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This book outlines the development and research results of cultural semantic theory, and then proposes the distinction between two types of cultural semantics at the synchronic level: conceptual gap items and items with a cultural meaning. It provides criteria for identifying these items by using detailed examples from theory and application. Finally, the two types of cultural semantics are applied to the case of modern Chinese. The criteria proposed for determining the Chinese cultural semantics apply not only to this, but also to other languages. Therefore, this book offers an operational basis for further studies of cultural semantics in academia.
This book outlines the development and research results of cultural semantic theory, and then proposes the distinction between two types of cultural semantics at the synchronic level: conceptual gap items and items with a cultural meaning. It provides criteria for identifying these items by using detailed examples from theory and application. Finally, the two types of cultural semantics are applied to the case of modern Chinese. The criteria proposed for determining the Chinese cultural semantics apply not only to this, but also to other languages. Therefore, this book offers an operational basis for further studies of cultural semantics in academia.
Abstract
This study looks at the grammatical category of evidentiality in Qiangic languages within the typological framework developed by Aikhenvald. An examination of nine Qiangic languages, with a total of sixteen dialects and varieties, shows that the evidential systems currently identified can be grouped into three categories: the Rgyalrongic type, which is characterized by a firsthand and a non-firsthand subsystem in the past tense, the Qiang type, with a visual, an inferential, and a reported evidential, and the southern Qiangic type, which consists of a direct, an inferential, and a reported and/or a quotative evidential. After comparing these systems, it is found that there is little or no conclusive evidence for them to be inherited from a proto-language, instead, they are more likely to have developed independently. The special properties of the direct evidentials and the unusual composition of the reported and quotative evidentials recurrent in several languages are also discussed.
Abstract
This paper is a brave and largely successful effort to make sense of bamboo slips unearthed from ancient Chinese tombs and the astrological texts written on them, and especially their relationship to music. Jao Tsung-i then relates these primary texts to near-contemporary and other passages on the subject that survive only in later redactions and establishes clear linkage between the two. The picture that emerges is a complex web of interconnection between musical mode, notes, wind direction, climate, human health, harvest, and military action. Ancient China was clearly a world where the significance of phenomena and event was paramount.
Abstract
With its multiplicity of short-lived states, the political history of the period between the Tang and Song dynasties in the tenth century is both confusing and convoluted. This essay makes sense of this background in order to give a context to the pipa scores found in Dunhuang that constitute some of the most important early musical notations that survive. The principal sources that Jao Tsung-i deploys are the Dunhuang manuscripts themselves with which he was evidently intimately familiar. To add contemporary drama to his narrative, a strong subtext is acerbic dissection of opinions on the topic put forward by fellow scholar He Changlin