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“YOU CAN LIVE LIKE A KING …” A POSTCOLONIAL TOUR OF COLONIAL HONG KONG

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Ellis J. W.

Asian and African Studies

2017

vol. 26

issue 2

209 – 232

For a long time Westerners were attracted to the Far East by a romantic vision of the Orient. This essay explores how written tourism texts, travel advertisements, and related ephemera, blended fantasy and reality to lure Western visitors to the remote, ‘exotic’ British colony of Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a divided city, with a small British contingent overseeing a large Chinese society. Westerner writers, advertising illustrators, and the tourism industry generally, reflected colonialist perspectives and exploited a largely contrived East-West dichotomy between Hong Kong’s Chinese and British residents, reinforcing an Orientalist view of exoticism and colonial superiority. The essay treats tourism images as cultural relics and social statements, which transmitted disturbing messages about relationships of social power, through a compositional device called visual positional superiority. The essay takes the reader on a hypothetical Grand Tour of colonial Hong Kong, visiting racially segregated Western enclaves, the private world of international hotel “micro-cultures”, and “contact zones”, where people met in “asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination”. The essay concludes with musings on Hong Kong’s recent effort to change its global identity to “Asia’s World City”, after the British transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. Even in the postcolonial era, efforts to encapsulate Hong Kong’s essence rely on troubling symbols carried over from the colonial past.

TOWARDS A COMPLEX ANALYSIS OF WAYIHÎ + T CONSTRUCTIONS IN BIBLICAL HEBREW

100%

Ellis J. W.

Asian and African Studies

2018

vol. 27

issue 1

50 – 79

This study analyses the complex behavioural profile of Biblical Hebrew constructions that are formally characterized by the schematic sequence: wayhî + temporal expression (T) + a wayyiqtol or qatal clause within the corpus of Genesis – 2 Chronicles. More specifically, this schema entails the following construction types: 1) wayhî + T + wayyiqtol, 2) wayhî + T + (ו +) X + qatal, and 3) wayhî + T + qatal. In analysing these constructions, this study utilizes a framework known as Construction Grammar, in addition to other complementary frameworks that fall under the more general rubric of Cognitive Linguistics. The constructions are analysed according to the following parameters: the formal and semantic profile of the temporal adjunct employed; the discourse pragmatic function and distribution in discourse; and the TAM semantics of the wayyiqtol and qatal verb forms. This empirical analysis reveals that, while sharing a prototypical discourse function, these constructions differ with respect to their distribution in discourse. Moreover, this study shows that the choice to use one construction over another is motivated by the simultaneous interplay of several factors, among which the most relevant are: the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of the temporal adjuncts; the discourse pragmatic profile of each construction type; the TAM properties of the verb; and the syntactic profile of the wayyiqtol and qatal clauses. Overall, the behaviour of the wayhî + T constructions epitomizes the complexity of Biblical Hebrew, in particularly, the fuzziness of grammatical categories, their multilevel interconnectivity, and dynamics.

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2 Asian and African Studies

2 Ellis J. W.

1 2018

1 2017

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“YOU CAN LIVE LIKE A KING …” A POSTCOLONIAL TOUR OF COLONIAL HONG KONG

TOWARDS A COMPLEX ANALYSIS OF WAYIHÎ + T CONSTRUCTIONS IN BIBLICAL HEBREW