Zhengdao Ye

The Chinese Folk Model of Facial Expressions: A Linguistic Perspective

This study provides much-anticipated information on how facial expressions are perceived and interpreted by people from a non-Western culture by undertaking a detailed, culturespecific case study of their linguistic representations in the Chinese language. It shows that linguistic representations of facial expressions, which represent a local facial encoding system, provide valuable resources with which researchers can obtain a culture-internal view of the perceptions and conceptions of the face. A folk model of facial expressions characteristic of the Chinese people is revealed through systematic documentation and linguistic analyses of set phrases for describing facial expressions drawn from Hongloumeng, the most popular and important literary work in the Chinese language. This folk model, which shows a way of seeing and thinking about facial expressions that is not commonly reflected in the English language, and is yet most natural to the Chinese people, questions the methodological assumptions underpinning the current dominant paradigm in research of the ‘universals’ of the human face, and highlights the force of culture and folk theories in scientific research programs. It also demonstrates the usefulness and viability of a linguistic perspective and methodology, in particular the cross-cultural semantic theory of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), for a theory of linguistic representations of facial expressions and emotions across cultures.

Understanding the Conceptual Basis of the ‘Old Friend’ Formula in Chinese Social Interaction and Foreign Diplomacy: A Cultural Script Approach

This study attempts to make sense of a Chinese diplomatic formula—calling or labelling ones counterpart zhōngguó rénmín de lăopéngyóu 中国人民的老朋友 (‘an old friend of the Chinese people’)—by unravelling its conceptual basis. It shows that this formula has deep roots in Chinese social practices, and that its use is governed by a web of intrinsically-linked cultural scripts. The paper articulates these scripts in terms of the culture-independent Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), unveiling the cultural logic underlying the use of the expression and revealing the culturally distinctive Chinese way of categorizing and conceptualizing ‘friend’, which is different from the Anglophone way. On the one hand, the paper shows the crucial role that language plays in managing interpersonal relationships by Chinese speakers; on the other, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the conceptual foundations of Chinese diplomatic style, illustrating how formulaic language in diplomacy highlights aspects of social cognition that are fundamental to the speakers of a community, and therefore deserving more attention than has hitherto been the case.

Eating and Drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A Lexical-Conceptual Analysis

There are many activities that humans cannot do without. Eating and drinking are two of them. But, do people conceptualise these ‘basic’ human activities in the same way? This paper provides a Chinese perspective from two varieties of Sinitic languages—Mandarin Chinese and Shanghai Wu, which is spoken in the Shanghai metropolitan area by approximately 14 million native speakers. Both of these forms of Chinese suggest two different ways of conceptualisation. In Mandarin Chinese, a lexical distinction is made between chī and hē, comparable to eat and drink in English (but not exactly the same); whereas in Shanghai Wu one single lexical item čhyq is used to describe any activity involving ingestion. The paper conducts a detailed contrastive semantic analysis of these concepts in question, explores the motivations behind their figurative meaning extensions, and uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to articulate the conceptulisations reflected in these concepts. The findings of this paper are consistent with those emerging from crosslinguistic investigation of less familiar languages in recent times, in that there are variations in linguistic coding of eating and drinking (e.g. Newman, 2009b). However, this paper also illustrates that one perhaps should not underestimate the variations of conceptualisation within one ethnic group.