When I was growing up, there was no internet. Luckily, I had Dad. My father Tom McArthur was my search engine long before Google existed, answering questions that kept me awake at night, often with long, intricate stories. If he didn't know an answer, he would consult one of the many dictionaries and reference books that lined the shelves of our home. There was no such thing as a casual question with Dad; he took my curiosity very seriously.

Any news on English education in China today is now no news, but this most recent one may offer us some fresh food for thought.

The English major programme and related academic disciplines in Chinese universities are apparently experiencing growing pains as documented in the article entitled ‘The English Major Crisis in China’ published in this journal (Chen, 2019). In the article, Chen analysed the controversies surrounding the English major programme in Chinese universities and presented a somewhat gloomy prospect for the English major programme as an undergraduate subject in Chinese universities. Yet we found that the disheartening picture of the English major programme as portrayed by the article is open to question. We are also concerned that the article may misguide readers and negate the efforts that educators have undertaken to refine the English major programme in Chinese universities. For this reason, we would like to respond to the article with a different view, which has been made possible by our concerted efforts to bring the English major programme back to its basics over the last few years. We argue that the English major programme will play a critical role in promoting humanistic education in Chinese universities.

In their article, ‘Back to basics’, Zhou and Zha critique a ‘disheartening picture’ they found in my paper ‘The English major crisis in China’ (2019) and proposes an alternative view based on a model reform project. I will take the opportunity of this invitation to respond to reflect further on my study and the issue under debate.

Semantic shifts have been explored via a range of methods (Allan & Robinson 2012). Typically, semantic shifts were usually noted or described with methods such as a literature review or dictionary checking (e.g. Blank & Koch, 1999; Stockwell & Minkova, 2001; Williams, 1976), which are very labour-intensive and time-consuming methods. Other more recently developed methods involve sociolinguistic interviews (Robinson, 2012; Sandow & Robinson, 2018). However, with the development of large-sized corpora and computational semantics, diachronic semantic shifts have started to be captured in a data-driven way (Kutuzov et al., 2018). Recently, the word embeddings technique (Mikolov et al., 2013) has been proven to be a promising tool for the tracking of semantic shifts (e.g. Hamilton, Leskovec & Jurafsky, 2016a, 2016b; Kulkarni et al., 2015; Kutuzov et al., 2017). For example, Hamilton et al. (2016b) exemplified how to use the technique to capture the subjectification process of the word ‘actually’ during the 20th century.

English-medium instruction (EMI) has been perceived as a key strategy through which universities, propelled by academic, political, social and economic motives, respond to the influence of globalisation (Altbach & Knight, 2007). This has been fuelled by the fact that English, defined as the global common language, is needed to create the knowledge base in global tertiary education (Fishman, 2000). In the process, English has become the universal second language of advanced education (Brumfit, 2004), due to the value attached to the language in present times and the advantage of using the language in the existing global language order (Zhang, 2017). These motivations have contributed to the global phenomenon of English being the medium of instruction (MOI), and higher education has been the venue where EMI could be implemented more consistently (Dearden, 2014). This has resulted in the generation of a growing body of work on how universities plan their language policies (Liddicoat, 2016).

In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999), a new category is identified in the grammar of the English phrase. In conversational data, the most frequent forms cited as examples of this category are or something, and everything, and things and and stuff, which are described as ‘coordination tags’ by Biber et al. (1999: 115–16). This label has not been widely adopted, but the linguistic category it describes has clearly become established as part of modern English. The term ‘general extender’ (Overstreet, 1999) is now commonly used to refer to this category: ‘“general” because they are nonspecific and “extender” because they extend otherwise complete utterances’ (1999: 3). There are two subcategories: adjunctive general extenders, beginning with and, and disjunctive general extenders, beginning with or. In casual conversation, general extenders are typically phrase- or clause-final, consisting of and/or plus a vague noun (stuff/things) or a pronoun (something/everything), with an optional comparative phrase (like that/this). In everyday spoken British English, the phrase and (all) that is also extremely common. In written and formal spoken English, forms with quite different structures, such as et cetera, and so on, and so forth, and or so are more typically used to fulfill related functions. All of these forms are grammatically optional and fall within the more general category of pragmatic markers, along with you know, I mean, like and sort of, ‘expressions which may have little obvious propositional meaning but which oil the wheels of conversational social interaction’ (Beeching, 2016: 1).