DSpace collection: 專書

Confucian Principles: A Study of Chinese Americans’ Interpersonal Relationships in Selected Children’s Picturebooks

title: Confucian Principles: A Study of Chinese Americans’ Interpersonal Relationships in Selected Children’s Picturebooks abstract: There has not been enough critical analysis of children’s literature by and about Chinese Americans, especially when compared to other minority groups in the United States. In particular, Chinese American historical books lack extensive analysis. It is important to reflect cultural accuracy in literature and to help children develop clear concepts of self and others by providing precise cultural and physical characteristics of people. While cultural authenticity allows children the opportunity to see a reflection of real experiences within a book instead of seeing stereotypes or misrepresentations, obtaining correct information about a certain time period can help children to see images of immigration accurately represented in literature. Using the Confucian delineation of interpersonal relationships as the major criterion of cultural authenticity, this article examines three currently available children’s picturebooks set in the historical period between 1848 and 1885. In addition to exploring how Chinese Americans’ interpersonal relationships are portrayed in these children’s historical books, this article argues for more proactive inclusion of the diversity in selection of picturebooks.

Sound Patterns in Mandarin Recycling Repair

title: Sound Patterns in Mandarin Recycling Repair abstract: The objective of the present research is to investigate the ways in which Mandarin interlocutors utilize prosodic resources as part of the means to achieve interactional actions and sequential-organization in natural conversation. By approaches of interactional prosody and conversational phonetics toward the analysis of sound realization of Mandarin repair in natural conversation, this study provides a preliminary exploration on how the combination of detailed prosodic features forms various sound patterns in reflecting the interactional aspect and sequential organization of Mandarin conversation. The current study examines the particular example of recycling repair, defined as “a repeat of part of a conversational turn,” among all methods used in accomplishing Mandarin same-turn self-repair. The data corpus consists of 260 cases of recycling repair culled from a collection of both video- and audio-taped naturally occurring Mandarin conversation. For each recycling, acoustic measurements, including duration, pitch, silence, cut-off and lengthening were carried out by using Praat. Additional judgments would be made based on the analyst’s impressionistic interpretation of these acoustic cues. After taking measurements, the results were compared and the sound patterns that emerged from recyclings of the same sound manifestation were identified. By a qualitative case-study methodology, this thesis reports 6 sound patterns and 3 sub-patterns based on 112 cases of Mandarin recyclings selected. The findings from the current research highlight the interaction-specific, sequence-specific, and function-specific examples of recyclings in relation to the use of the 6 main prosodic patterns. 3 sub-patterns that share some similarity with 2 of the 6 sound patterns in terms of interactional function were further identified. The result from the current exploratory work on the correlation between sound patterns in Mandarin recyclings and interaction contributes significantly to an interdisciplinary study that focuses on broadening the interactional linguistic theory by paying close attention to the sound patterns in natural conversation.

How Timberlake Wertenbaker Constructs New Forms of Gender in Her History Plays: Exposing the Power Relations between the Sexes

title: How Timberlake Wertenbaker Constructs New Forms of Gender in Her History Plays: Exposing the Power Relations between the Sexes abstract: By emphasizing gender issues that have been previously suppressed, the author shows how Timberlake Wertenbaker constructs a new historical narrative of Western imagination. This book focuses on how gender is constructed socially and culturally in history through analyzing Wertenbaker's plays. Not only do we understand history from gender, but we also understand that the inclusion of gender in history indeed changes our perception of history. It is definitely not enough to simply emphasize women as victims in history, so the recognition of gender differences and the relations between gender and history help to lead us to rethink and reconstruct history.