Cultural conceptualisations of loong (龙) in Chinese idioms

This study investigates the abundant metaphorical meanings of the term loong (‘dragon’) in Chinese idioms and the cognitive and cultural factors that influence those meanings from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics. To this end, we present a systematic categorisation of the idiomatic expressions involving the term loong in Mandarin Chinese based on three conceptual metaphors: a human being is a loong, a concrete entity is a loong, and an abstract object is a loong. We then elaborate on the cultural conceptualisations of loong from three perspectives: cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors. The results of the study show how the metaphorical conceptualisations of loong are profoundly influenced by Chinese culture. The resulting study is intended to add to the pool of studies which lend support to the view that a fine-grained study of the metaphors of a particular culture and their linguistic realisation can shed light on how culture influences human cognition. Finally, the study calls for a clearer integration of cultural approaches into conceptual metaphor theory and it explores some possibilities in this regard.

A New Argument for the Groundedness of Grounding Facts

Many philosophers have recently been impressed by an argument to the effect that all grounding facts about “derivative entities”—e.g. the facts expressed by the (let us suppose) true sentences ‘the fact that Beijing is a concrete entity is grounded in the fact that its parts are concrete’ and ‘the fact that there are cities is grounded in the fact that p’, where ‘p’ is a suitable sentence couched in the language of particle physics—must themselves be grounded. This argument relies on a principle, Purity, which states that facts about derivative entities are non-fundamental. Purity is questionable. In this paper, I introduce a new argument—the argument from Settledness—for a similar conclusion but which does not rely on Purity. The conclusion of the new argument is that every “thick” grounding fact is grounded, where a grounding fact [F is grounded in G, H, …] is said to be thick when at least one of F, G, H, … is a fact—a condition that is automatically satisfied if grounding is factive. After introducing the argument, I compare it with the argument from Purity, and I assess its cogency relative to the relevant accounts of the connections between grounding and fundamentality that are available in the literature.

CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN COGNITIVE-SEMIOTIC INTERPRETATION

The article presents an attempt to view the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor in the cognitive-semiotic aspect. The object of the study is the conceptual metaphor, the subject matter is its cognitive-semantic essence and the forms of its representation. The main thesis that forms the theoretical basis of the article is that the conceptual metaphor understood as the ability of our consciousness to think of one, more abstract entity in terms of another, more concrete, entity, presents a mental phenomenon that may have not only verbal, but other forms of its representation. The main objective of the article is to carry out the analysis of visual, artefact and ontological metaphors in the cognitive-semiotic aspect and the ways of their representation in the text. The main methods of analysis conditioned by the theoretical aspect chosen for analysis are introspection, or metacognition aimed at reconstructing the work of consciousness in the process of metaphorical thinking, and the inferential method aimed at reconstructing implicit metaphorical meanings. The analysis of visual (artistic), artifact and ontological metaphors reveals that they are characterized by the same qualities as verbal metaphors: dynamism, contextual variability and existence of two their varieties: trite metaphors which reflect ordinary thinking and original ones which are the product of artistic thinking. When ontological and artefact metaphors are presented in the text, their metaphorical meanings can be presented both explicitly and implicitly and, in the latter case, their metaphorical meanings must be inferred by the reader or the linguist. The participation of nonverbal codes in the expression of metaphorical meanings does not diminish the significance of the verbal code which is another proof of the leading role of language in conceptualization and interpretation of the world. The analysis undertaken enables to confirm the main thesis as well as to reveal the explanatory potential of the cognitive-semiotic approach to the study of metaphor and, most probably, other language phenomena.

Place, Space and Identity in Modern Drama: Analysis of Four Selected Plays

Individual’s identity has always been expressed by abstract terms like culture, beliefs, religion, values etc. In this paper, I argue that modern playwrights show that the generations of the modern era tend to identify more with place, a concrete entity, than they do with the traditional constitutive elements of identity since these abstractions started to lose their glamour and value in an age marked by tremendous advancement in technology and materialism. With the modern generations increasingly associating themselves with place, an identity crisis has emerged since place is contingent to economic and social factors i.e. is not as stable as culture or religion. The vulnerability of modern identity turns it into a notion in flux, with no fixed or clear-cut boundaries. Thus, modern age people may live with multilayered identity or swing between two or more identities. Place, with whatever experience is practiced in it, remains the hinge on which modern identity revolves. To show that the phenomenon is a global one, the paper studies four plays representing different cultures and spheres—Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, and Wakako Yamuchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance.

Studi Metafora Konseptual pada Idiom Bahasa Jepang yang mengandung Bagian Tubuh dan Bermakna Emosi

Kanyouku is used to express human emotions. This study discusses the mapping of the meaning of Japanese idiom related to emotions in human cognition by using Knowles and Moon’s metaphor theory and conceptual metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson. The study utilizes 28 idioms that related to human basic emotions such as anger, happiness, sadness, fear, love, shame, pride, and surprise. These basic emotions are obtained from Goo Jiten online Japanese dictionary. The results show that human cognition viewing emotion concept as an entity and representing emotions into human body. In Japanese people’s cognition, anger represented as belly, chest, and head; fear represented as tongue, heart, and foot; happiness represented as cheek, chest, and heart; sadness represented as shoulder, chest, and heart; love represented as eye and heart; pride represented as chest; shame represented as face and cheek; and surprise represented as eye, tongue, and heart. Human cognition represented emotion concept as human body to measure the level of emotion. This study mapped the emotion concepts as a concrete entity: the entity as fluid in a container or entity as parts of body. Keywords: Cognitive Linguistic, Conceptual Metaphor, Image Scheme, Idiom, Emotion

A “Highdeeply” Review of Johnny Saldaña’s Thinking Qualitatively: Methods of Mind

More than a book about conducting qualitative research, Johnny Saldaña in Thinking Qualitatively: Methods of Mind asks readers to think “highdeeply,” so they organize their thinking about how to live their best lives through the process of qualitative inquiry. To do so, Saldaña transforms the concept of person-centered qualitative inquiry into a concrete entity with structured exercises and practical examples. Saldaña contributions with this work all center on the process of conscious qualitative reflection as a tool for synthetic understanding of the world around us.

Necessary Existence

A necessary being is a concrete entity that cannot fail to exist. An example of such a being might be the God of classical theism or the universe of necessitarians. Necessary Existence offers and carefully defends a number of novel arguments for the thesis that there exists at least one necessary being, while inviting the reader to a future investigation of what the neccessary being(s) is (are) like. The arguments include a defense of a classic contingency argument, a series of new modal arguments from possible causes, an argument from abstract objects, and a Gödelian argument from perfections. Furthermore, arguments against the possibility of a necessary being are critically examined. Among these arguments are old and new arguments from conceivability, a subtraction argument, problems with causation, and an argument from parsimony. Necessary Existence also includes a defense of the axioms of S5 modal logic, which is a framework for understanding several arguments for necessary existents.

A Study on Chinese TALK Metaphor from Corpus-based Approach

Metaphor is a vitally important concept in Cognitive Linguistics and refers to the mapping from source domain to the target domain. It is the mapping from the concrete entity to the abstract one, through which we can understand the process of men’s mental cognition to handle abstract things through specific ones and has been researching by many linguistic scholars by means of traditional methods such as introspection. The Corpus method is a newly utilized and empirical method to conduct linguistic research and contains the language materials of real and the actual use of language, and corpus is the carrier of basic language knowledge resources based on the computer. The real corpus must be processed (analysis and processing), in order to become useful resources. This paper takes advantage of CCL Corpus(Center for Chinese Linguistics Corpus) which is the biggest Chinese Corpus in China constructed by Beijing University to investigate TAKL metaphor and conduct the empirical research to make metaphor research more objective and convincing.

The Syntax of the Abstract-type Measurement Construction in Mandarin Chinese

This paper investigates a special sub-type of measurement construction in Mandarin Chinese, namely the [Num-measure word-de-N] construction where the N is an abstract dimension-denoting noun. Evidence is presented to show that the abstract-type [Num-measure word-de-N] should be fundamentally distinguished from the quantifying-/modifying-type [Num-measure word-de-N], in which the [Num-measure word] sequence serves to quantize/modify a semantically concrete, entity-denoting N. At the interpretive level, this paper claims that the abstracttype [Num-measure word-de-N] is semantically definite. At the syntactic level, a clausal analysis within the framework of the Predicate Inversion theory is pursued to account for the derivation of the abstract-type measurement construction. Last, it is proposed that the word order distinction between the Chinese abstracttype measurement construction, which is N-final, and its English counterpart, where the N linearly precedes [Num-measure word], can be explained in terms of a parametric variation with respect to the (non-)application of N-raising after Predicate Inversion.