The Conceptual Structure Of Emotional Experience In Chinese

This is a PhD dissertation that analyzes the metaphors and metonymies found in Chinese emotion concepts, such as ANGER, FEAR, HAPPINESS, SADNESS, and WORRY and looks at the role of culture in the folk models which structure them. Completed in 1989, it was the first detailed attempt to look at Chinese emotion metaphors using the Cognitive Linguistic Framework developed in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The content should be equally accessible to cognitive linguists interested in Chinese metaphors, universals of metaphors, emotion metaphors, or to Chinese language learners wanting to expand their vocabulary in a meaningful and systematic way.

This chapter briefly describes the general goals of the book, introduces the most fundamental features of the methodology that is employed to achieve these goals, and gives an outline of the structure of the book. A more detailed account of the goals and methodology is presented in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. What the Book Is About The main objective of this study is to attempt to answer the question: How do people understand their emotions? As we shall see in the next chapter, a large number of scholars have tried to provide answers to this question. The interest in the way people understand their emotions has led scholars to the issue of the nature of emotion concepts and emotional meaning. Since the notion of understanding involves or presupposes the notions of concept and meaning, it was only natural for scholars with an interest in the way people understand their emotions to tum their attention to emo tion concepts and the meaning associated with emotion terms. So the broader issue has often become more specific. For example, Davitz in his The Language of Emotion formulated the central question in the following way: "What does a person mean when he says someone is happy or angry or sad?" (Davitz 1969: 1).

In Where Metaphors Come From, Zoltán Kövecses proposes a metaphorical grounding that augments and refines conceptual metaphor theory according to which conceptual metaphors are based on our bodily experience. While this is certainly true in many cases of metaphor, the role of the body in metaphor creation can and should be reinterpreted, and, consequently, the body can be seen as just one of the several contexts from which metaphors can emerge (including the situational, discourse, and conceptual-cognitive contexts) - although perhaps the dominant or crucial one. Kövecses is a leader in CMT, and his argument in this book is more in line with what has been discovered about the nature of human cognition in recent years; namely, that human cognition is grounded in experience in multiple ways - embodiment, in a strict sense, being just one of them (see Barsalou, 2008; Gibbs, 2006; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005). In light of the present work, this is because cognition, including metaphorical cognition, is grounded in not only the body, but also in the situations in which people act and lead their lives, the discourses in which they are engaged at any time in communicating and interacting with each other, and the conceptual knowledge they have accumulated about the world in the course of their experience of it.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao exhorted the Chinese people to “smash the four olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Yet when the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square chanted “We want to see Chairman Mao,” they unknowingly used a classical rhythm that dates back to the Han period and is the very embodiment of the four olds. An Anatomy of Chinese reveals how rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey time-honored meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be consciously aware, and contributes to the ongoing debate over whether language shapes thought, or vice versa. Perry Link’s inquiry into the workings of Chinese reveals convergences and divergences with English, most strikingly in the area of conceptual metaphor. Different spatial metaphors for consciousness, for instance, mean that English speakers wake up while speakers of Chinese wake across. Other underlying metaphors in the two languages are similar, lending support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain. The distinction between daily-life language and official language has been unusually significant in contemporary China, and Link explores how ordinary citizens learn to play language games, artfully wielding officialese to advance their interests or defend themselves from others. Particularly provocative is Link’s consideration of how Indo-European languages, with their preference for abstract nouns, generate philosophical puzzles that Chinese, with its preference for verbs, avoids. The mind-body problem that has plagued Western culture may be fundamentally less problematic for speakers of Chinese.

Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). This book challenges this simplistic division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent "constructed" from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. The view proposed here demonstrates how cultural aspects of emotions, metaphorical language about the emotions, and human physiology in emotion are all part of an intergrated system and shows how this system points to the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory views of biological reductionism and social constructionism in contemporary debates about human emotion.

The volume brngs togethr an int'l,interdisciplinary group of resrchers focusing on the verbal communication of emotion.The chapters provide a comprehensive look at the current state of research on the use of language in affective communication.

How do emotions change over time? When is hate honorable? What happens when "love" is translated into different languages? Such questions are now being addressed by historians who trace how emotions have been expressed and understood in different cultures throughout history. Doing Emotions History explores the history of feelings such as love, joy, grief, nostalgia as well as a wide range of others, bringing together the latest and most innovative scholarship on the history of the emotions. Spanning the globe from Asia and Europe to North America, the book provides a crucial overview of this emerging discipline. An international group of scholars reviews the field's current status and variations, addresses many of its central debates, provides models and methods, and proposes an array of possibilities for future research. Emphasizing the field's intersections with anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, data-mining, and popular culture, this groundbreaking volume demonstrates the affecting potential of doing emotions history. Contributors are John Corrigan, Pam Epstein, Nicole Eustace, Norman Kutcher, Brent Malin, Susan Matt, Darrin McMahon, Peter N. Stearns, and Mark Steinberg.

The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.