling some of its v

What happened on 23 October 1997 -- The Black Thursday?

The financial turmoil in Asia, which

Generally colour terms are adjectives qualifying the appearance of something concrete, and they can be judged by our chromatic experience. To separate literal and metaphorical use of black, the notion of semantic preference (Sinclair, 2003), i.e., the relation between an individual word and semantically-related words, can be used as a parameter. When black co-exists with people, weather or other concrete items, it is used literally, as in Line 15 and 17. Although black mark and black box can also be concrete, the extended context (L14) and quotation marks (L3 and 4) show they are used figuratively, therefore they are counted as metaphors. Following this metaphor identification procedure, the frequencies of the colour terms and the frequencies with which they were used metaphorically were normalised per million words for the two corpora. Results are shown in Table 1.


16

Table 1 Comparison of the Frequency of Colour Terms per Million Words

BNC-F Colour Term BLACK WHITE RED GREEN YELLOW BLUE BROWN GRE Y

Total

HK-F

Metaphoric use

Total

Metaphoric use

#

#

%

#

#

%

124 106 58 52 12 36 14 26

27 26 16 29