Acknowledgements
This work was supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (No. 3132023332) in the People’s Republic of China.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Hongying Xu
Hongying Xu is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages at Dalian Maritime University. She holds a PhD from RWTH Aachen University (Germany) in English Linguistics. Her research interests include social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics.