Semantic Analysis of Xin: Linguistic Categorization and Cultural Cognition
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Lin, You-Min
Abstract
Abstracthe study is an exploration of cultural cognition and linguistic categorization via the analysis of xin-expressions. Focusing on the semantic analysis of Chinese xin, we have touched upon the issues of polysemy, interaction between metaphor and metonymy, the importance of context in meaning construction and disambiguation, and most importantly, the significance of culture in human categorization and conceptualization. Adopting Principled Polysemy (Evans 2005) as our framework, we have constructed the semantic network of xin based on xin-compounds. Four senses of xin are identified: Muscular Organ, Mind-heart, Central/Innermost Part, and Essential Part. The distinct senses, aside from containing additional message at the conceptual level, are also manifested in unique collocational and constructional patterns. We have identified the Muscular Organ sense as the sanctioning sense, finding it the historically earliest attested meaning, the most closely related to our socio-phenomenological experience, and the sense that can most naturally develop into other senses based on pragmatic and cognitive inferences. Xin-compounds with both the literal and figurative readings call for further exploration of the impact of contextual cues, and the incorporation of discourse data in our analysis.fter the semantic network of xin is constructed, we turn to explore the frequent interaction between two fundamental conceptual strategies -- metaphor and metonymy. Taking metpahotonymy (Goossens 2002) and domain matrix (Croft 2002) as crucial notions to our analysis, we identified four types of expressions involving the combination of metaphor and metonymy: (1) metaphor from metonymy, (2) metaphor within metonymy, (3) metonymy within metaphor, and (4) metaphor + metonymy. Results show that the “mixed types”—the combination of both metaphor and metonymy— prevail in frequency at the discourse level. The finding indicates that conceptualization of xin at the discourse level relies largely on the mixture of both metaphor and metonymy. Such interplay of conceptual contiguity, similarity or contrast is rendered by the linguistic context, world knowledge, and our physical and social-cultural experience. On the other hand, the indispensability of metonymic conceptualizations for all xin-expressions echoes to Huang’s (1994) finding that Chinese is a “metonymic language,” which tends to resort to metonymies for sense extension. inally, taking a broad view of context, we have provided evidence for the essential role of context in meaning construal. By incorporating discourse data in our discussion and thus extend our analysis beyond the lexical level, we have found two kinds of continuums instantiated by xin-expressions: the literal-figurative (physical-mental) continuum and the heart-mind (emotive-cognitive) continuum. Xin can be divided into “literal” and “figurative” readings, with the literal ones denoting the make-up and condition of the muscular heart, and the figurative ones designating both the emotive and the cognitive. The three conceptualizations of xin overlap in their linguistic manifestations. Disambiguation of meaning of a xin-expression relies largely on context rooted linguistic profiles, immediate situation, and social-cultural experiences.
Subjects
linguistic categorization
culture
metaphor
metonymy
context
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