This paper is motivated by the premise that little is known about the use of requestive strategies in request emails in Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Specifically, the paper examines and compares requestive strategies in request emails between two groups of university students, namely English majors (EM) and non-English majors (NEM). It then explores whether the assessments of three situational factors: assessments of social distance, power and rank of imposition, either alone or combined, has a statistically significant effect on the choice of requestive strategies by the two groups. In reference to some existing similar research, the paper argues that both groups under study seemed to exhibit inadequate sociopragmatic competence and pragmalinguistic knowledge. The study thus sheds some light on Interlanguage Pragmatics research on the Chinese EFL context. The paper finally offers some pedagogical implications in foreign language settings.

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Rapport management is argued to be a critical antecedent of voter support in election campaigns, as it can motivate cooperation. However, little research has been conducted exploring how rapport is managed in such practice. In the present study, the campaign leaflets of four political parties in Sheffield Central constituency for the 2017 UK general election were analysed in relation to rapport-management strategies. Three domains of discourse were identified and classified in terms of one or more of the six principles of persuasion: Reciprocity, Consistency and Commitment, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity. The findings showed that Reciprocity and Liking were the commonly employed principles in the rapport-management strategies. These two principles were established in the leaflets by justifying and explaining credentials. Authority played a major role in influencing the functioning of the other principles in the rapport-management strategies. Specifically, the more authority a party had, the stronger the commitment made to act as rapport-management strategies. In contrast, the less authority a party had, the greater social proof and scarcity were involved in the strategies.

This study investigates what images of China were constructed in China Daily’s reports on the G20 summit, and how this was done. One hundred and fifty samples were collected to form a corpus. Data was analyzed through Antconc3.2.4w under Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework. The findings indicated that China Daily has constructed Chinese national images such as a rapidly developing cooperator, a voluntarily responsible, innovative and civilized country with the language resources of vocabulary, modality, tense and the collocation. The study has thus provided some implications for readers to further comprehend the positive national images of China, and for other domestic media to better their foreign publicity strategies.