No abstract

This is a study of Chinese-English code-switching (CS) by grandparents, parents, and grandchildren in family conversations. Based on a 30,000-word corpus of New ZealandChinese family conversations, 1,091 tokens of CS were retrieved and coded as "betweenturns" CS and "within-turn" CS on the basis of structural form. The results generally supported three hypotheses proposed on the bases of Communication Accommodation Theory and the contrasting bilingual competence across the three generations. Between-turns CS occurred more often than within-turn CS (Hypothesis 1), and the ratio of between-to within-turn CS was higher for grandchildren than for either parents or grandparents (Hypothesis 2a). Parents used more within-than between-turns CS, and their propensity for within-turn CS was significantly greater than that of grandchildren but not of grandparents (partial support for Hypothesis 2b). The interpretive function of CS was then examined to identify tokens of CS that facilitated family members communicating with each other despite language barriers. Parents were found to be the main users of interpretive CS. Four tokens of interpretive CS (from a total of 69) were presented to illustrate the kinds of communication problems that occasioned the use of interpretive CS, and the turnby-turn dynamics in which the interpretive function was collaboratively enacted.

Communication between grandparents and grandchildren can be superficial because of insufficient common ground between them. Among Chinese immigrant families in New Zealand, communication is complicated by linguistic mismatches, as grandparents may be proficient only in Chinese and grandchildren in English. To surmount these communication barriers, middle-aged parents (who know the cultures and languages of both grandparents and grandchildren) may play the role of a 'communication broker' to encourage and assist the two generations to conversationally move towards each other. We identified 35 cases (tokens) of brokering in 12 New Zealand Chinese families and found, as hypothesized, that brokering was significantly overrepresented in moderately (compared to high- or low-) acculturated families, and that brokers were mostly middle-aged parents. In the qualitative part of the study, detailed turn-by-turn analyses of brokering were conducted to reveal how brokering was occasioned, its subsequent enactment and eventual outcome. The results extend the understanding of unmediated communication accommodation in dyadic settings to mediated accommodation in group settings wherein a third (and sometimes a fourth) person brokers the accommodation. The resultant framework of brokered accommodation will be useful for research on other group conversations such as those involving a nurse brokering between a doctor and a patient.

The extensible markup language (XML), a standard format of web information, has a clear syntax but unfortunately an ambiguous formal semantics, which results in being not used directly in semantic web applications. So it is tough job to reuse XML-based data intelligently in the semantic web. To address this problem, a new formal technique of obtaining ontology data automatically from XML documents is proposed. We provide the XML a semantical interpretation by developing a graph-based formal language, which then can be automatically mapped into web ontology language OWL with semantics preserved. The semantic validity and entailment problem are also concerned. The automatical mapping tool has also been developed.

We propose a bio-inspired model for making handover decision in heterogeneous wireless networks. It is based on an extended attractor selection model, which is biologically inspired by the self-adaptability and robustness of cellular response to the changes in dynamic environments. The goal of the proposed model is to guarantee multiple terminals’ satisfaction by meeting the QoS requirements of those terminals’ applications, and this model also attempts to ensure the fairness of network resources allocation, in the meanwhile, to enable the QoS-oriented handover decision adaptive to dynamic wireless environments. Some numerical simulations are preformed to validate our proposed bio-inspired model in terms of adaptive attractor selection in different noisy environments. And the results of some other simulations prove that the proposed handover scheme can adapt terminals’ network selection to the varying wireless environment and benefits the QoS of multiple terminal applications simultaneously and automatically. Furthermore, the comparative analysis also shows that the bio-inspired model outperforms the utility function based handover decision scheme in terms of ensuring a better QoS satisfaction and a better fairness of network resources allocation in dynamic heterogeneous wireless networks.