Debing Feng - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Debing Feng
Journal of Xinyu College, 2008
Blend-learning is a kind of learning way of combining conventional teaching with networking teach... more Blend-learning is a kind of learning way of combining conventional teaching with networking teaching under the network circumstance.It blends the students' initiative with the teachers' dominant roles,gives same priority to teaching and learning,develops the mutual advantages of on-line teaching and conventional teaching and obtains the best teaching effect.According to the idea of blend-learning,the paper establishes the college English teaching model based on B-learning and applies it in the college English teaching practice,promoting the reform of college English teaching.
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Apr 7, 2021
In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caugh... more In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caught in the dilemma of whether to interpret or report. Based on Stephen J. A. Ward’s theory of pragmatic objectivity, this article responds to this question by proposing a concept of discourse truth and applying it to the analysis of affiliated news interviews collected from BBC News at Ten. It is found that journalists in such interviews tend to achieve a sense of discourse truth through three primary discourse practices, including achieving journalistic authority, emphasizing authenticity of news and displaying journalistic neutrality. These practices are in turn realized through a variety of discourse strategies such as identity credentials, personalization, modality, third-party attribution and metadiscourse expressions. The results show that objectivity can be maintained through discourse truth, even when news is interpreted. Discourse truth can reflect the authenticity of talk to some extent. It is, however, not the fact itself, but the reality constructed in the news.
International Journal of Communication, Aug 29, 2016
Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic ... more Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic and needs to be delivered with diversified presentational modes and forms. Drawing upon Bakhtin's heteroglossia and Goffman's production format of talk, this article examined the presentational forms and strategies deployed in BBC News at Ten and CCTV's News Simulcast. It showed that the employment of different presentational elements and forms in the two programs reflects two contrasting types of news discourse. The discourse of BBC News tends to present different, and even confrontational, voices with diversified presentational forms, such as direct mode of address and "fresh talk," thus likely to accentuate the authenticity of the news. The other type of discourse (i.e., CCTV News) seems to prefer monologic news presentation and prioritize studio-based, scripted news reading, such as on-camera address or voiceovers, and it thus creates a single authoritative voice that is likely to undermine the truth of the news.
Journal of Chongqing Institute of Technology, 2006
With relevance theory,this paper analyses humorous discourse and believes the humorous effect com... more With relevance theory,this paper analyses humorous discourse and believes the humorous effect comes from the interpretation of the humorous discourse.According to relevance theory,the course of dis- course interpretation of the listener is the best relevant information searching from the speaker's hypothesis. In this process the listener gets two interpretations that are related but not in accordance with the discourse. The listener has to make greater cognitive effort to find out the congruous aspect of the discourse,to under- stand the humor and to get the joviality of thorough understanding.
SAGE Open, 2022
Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting t... more Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting the knowledge of COVID-19 and China’s anti-epidemic activities. Based primarily on Feng and O’Halloran’s visual representation of multimodal metaphor, this article examines visual and multimodal metaphors created in the online PSAs that were produced in early 2020 to publicize China’s epidemic prevention and control activities. It is found that those metaphors fall into three general groups, namely “coronavirus” metaphor, “anti-epidemic worker” metaphor, and “medical instrument” metaphor. Nearly all of them were created to serve an overarching metaphor, namely ANTI-EPIDEMIC WORK IS WAR, of which coronaviruses were depicted as enemies, anti-epidemic workers as warriors, and medical instruments as weapons. Most of the metaphors were constructed through visual or multimodal anomaly realized through strategies such as participant substitution, verbal/visual superimposition, and verbo-visual integration/fusion in the representational structure, while their metaphorical meanings became supplemented or reinforced by the deployment of compositional and interactive resources such as spatial position, color contrast, gaze, and size. Finally, the causes and implications of the findings are discussed from three aspects: social background, genre, and audience.
Discourse, Context and Media, Aug 1, 2018
Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important role... more Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important roles in the formation and development of Internet anti-corruption, but little attention has been given to how such interaction is locally constructed among Weibo users. Drawing upon analytical tools evolved from Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study examined a pool of Weibo tweets and responses employed in discussing an Internet anti-corruption event, i.e., the ''Brother Watch" event which happened in 2012. The analysis showed that Weibo interaction featured an overarching sequence of ''key tweet + responses", wherein key tweets were formulated as newsworthy and authentic messages to engage the audience. Responses were designed to project new meanings and actions while orienting to prior turns. As a result, exposed information became repetitively circulated, amplified and reinforced, and eventually shaped into an online public event.
Journal of Language and Politics, Jun 8, 2021
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Sep 17, 2021
Journal of Jimei University, 2007
Intentionality plays a primary role in interpreting discourse structures.Explicit expression of i... more Intentionality plays a primary role in interpreting discourse structures.Explicit expression of intentions is closely related to the choice of cohesive devices,while implicitness of intention helps reveal underlying mechanisms of coherence.This paper argues that a complete analysis of discourse entails a comprehensive examination of various aspects of the speaker's intentions rather than grammatical and semantic interpretations.Through a pragmatic analysis of seemingly incoherent discourses including conversations and written texts,it concludes that the communicative intention of a discourse is the prerequisite of its coherence.
Discourse & Communication, Nov 29, 2019
Existing studies have extensively explored audience engagement in TV news, but not enough attenti... more Existing studies have extensively explored audience engagement in TV news, but not enough attention has been paid to the discursive (re)presentation of this phenomenon in the discourse of TV news kernels. Based on a pool of news items collected from BBC News at Ten, this article aims to investigate how the discourse of news kernels is constructed and presented to engage the audience. The analysis shows that news values and (simulated) journalist-audience interaction are two main ways employed by the journalists to achieve audience engagement in presenting TV news kernels. On one hand, a news kernel tends to cover the most newsworthy information of the news story, and the news text; on the other hand, it is often styled as newsworthy, too. In the meanwhile, the presentation of the news kernel tends to create a sense of (simulated) interaction between the journalist and the audience by practices such as pre-opening remarks, introducing the reporter and alerting the audience, among others. The findings reflect quite different journalistic practice of TV news kernels from that of print news leads.
SAGE Open
Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting t... more Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting the knowledge of COVID-19 and China’s anti-epidemic activities. Based primarily on Feng and O’Halloran’s visual representation of multimodal metaphor, this article examines visual and multimodal metaphors created in the online PSAs that were produced in early 2020 to publicize China’s epidemic prevention and control activities. It is found that those metaphors fall into three general groups, namely “coronavirus” metaphor, “anti-epidemic worker” metaphor, and “medical instrument” metaphor. Nearly all of them were created to serve an overarching metaphor, namely ANTI-EPIDEMIC WORK IS WAR, of which coronaviruses were depicted as enemies, anti-epidemic workers as warriors, and medical instruments as weapons. Most of the metaphors were constructed through visual or multimodal anomaly realized through strategies such as participant substitution, verbal/visual superimposition, and verbo-visual i...
Journalism, 2021
In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caugh... more In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caught in the dilemma of whether to interpret or report. Based on Stephen J. A. Ward’s theory of pragmatic objectivity, this article responds to this question by proposing a concept of discourse truth and applying it to the analysis of affiliated news interviews collected from BBC News at Ten. It is found that journalists in such interviews tend to achieve a sense of discourse truth through three primary discourse practices, including achieving journalistic authority, emphasizing authenticity of news and displaying journalistic neutrality. These practices are in turn realized through a variety of discourse strategies such as identity credentials, personalization, modality, third-party attribution and metadiscourse expressions. The results show that objectivity can be maintained through discourse truth, even when news is interpreted. Discourse truth can reflect the authenticity of talk to some...
Language, Politics and Media, 2021
International Journal of Communication, 2016
Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic ... more Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic and needs to be delivered with diversified presentational modes and forms. Drawing upon Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Goffman’s production format of talk, this article examined the presentational forms and strategies deployed in BBC News at Ten and CCTV’s News Simulcast . It showed that the employment of different presentational elements and forms in the two programs reflects two contrasting types of news discourse. The discourse of BBC News tends to present different, and even confrontational, voices with diversified presentational forms, such as direct mode of address and “fresh talk,” thus likely to accentuate the authenticity of the news. The other type of discourse (i.e., CCTV News) seems to prefer monologic news presentation and prioritize studio-based, scripted news reading, such as on-camera address or voice-overs, and it thus creates a single authoritative voice that is likely to ...
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2021
Discourse & Communication, 2016
Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in ... more Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in the different media are not the same. Print headlines are mostly contiguous with the story to which they refer. Broadcast headlines, however, are often at some temporal distance from their associated news item. In the print medium every story carries a headline. In broadcast news only some items are headlined. And yet, whereas the linguistic properties of print headlines have been much studied, almost no attention has been given to broadcast headlines. This article uses a corpus of headlines from BBC television news to explore their discursive form and function. It isolates a basic structure of {heading (+supplement)} for television news headlines and delineates a repertoire of patterns through which the structure is realised. In doing so, it suggests that the core function of television news headlines is to engage with the audience by projecting aspects of their news values forward thro...
Discourse, Context & Media, 2018
Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important role... more Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important roles in the formation and development of Internet anti-corruption, but little attention has been given to how such interaction is locally constructed among Weibo users. Drawing upon analytical tools evolved from Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study examined a pool of Weibo tweets and responses employed in discussing an Internet anti-corruption event, i.e., the ''Brother Watch" event which happened in 2012. The analysis showed that Weibo interaction featured an overarching sequence of ''key tweet + responses", wherein key tweets were formulated as newsworthy and authentic messages to engage the audience. Responses were designed to project new meanings and actions while orienting to prior turns. As a result, exposed information became repetitively circulated, amplified and reinforced, and eventually shaped into an online public event.
Visual Communication, 2016
This article presents a generalized model of reference relations in the discourse of television n... more This article presents a generalized model of reference relations in the discourse of television news based on Montgomery’s principles of intelligibility, Halliday and Hasan’s reference cohesion, Martin’s identification system, Tseng’s cohesive reference and some intersemiotic models. Reference in television news involves reference patterns from the verbal track (verbal reference), the visual track (visual reference) and across the two tracks (visual–verbal reference). Based on the categorization of verbal reference, this study classifies visual reference as personals (such as visual reappearance), demonstratives (such as proximity and direction) and comparatives (such as similarity and difference). Reference across visual and verbal tracks includes three general types of visual–verbal reference, i.e. complementary, visual-as-bridge and parallel, among others. Through these patterns of reference and their reference chains, participants in television news can be tracked and identified...
Text & Talk, 2017
The television news interview has been widely studied in the field of Conversation Analysis. Few ... more The television news interview has been widely studied in the field of Conversation Analysis. Few researchers, however, have paid attention to the interview fragments that often occur in news bulletin programs. This article applies Conversation Analysis and the notion of recontextualization to the analysis of experiential interview fragments deployed in CCTV News. It is shown that this type of fragments enjoys a relatively fixed sequence structure: introduction–fragment, where the fragment consists of (question+) answer turns. The introduction may be designed to raise a question, offer background information or summarize key points. The fragment itself, unlike a complete interview, is often selected and designed to achieve particular communicative purposes. In CCTV News, for example, the fragments tend to be employed to represent ordinary people’s experience, beneficiary identity and positive image, among others.
Communication Research and Practice, 2017
Journal of Xinyu College, 2008
Blend-learning is a kind of learning way of combining conventional teaching with networking teach... more Blend-learning is a kind of learning way of combining conventional teaching with networking teaching under the network circumstance.It blends the students' initiative with the teachers' dominant roles,gives same priority to teaching and learning,develops the mutual advantages of on-line teaching and conventional teaching and obtains the best teaching effect.According to the idea of blend-learning,the paper establishes the college English teaching model based on B-learning and applies it in the college English teaching practice,promoting the reform of college English teaching.
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Apr 7, 2021
In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caugh... more In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caught in the dilemma of whether to interpret or report. Based on Stephen J. A. Ward’s theory of pragmatic objectivity, this article responds to this question by proposing a concept of discourse truth and applying it to the analysis of affiliated news interviews collected from BBC News at Ten. It is found that journalists in such interviews tend to achieve a sense of discourse truth through three primary discourse practices, including achieving journalistic authority, emphasizing authenticity of news and displaying journalistic neutrality. These practices are in turn realized through a variety of discourse strategies such as identity credentials, personalization, modality, third-party attribution and metadiscourse expressions. The results show that objectivity can be maintained through discourse truth, even when news is interpreted. Discourse truth can reflect the authenticity of talk to some extent. It is, however, not the fact itself, but the reality constructed in the news.
International Journal of Communication, Aug 29, 2016
Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic ... more Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic and needs to be delivered with diversified presentational modes and forms. Drawing upon Bakhtin's heteroglossia and Goffman's production format of talk, this article examined the presentational forms and strategies deployed in BBC News at Ten and CCTV's News Simulcast. It showed that the employment of different presentational elements and forms in the two programs reflects two contrasting types of news discourse. The discourse of BBC News tends to present different, and even confrontational, voices with diversified presentational forms, such as direct mode of address and "fresh talk," thus likely to accentuate the authenticity of the news. The other type of discourse (i.e., CCTV News) seems to prefer monologic news presentation and prioritize studio-based, scripted news reading, such as on-camera address or voiceovers, and it thus creates a single authoritative voice that is likely to undermine the truth of the news.
Journal of Chongqing Institute of Technology, 2006
With relevance theory,this paper analyses humorous discourse and believes the humorous effect com... more With relevance theory,this paper analyses humorous discourse and believes the humorous effect comes from the interpretation of the humorous discourse.According to relevance theory,the course of dis- course interpretation of the listener is the best relevant information searching from the speaker's hypothesis. In this process the listener gets two interpretations that are related but not in accordance with the discourse. The listener has to make greater cognitive effort to find out the congruous aspect of the discourse,to under- stand the humor and to get the joviality of thorough understanding.
SAGE Open, 2022
Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting t... more Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting the knowledge of COVID-19 and China’s anti-epidemic activities. Based primarily on Feng and O’Halloran’s visual representation of multimodal metaphor, this article examines visual and multimodal metaphors created in the online PSAs that were produced in early 2020 to publicize China’s epidemic prevention and control activities. It is found that those metaphors fall into three general groups, namely “coronavirus” metaphor, “anti-epidemic worker” metaphor, and “medical instrument” metaphor. Nearly all of them were created to serve an overarching metaphor, namely ANTI-EPIDEMIC WORK IS WAR, of which coronaviruses were depicted as enemies, anti-epidemic workers as warriors, and medical instruments as weapons. Most of the metaphors were constructed through visual or multimodal anomaly realized through strategies such as participant substitution, verbal/visual superimposition, and verbo-visual integration/fusion in the representational structure, while their metaphorical meanings became supplemented or reinforced by the deployment of compositional and interactive resources such as spatial position, color contrast, gaze, and size. Finally, the causes and implications of the findings are discussed from three aspects: social background, genre, and audience.
Discourse, Context and Media, Aug 1, 2018
Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important role... more Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important roles in the formation and development of Internet anti-corruption, but little attention has been given to how such interaction is locally constructed among Weibo users. Drawing upon analytical tools evolved from Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study examined a pool of Weibo tweets and responses employed in discussing an Internet anti-corruption event, i.e., the ''Brother Watch" event which happened in 2012. The analysis showed that Weibo interaction featured an overarching sequence of ''key tweet + responses", wherein key tweets were formulated as newsworthy and authentic messages to engage the audience. Responses were designed to project new meanings and actions while orienting to prior turns. As a result, exposed information became repetitively circulated, amplified and reinforced, and eventually shaped into an online public event.
Journal of Language and Politics, Jun 8, 2021
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Sep 17, 2021
Journal of Jimei University, 2007
Intentionality plays a primary role in interpreting discourse structures.Explicit expression of i... more Intentionality plays a primary role in interpreting discourse structures.Explicit expression of intentions is closely related to the choice of cohesive devices,while implicitness of intention helps reveal underlying mechanisms of coherence.This paper argues that a complete analysis of discourse entails a comprehensive examination of various aspects of the speaker's intentions rather than grammatical and semantic interpretations.Through a pragmatic analysis of seemingly incoherent discourses including conversations and written texts,it concludes that the communicative intention of a discourse is the prerequisite of its coherence.
Discourse & Communication, Nov 29, 2019
Existing studies have extensively explored audience engagement in TV news, but not enough attenti... more Existing studies have extensively explored audience engagement in TV news, but not enough attention has been paid to the discursive (re)presentation of this phenomenon in the discourse of TV news kernels. Based on a pool of news items collected from BBC News at Ten, this article aims to investigate how the discourse of news kernels is constructed and presented to engage the audience. The analysis shows that news values and (simulated) journalist-audience interaction are two main ways employed by the journalists to achieve audience engagement in presenting TV news kernels. On one hand, a news kernel tends to cover the most newsworthy information of the news story, and the news text; on the other hand, it is often styled as newsworthy, too. In the meanwhile, the presentation of the news kernel tends to create a sense of (simulated) interaction between the journalist and the audience by practices such as pre-opening remarks, introducing the reporter and alerting the audience, among others. The findings reflect quite different journalistic practice of TV news kernels from that of print news leads.
SAGE Open
Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting t... more Metaphors in public service advertisements, or PSAs, have played an important role in promoting the knowledge of COVID-19 and China’s anti-epidemic activities. Based primarily on Feng and O’Halloran’s visual representation of multimodal metaphor, this article examines visual and multimodal metaphors created in the online PSAs that were produced in early 2020 to publicize China’s epidemic prevention and control activities. It is found that those metaphors fall into three general groups, namely “coronavirus” metaphor, “anti-epidemic worker” metaphor, and “medical instrument” metaphor. Nearly all of them were created to serve an overarching metaphor, namely ANTI-EPIDEMIC WORK IS WAR, of which coronaviruses were depicted as enemies, anti-epidemic workers as warriors, and medical instruments as weapons. Most of the metaphors were constructed through visual or multimodal anomaly realized through strategies such as participant substitution, verbal/visual superimposition, and verbo-visual i...
Journalism, 2021
In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caugh... more In affiliated news interviews, interviewees are both reporters and commentators, thus often caught in the dilemma of whether to interpret or report. Based on Stephen J. A. Ward’s theory of pragmatic objectivity, this article responds to this question by proposing a concept of discourse truth and applying it to the analysis of affiliated news interviews collected from BBC News at Ten. It is found that journalists in such interviews tend to achieve a sense of discourse truth through three primary discourse practices, including achieving journalistic authority, emphasizing authenticity of news and displaying journalistic neutrality. These practices are in turn realized through a variety of discourse strategies such as identity credentials, personalization, modality, third-party attribution and metadiscourse expressions. The results show that objectivity can be maintained through discourse truth, even when news is interpreted. Discourse truth can reflect the authenticity of talk to some...
Language, Politics and Media, 2021
International Journal of Communication, 2016
Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic ... more Unlike print news that is static and mainly composed of written text, television news is dynamic and needs to be delivered with diversified presentational modes and forms. Drawing upon Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Goffman’s production format of talk, this article examined the presentational forms and strategies deployed in BBC News at Ten and CCTV’s News Simulcast . It showed that the employment of different presentational elements and forms in the two programs reflects two contrasting types of news discourse. The discourse of BBC News tends to present different, and even confrontational, voices with diversified presentational forms, such as direct mode of address and “fresh talk,” thus likely to accentuate the authenticity of the news. The other type of discourse (i.e., CCTV News) seems to prefer monologic news presentation and prioritize studio-based, scripted news reading, such as on-camera address or voice-overs, and it thus creates a single authoritative voice that is likely to ...
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2021
Discourse & Communication, 2016
Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in ... more Despite the adoption of the term headline for both print news and broadcast news, their roles in the different media are not the same. Print headlines are mostly contiguous with the story to which they refer. Broadcast headlines, however, are often at some temporal distance from their associated news item. In the print medium every story carries a headline. In broadcast news only some items are headlined. And yet, whereas the linguistic properties of print headlines have been much studied, almost no attention has been given to broadcast headlines. This article uses a corpus of headlines from BBC television news to explore their discursive form and function. It isolates a basic structure of {heading (+supplement)} for television news headlines and delineates a repertoire of patterns through which the structure is realised. In doing so, it suggests that the core function of television news headlines is to engage with the audience by projecting aspects of their news values forward thro...
Discourse, Context & Media, 2018
Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important role... more Extant studies have been predicated on the assumption that Weibo interaction plays important roles in the formation and development of Internet anti-corruption, but little attention has been given to how such interaction is locally constructed among Weibo users. Drawing upon analytical tools evolved from Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study examined a pool of Weibo tweets and responses employed in discussing an Internet anti-corruption event, i.e., the ''Brother Watch" event which happened in 2012. The analysis showed that Weibo interaction featured an overarching sequence of ''key tweet + responses", wherein key tweets were formulated as newsworthy and authentic messages to engage the audience. Responses were designed to project new meanings and actions while orienting to prior turns. As a result, exposed information became repetitively circulated, amplified and reinforced, and eventually shaped into an online public event.
Visual Communication, 2016
This article presents a generalized model of reference relations in the discourse of television n... more This article presents a generalized model of reference relations in the discourse of television news based on Montgomery’s principles of intelligibility, Halliday and Hasan’s reference cohesion, Martin’s identification system, Tseng’s cohesive reference and some intersemiotic models. Reference in television news involves reference patterns from the verbal track (verbal reference), the visual track (visual reference) and across the two tracks (visual–verbal reference). Based on the categorization of verbal reference, this study classifies visual reference as personals (such as visual reappearance), demonstratives (such as proximity and direction) and comparatives (such as similarity and difference). Reference across visual and verbal tracks includes three general types of visual–verbal reference, i.e. complementary, visual-as-bridge and parallel, among others. Through these patterns of reference and their reference chains, participants in television news can be tracked and identified...
Text & Talk, 2017
The television news interview has been widely studied in the field of Conversation Analysis. Few ... more The television news interview has been widely studied in the field of Conversation Analysis. Few researchers, however, have paid attention to the interview fragments that often occur in news bulletin programs. This article applies Conversation Analysis and the notion of recontextualization to the analysis of experiential interview fragments deployed in CCTV News. It is shown that this type of fragments enjoys a relatively fixed sequence structure: introduction–fragment, where the fragment consists of (question+) answer turns. The introduction may be designed to raise a question, offer background information or summarize key points. The fragment itself, unlike a complete interview, is often selected and designed to achieve particular communicative purposes. In CCTV News, for example, the fragments tend to be employed to represent ordinary people’s experience, beneficiary identity and positive image, among others.
Communication Research and Practice, 2017