Chinese vocabulary and Huaxia culture

Author: Yang Lin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1996-07-01
Features: Since the 1980s, Chinese academia has been gripped by a cultural fever, with various academic works proudly waving the banner of culture. Titles like "Cultural Studies," "Introduction to Culture," "Cultural Connotation," "Cultural Interpretation," "Comparative Culture," "Tourism Culture," and "Folk Culture" are ubiquitous, seemingly marking a spring of academic. Linguistics, traditionally regarded as the leading discipline in the humanities, faced a "cold and desolate" situation ignored by other disciplines and thus raised the banner of "Cultural Linguistics," actively reaching out to other fields and becoming an interdisciplinary yet independent marginal discipline. Combining linguistic research with cultural research, allowing language and culture to mutually validate and enlighten each other, has long been a tradition in Chinese academia. The term "Cultural Linguistics" was proposed in the 1980s, and people's understanding of it varies. Our understanding of cultural linguistics encompasses two aspects: First, placing language within its cultural context to reveal the role culture plays in the formation, development, and evolution of certain linguistic phenomena, thereby deepening our understanding of these phenomena. Second, using linguistic knowledge to study cultural phenomena and explain their formation, development, and evolution. In specific research, these two aspects often intertwine, mutually observe, and mutually verify, not remaining entirely separate. Chapters 1 to 3 of this book focus on Chinese lexical phenomena, falling under the first aspect, while Chapters 4 and 5 focus on Chinese cultural phenomena, belonging to the second aspect. Some of the references cited in this book were originally encountered indirectly in other works. Whenever possible, we verified the original sources and corrected numerous errors such as misinterpretations, omissions, and mismatches.