Chinese Lexical Semantics

Huang, Chu‐Ren; Hsieh, Shu-Kai

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199856336.013.0018

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Thus, we will exclude them in our analysis. In addition, the high-median-low values are widely adopted and shown to be useful in the analysis of power relations in Chinese [ 39 ], although there are some variations in details.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Wang¹,

Liu²,

Huang

2022

PLoS ONE

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Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Wang¹,

Liu²,

Huang

2022

PLoS ONE

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“…Two main accounts support this argument. First, the Mandarin writing system is considered semantic-based orthography, suggesting the etymology of Chinese characters can be deduced from the semantic and/or phonetic components, and that the Chinese orthographical system encodes certain conceptual properties (Huang and Hsieh 2015;Chen et al 2019). Based on the Shuowenjiezi 说文解字 (Xu 1963, 309), xīn 辛 is originally related with tòng 痛 'hurt'.…”

Section: Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bodily sensation and embodiment: A corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese

Yin¹,

Huang²,

Dong³

2022

Journal of Chinese Linguistics

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Embodiment has been the tenet of several linguistic theories accounting for how language conceptualizes cognitive and bodily experiences. Studies on linguistic synesthesia and sensory lexicon strengthened the embodiment account by showing that the mapping patterns amongst sense modalities likewise exhibited a tendency from the more embodied to the less embodied. This paper reports a corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese to explore the interaction between embodied senses and conceptual embodiment. We first observed that the perception of là 辣 'spicy' and má 麻 'numbing' was chemesthesis derived from a chemical reaction from the body. In addition, the concept of taste was found capable of being depicted by variegated non-taste lexical items from less embodied sensory domains. This study posits that gustatory properties as abstract cognitive categories are likely to be derived from more embodied senses, yet when the quality of gustatory sensation is the focus, less embodied senses can be adopted to modify it. Corroborated with other recent studies, this study underlines and clarifies the role of embodiment as a versatile

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“…This study adopts the position that lexical evolution interacts with social realities and examines the intersection of lexical semantics and communicative functions. The lexical semantic theory we adopt is MARVS (Huang et al, 2000; Huang & Hsieh, 2014), which is a theory of verbal event representation. MARVS aims to represent word senses in terms of eventive structure, participants, and their properties.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Event modules are the “building blocks of event structures” (Huang & Hsieh, 2014, p. 300). Event structures in MARVS are constructed with five atomic event modules (Huang et al, 2000).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Contact Prevention to Social Distancing: The Co-Evolution of Bilingual Neologisms and Public Health Campaigns in Two Cities in the Time of COVID-19

Wang

Huang

2021

Sage Open

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This article investigates the evolution of social distancing terms in Chinese and English in two geographically close yet culturally distinct metropolitan cities: Hong Kong and Guangzhou. This study of bilingual public health campaign posters during the COVID-19 pandemic focuses on how the evolution of neologisms and linguistic strategies in public health campaigns adapts to different societal contexts. A baseline meaning of the re-purposed linguistic expressions was established according to the BNC corpus for English and the Chinese Gigaword Corpus for Chinese. To establish the link between linguistic expressions and public health events, we converted them to eventive structures using the Module-Attribute Representation of Verbs and added interpersonal meaning interpretations based on Systemic Functional Linguistics. The two cities are found to have taken divergent approaches. Guangzhou prefers “contact prevention” with behavior-inhibiting imperatives and high value modality. Conversely, the original use of “contact prevention” in Hong Kong was gradually replaced by the neologism social distancing in English, triggering competing loan translations in Chinese. In Hong Kong, behavior-encouraging expressions are predominantly used with positive polarity and varying modality and mood devices, which fluctuate to track the epidemic curve of COVID-19. We conclude that lexical evolution interacts with social realities. Different speech acts, prohibition in Guangzhou but advice and warning in Hong Kong, are constructed with a careful bilingual reconfiguration of eventive information, mood, modality, and polarity to tactfully address the social dynamics in the two cities.

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Chinese Lexical Semantics

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Bodily sensation and embodiment: A corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese

From Contact Prevention to Social Distancing: The Co-Evolution of Bilingual Neologisms and Public Health Campaigns in Two Cities in the Time of COVID-19

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