David C S Li
Biographic Data
| ID | 114249 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David C S Li |
| GIVEN NAMES | David C S |
| FAMILY NAME | Li |
| SIGNATURE | LI D C S |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8427-0424 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
China or Chinese, Belgium or Belgian, Peru or Peruvian, Guam or Guamanian: A response to Laurie Bauer
Research has shown that when ‘xxx English’ is used in reference to an English variety, the attribute ‘xxx’ is more likely to be an adjective than a noun. This is true of traditional ENL and ESL varieties, whose speakers can legitimately claim that ‘English is our language’. EFL varieties tend to follow the same trend, with ‘China English’ being a glaring exception to date. Corpus analysis shows that the pre-head attribute of a noun phrase may be …
China English or Chinese English: The Coming of Age of an Indigenized Variety
The distinction between ‘Singapore English’ and ‘Singaporean English’ is interesting. It appears that small places tend to use the bare name of the country, while larger countries use the derived adjective. So we find: Singapore English, Hong Kong English, Brunei English; but American English, German English, Malaysian English. On this basis, we might favour Chinese English over China English, because China is big
Phonetic loan, graphic borrowing, and script-mixing: Key to the vitality of written Cantonese in Hong Kong
This study aims at investigating how loanwords from Japanese and Korean are used in informal written Cantonese media discourse, including print and social media. Data from these media were collected from designated websites for 15 min every other day over a two-week period. The results show that loanwords from Korean, being written in a phonographic script hangul (한글), are rendered into written Cantonese typically through phonetic adaptation usin…
Belief diversity and cooperation
Why China English should give way to Chinese English: Chinese English: A linguistic perspective
China English or Chinese English? To my mind, the time is ripe for Chinese English to be adopted as the preferred term, or banner, for characterizing the variety of English of a country which has the largest number of users and learners of English in the world. There are sound linguistic and sociolinguistic reasons for this important terminological choice and decision. There is little research on the naming of the multiplicity of Englishes to dat…
Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: Interactional Cross-border Communication Using Literary Sinitic in Early Modern East Asia
Introduction to “Media Language and Discourse in Cultural China”
Preview this article: Introduction to "Media Language and Discourse in Cultural China", Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/cld.00040.int-1.gif
Writing-Mediated Interaction Face-to-Face: Sinitic Brushtalk (漢文筆談) as an Age-Old Lingua-Cultural Practice in Premodern East Asian Cross-Border Communication
In Western societies, speaking is construed as an interactive social activity while writing is widely perceived as a solo or private endeavor. Such a functional dichotomy did not apply to the “Sinographic Cosmopolis” in premodern East Asia, however. Based on selected documented examples of writing-mediated cross-border communication spanning over a thousand years from the Sui dynasty to the late Ming dynasty, this paper demonstrates that Hanzi 漢字…
Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, written by Zev Handel
Review of the book Zev Handel, Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019, xiv, 369 pp. Hardback, isbn: 978-90-04-38632-7
Silent conversation through Brushtalk (筆談): The use of Sinitic as a scripta franca in early modern East Asia
Literary Sinitic (written Chinese, hereafter Sinitic) functioned as a ‘scripta franca’ in sinographic East Asia, which broadly comprises China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and Vietnam today. It was widely used by East Asian literati to facilitate cross-border communication interactively face-to-face. This lingua-cultural practice is generally known as bĭtán 筆談, literally ‘brushtalk’ or ‘brush conversation’. While brushtalk as a substitute…
Two decades of decolonization and renationalization: The evolutionary dynamics of Hong Kong English and an update of its functions and status
This paper is an update of Luke and Richards and Li on the functions and status of English in postcolonial Hong Kong. Two decades after the handover, relatively little has changed except in the education domain. The ‘mother tongue education’ policy implemented from September 1998, whereby primary school-leavers are streamed into Chinese-medium and English-medium secondary schools, was ‘fine-tuned’ in 2009. Chinese-medium schools are given the fle…
Multilingualism in the Chinese diaspora worldwide: Transnational connections and local social realities
Accepted Manuscript
Facilitation of transference: The case of monosyllabic salience in Hong Kong Cantonese
Drawing on Clyne’s (
South Asian students' needs for Cantonese and written Chinese in Hong Kong: A linguistic study
Based on qualitative data obtained from 15 South Asian (SA) B.Ed. (EL) (Bachelor of Education in English Language) students, this study reports on SA students' difficulty in mastering Mandarin-based written Chinese and the vernacular Cantonese in Hong Kong. For convenience, SA here also refers to students whose homeland is the Philippines. Since Britain's return of sovereignty to China on 1 July 1997, the language policy of post-colonial Hong Kon…
Improving the Standards and Promoting the Use of English in Hong Kong: Issues, Problems and Prospects
Perfective paradox’: A cross-linguistic study of the aspectual functions of - guo in Mandarin Chinese
The toneless aspect mark - guo is generally viewed as a perfective marker with experiential function. It appears to be subject to a number of semantic constraints, such as discontinuity, repeatability or recurrence, reversibility, and indefinite reference. This article demonstrates that ‘experiential’ is only one of the three main local functions of - guo . Crucial to the determination of the local function of a - guo clause is the boundedness of…
Towards ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’ in Hong Kong (SAR): Problems, dilemmas and stakeholders’ views
Despite the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) government’s determination to implement the ‘mother tongue education’ policy amid strong social resistance one year after the handover, English remains a prestigious language in society. The need for Putonghua (Mandarin/Standard Chinese) is also increasing following ever-expanding trade and other activities with mainland China. The societal demand for both English and Putonghua in postcolo…
Language attitudes and linguistic features in the 'China English' debate1
In this paper we shall first try to define the term 'China English' (with our own definition of this term deliberated in the 'Discussion' section) as a performance variety in the larger conceptualization of World Englishes. Following that, we will adduce some linguistic features of 'China English' from the relevant literature at four levels (phonology, lexis, syntax, and discourse pragmatics) and discuss the arguments in favor of developing local…
Researching and teaching China and Hong Kong English
THE ENGLISH curriculum in China – including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) – has traditionally been dominated by native-speaker (NS) based pedagogical models. This is a source of many problems, ranging from learning outcome to teaching performance, and from cultural inappropriacy to speaker identity. Research in World Englishes (WE), in English as a lingua franca (ELF) and an international language (EIL), and to a lesser exte…
Cantonese as an additional language in Hong Kong: Problems and prospects
Based on data obtained from a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with four Caucasians and four dark-skinned Asians, this study shows that while some ‘foreigners’ do make an effort to learn Cantonese, many find the teaching methods not so useful and the language difficult to master, especially its tone system. The data are analyzed following the interactive multicultural model of acculturation. The findings point toward a huge chasm betw…
Between English and Esperanto: What Does It Take to Be a World Language
Article Between English and Esperanto: what does it take to be a world language? was published on November 13, 2003 in the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language (volume 2003, issue 164)
One day in the life of a “purist”
This paper reports on an experimental study. Twelve university students were asked (a) not to speak any English for one day (b) to record examples of English words that they wanted to use but could not; (c) to write up a two-page reflective diary; and (d) to share and discuss their thoughts, feelings and “rich” points of their experiences in a focus group interview. Before the day of the experiment, they were given training on how to record their…
Discriminatory news discourse: Some Hong Kong data
This article analyses the discriminatory discursive practices of one leading liberal Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, with a view to examining to what extent they mirror those found in the literature (which to date has focused primarily on Europe). The data for the study consist of 80 articles concerning one news event, Chinese Mainlanders claiming the right-of-abode in Hong Kong during the period 30 January 1999 to 19 August 20…
Form‐focused remedial instruction: An empirical study
This article reports on an empirical study exploring the effectiveness of giving oral remedial instruction to secondary and university students using a consciousness‐raising approach. The focus of remedial instruction was three high‐frequency lexico‐grammatical anomalies: ‘pseudo‐tough movement’, the verb concern and the related adjective concerned , and the connective on the contrary . The instrument consisted of two identical tests before treat…
L2 lexis in L1: Reluctance to translate out of concern for referential meaning
Using evidence from the Hong Kong Chinese press, this paper shows that intra-sentential code-alternation may be due to linguistic, especially semantic, factors at work, which explain why the bilingual is reluctant to translate the English expressions into Chinese, resulting in code-alternation. This observation amounts to a challenge to a tacit assumption behind social or discourse-related explanations of code-alternation, that referential meanin…
Language attitudes and linguistic features in the 'China English' debate1
In this paper we shall first try to define the term 'China English' (with our own definition of this term deliberated in the 'Discussion' section) as a performance variety in the larger conceptualization of World Englishes. Following that, we will adduce some linguistic features of 'China English' from the relevant literature at four levels (phonology, lexis, syntax, and discourse pragmatics) and discuss the arguments in favor of developing local…
Discriminatory news discourse: Some Hong Kong data
This article analyses the discriminatory discursive practices of one leading liberal Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, with a view to examining to what extent they mirror those found in the literature (which to date has focused primarily on Europe). The data for the study consist of 80 articles concerning one news event, Chinese Mainlanders claiming the right-of-abode in Hong Kong during the period 30 January 1999 to 19 August 20…
Borrowed identity: Signaling involvement with a Western name
English and Cantonese Phonology in Contrast: Explaining Cantonese ESL Learners' English Pronunciation Problems
It is argued that most if not all of the pronunciation problems encountered by Cantonese learners of English may be adequately accounted for by the contrastive differences discussed in this paper. The phonological differences between the two languages are examined, ranging from their phoneme inventories, the characteristics of the phonemes, the distributions of the phonemes, syllable structure, to the function of tones and their respective rhythm…
The Functions and Status of English in Hong Kong: A Post-1997 Update
This paper is an update of Luke and Richards' (1982) study on the functions and status of English in Hong Kong. The sociolinguistic matrix is described by outlining the distribution of the main functions of the two written languages standard written Chinese (SWC) and English, and the three spoken languages Cantonese, English and Putonghua, in four key domains: government, media, employment and education. Cantonese and English remain the most impo…
South Asian students' needs for Cantonese and written Chinese in Hong Kong: A linguistic study
Based on qualitative data obtained from 15 South Asian (SA) B.Ed. (EL) (Bachelor of Education in English Language) students, this study reports on SA students' difficulty in mastering Mandarin-based written Chinese and the vernacular Cantonese in Hong Kong. For convenience, SA here also refers to students whose homeland is the Philippines. Since Britain's return of sovereignty to China on 1 July 1997, the language policy of post-colonial Hong Kon…
Attitudes Towards English and Cantonese among Hong Kong Chinese University Lecturers
This article describes a study that used primarily in-depth interviews to investigate the attitudes of 20 lecturers towards the English medium of instruction policy at a Hong Kong university at the moment of the former British colony's transition to Chinese sovereignty. The results of the study document the overall attitudes of the lecturers towards the policy, their reasons for supporting it, their problems in applying it, and their reported use…
L2 lexis in L1: Reluctance to translate out of concern for referential meaning
Using evidence from the Hong Kong Chinese press, this paper shows that intra-sentential code-alternation may be due to linguistic, especially semantic, factors at work, which explain why the bilingual is reluctant to translate the English expressions into Chinese, resulting in code-alternation. This observation amounts to a challenge to a tacit assumption behind social or discourse-related explanations of code-alternation, that referential meanin…
Silent conversation through Brushtalk (筆談): The use of Sinitic as a scripta franca in early modern East Asia
Literary Sinitic (written Chinese, hereafter Sinitic) functioned as a ‘scripta franca’ in sinographic East Asia, which broadly comprises China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and Vietnam today. It was widely used by East Asian literati to facilitate cross-border communication interactively face-to-face. This lingua-cultural practice is generally known as bĭtán 筆談, literally ‘brushtalk’ or ‘brush conversation’. While brushtalk as a substitute…
Facilitation of transference: The case of monosyllabic salience in Hong Kong Cantonese
Drawing on Clyne’s (
Cantonese as an additional language in Hong Kong: Problems and prospects
Based on data obtained from a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with four Caucasians and four dark-skinned Asians, this study shows that while some ‘foreigners’ do make an effort to learn Cantonese, many find the teaching methods not so useful and the language difficult to master, especially its tone system. The data are analyzed following the interactive multicultural model of acculturation. The findings point toward a huge chasm betw…
Form‐focused remedial instruction: An empirical study
This article reports on an empirical study exploring the effectiveness of giving oral remedial instruction to secondary and university students using a consciousness‐raising approach. The focus of remedial instruction was three high‐frequency lexico‐grammatical anomalies: ‘pseudo‐tough movement’, the verb concern and the related adjective concerned , and the connective on the contrary . The instrument consisted of two identical tests before treat…
Borrowed identity: Signaling involvement with a Western name
Incorporating L1 Pragmatic Norms and Cultural Values in L2: Developing English Language Curriculum for EIL in the Asia-Pacific Region
After briefly reviewing two research paradigms, Contrastive Rhetoric and New Varieties of English, this paper reaffirms the intimate relationship between language and culture and calls for the incorporation of L1 pragmatic norms and cultural values in the teaching of English as an international language (EIL) in the Asia-Pacific region. Since transfer may take place at the discourse/pragmatic level in the EFL learning process, apparent anomalies …
Attitudes Towards English and Cantonese among Hong Kong Chinese University Lecturers
This article describes a study that used primarily in-depth interviews to investigate the attitudes of 20 lecturers towards the English medium of instruction policy at a Hong Kong university at the moment of the former British colony's transition to Chinese sovereignty. The results of the study document the overall attitudes of the lecturers towards the policy, their reasons for supporting it, their problems in applying it, and their reported use…
Linguistic Convergence: Impact of English on Hong Kong Cantonese
This article presents two types of evidence obtained from the Hong Kong Chinese press before and after the handover – lexicosyntactic transference of English words and specific functions assigned to individual letters of the English alphabet – to show that Hong Kong Cantonese has been enriched at practically all linguistic levels, especially lexis and phonology, as a result of sustained contact with English for over a century. Lexicosyntactic tra…
The Functions and Status of English in Hong Kong: A Post-1997 Update
This paper is an update of Luke and Richards' (1982) study on the functions and status of English in Hong Kong. The sociolinguistic matrix is described by outlining the distribution of the main functions of the two written languages standard written Chinese (SWC) and English, and the three spoken languages Cantonese, English and Putonghua, in four key domains: government, media, employment and education. Cantonese and English remain the most impo…
Phonetic Borrowing: Key to the vitality of written Cantonese in Hong Kong
Chinese Hongkongers express themselves increasingly in written Cantonese, resulting in the proliferation of Cantonese elements in the Hong Kong Chinese press. To overcome the orthographic gap, Hongkongers resort to phonetic borrowing and phonetic compound formation. Phonetic borrowing may be based on modern standard Chinese or on English. Script mixing is very common, suggesting that linguistic convergence has taken place. Eighteen months after t…
Cantonese‐English code‐switching research in Hong Kong: A Y2K review
This paper is a review of the major works in code‐switching in Hong Kong to date. Four context‐specific motivations commonly found in the Hong Kong Chinese press—euphemism, specificity, bilingual punning, and principle of economy—are adduced to show that English is one of the important linguistic resources used by Chinese Hongkongers to fulfill a variety of well‐defined communicative purposes
English and Cantonese Phonology in Contrast: Explaining Cantonese ESL Learners' English Pronunciation Problems
It is argued that most if not all of the pronunciation problems encountered by Cantonese learners of English may be adequately accounted for by the contrastive differences discussed in this paper. The phonological differences between the two languages are examined, ranging from their phoneme inventories, the characteristics of the phonemes, the distributions of the phonemes, syllable structure, to the function of tones and their respective rhythm…
L2 lexis in L1: Reluctance to translate out of concern for referential meaning
Using evidence from the Hong Kong Chinese press, this paper shows that intra-sentential code-alternation may be due to linguistic, especially semantic, factors at work, which explain why the bilingual is reluctant to translate the English expressions into Chinese, resulting in code-alternation. This observation amounts to a challenge to a tacit assumption behind social or discourse-related explanations of code-alternation, that referential meanin…
One day in the life of a “purist”
This paper reports on an experimental study. Twelve university students were asked (a) not to speak any English for one day (b) to record examples of English words that they wanted to use but could not; (c) to write up a two-page reflective diary; and (d) to share and discuss their thoughts, feelings and “rich” points of their experiences in a focus group interview. Before the day of the experiment, they were given training on how to record their…
Discriminatory news discourse: Some Hong Kong data
This article analyses the discriminatory discursive practices of one leading liberal Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, with a view to examining to what extent they mirror those found in the literature (which to date has focused primarily on Europe). The data for the study consist of 80 articles concerning one news event, Chinese Mainlanders claiming the right-of-abode in Hong Kong during the period 30 January 1999 to 19 August 20…
Form‐focused remedial instruction: An empirical study
This article reports on an empirical study exploring the effectiveness of giving oral remedial instruction to secondary and university students using a consciousness‐raising approach. The focus of remedial instruction was three high‐frequency lexico‐grammatical anomalies: ‘pseudo‐tough movement’, the verb concern and the related adjective concerned , and the connective on the contrary . The instrument consisted of two identical tests before treat…
Between English and Esperanto: What Does It Take to Be a World Language
Article Between English and Esperanto: what does it take to be a world language? was published on November 13, 2003 in the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language (volume 2003, issue 164)
Researching and teaching China and Hong Kong English
THE ENGLISH curriculum in China – including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) – has traditionally been dominated by native-speaker (NS) based pedagogical models. This is a source of many problems, ranging from learning outcome to teaching performance, and from cultural inappropriacy to speaker identity. Research in World Englishes (WE), in English as a lingua franca (ELF) and an international language (EIL), and to a lesser exte…
Cantonese as an additional language in Hong Kong: Problems and prospects
Based on data obtained from a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with four Caucasians and four dark-skinned Asians, this study shows that while some ‘foreigners’ do make an effort to learn Cantonese, many find the teaching methods not so useful and the language difficult to master, especially its tone system. The data are analyzed following the interactive multicultural model of acculturation. The findings point toward a huge chasm betw…
Towards ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’ in Hong Kong (SAR): Problems, dilemmas and stakeholders’ views
Despite the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) government’s determination to implement the ‘mother tongue education’ policy amid strong social resistance one year after the handover, English remains a prestigious language in society. The need for Putonghua (Mandarin/Standard Chinese) is also increasing following ever-expanding trade and other activities with mainland China. The societal demand for both English and Putonghua in postcolo…
Language attitudes and linguistic features in the 'China English' debate1
In this paper we shall first try to define the term 'China English' (with our own definition of this term deliberated in the 'Discussion' section) as a performance variety in the larger conceptualization of World Englishes. Following that, we will adduce some linguistic features of 'China English' from the relevant literature at four levels (phonology, lexis, syntax, and discourse pragmatics) and discuss the arguments in favor of developing local…
Improving the Standards and Promoting the Use of English in Hong Kong: Issues, Problems and Prospects
Perfective paradox’: A cross-linguistic study of the aspectual functions of - guo in Mandarin Chinese
The toneless aspect mark - guo is generally viewed as a perfective marker with experiential function. It appears to be subject to a number of semantic constraints, such as discontinuity, repeatability or recurrence, reversibility, and indefinite reference. This article demonstrates that ‘experiential’ is only one of the three main local functions of - guo . Crucial to the determination of the local function of a - guo clause is the boundedness of…
South Asian students' needs for Cantonese and written Chinese in Hong Kong: A linguistic study
Based on qualitative data obtained from 15 South Asian (SA) B.Ed. (EL) (Bachelor of Education in English Language) students, this study reports on SA students' difficulty in mastering Mandarin-based written Chinese and the vernacular Cantonese in Hong Kong. For convenience, SA here also refers to students whose homeland is the Philippines. Since Britain's return of sovereignty to China on 1 July 1997, the language policy of post-colonial Hong Kon…
Facilitation of transference: The case of monosyllabic salience in Hong Kong Cantonese
Drawing on Clyne’s (
Two decades of decolonization and renationalization: The evolutionary dynamics of Hong Kong English and an update of its functions and status
This paper is an update of Luke and Richards and Li on the functions and status of English in postcolonial Hong Kong. Two decades after the handover, relatively little has changed except in the education domain. The ‘mother tongue education’ policy implemented from September 1998, whereby primary school-leavers are streamed into Chinese-medium and English-medium secondary schools, was ‘fine-tuned’ in 2009. Chinese-medium schools are given the fle…
Multilingualism in the Chinese diaspora worldwide: Transnational connections and local social realities
Accepted Manuscript
Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, written by Zev Handel
Review of the book Zev Handel, Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019, xiv, 369 pp. Hardback, isbn: 978-90-04-38632-7
Silent conversation through Brushtalk (筆談): The use of Sinitic as a scripta franca in early modern East Asia
Literary Sinitic (written Chinese, hereafter Sinitic) functioned as a ‘scripta franca’ in sinographic East Asia, which broadly comprises China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and Vietnam today. It was widely used by East Asian literati to facilitate cross-border communication interactively face-to-face. This lingua-cultural practice is generally known as bĭtán 筆談, literally ‘brushtalk’ or ‘brush conversation’. While brushtalk as a substitute…
Linguistics (29 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (22 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · History (14 works) · China (12 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works)