Initial Discussion on the Category of Life in Chinese

Author: Wang Jue
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: The special intuition people have for living things begins very early. (Because) living things all have an invisible essence, and this invisible essence is subject to an invisible process. (Steven Pinker: "The Language Instinct") In human language, most expressions involving inanimate objects are borrowed from the human body and its parts, as well as human senses and emotions, as metaphors. (Vico) The connection between degree of life and the arbitrariness of structure exists extremely widely across languages, and this fact fully demonstrates that the degree of life is a conceptual feature, a feature that constitutes classification, and a basis for classification. Although it has no other reason to be a basis for classification beyond its overall, in other opposing cases, the degree of life seems to indeed have some driving force as the dominant factor. Therefore, our conclusion is that the degree of life cannot be reduced to any single parameter, including only the degree of life itself in its original sense. In fact, the degree of life reflects a natural interaction between humans across several parameters, including the strict degree of life, but also including deixis (perhaps the parameter most easily disentangled from the degree of life among others), as well as various means of enhancing the individualization of an entity, such as assigning it a proper name, thereby also making it more likely to become a topic of conversation.