The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics

Note: I've changed the old-style (and sometimes inconsistent) romanisation to pinyin and added in simplified Chinese characters. If you spot any typos or errors, please let me know so I can correct them. Thanks! A Chinese Critical Vocabulary (Appendix B in The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, 1937) In my efforts at translation of Chinese literature, for instance in the translation of The Epigrams of Zhang Chao 张潮, I have constantly run across phrases or terms that are extremely difficult to render into English. This has made me think that perhaps a list of Chinese critical terms with explanatory comments will be both useful and enlightening. It will also be enlightening because the Chinese critics seem to have evolved a technique for the enjoyment of nature and art and literature, and an examination of their critical vocabulary will reveal this technique and their aesthetic feelings about things. One is often forced to write bad English in trying to express such Chinese aesthetic ideas or notions, as for instance when one speaks of 'enjoying the snow'. 'singing the wind', awaiting the moon', 'playing water', 'facing wine', 'sleeping flowers', 'pacing the moonlight', 'pacing spring', 'pillowing water', 'lying down travelling', and so on. One needs to explain that 'awaiting the moon' means that one goes out to the courtyard after supper to look at the crescent moon, but it has not yet come up and so one has to wait for it, or that 'lying down travelling' means mentally travelling while lying in bed. And when one speaks of 'the moon being suspended at the roof-corner' or 'over the treetops', of course the phrase is figurative. But there are more abstract and elusive ideas that are more difficult to paraphrase, as for instance when a Chinese artists speaks of the 'five grades of qing 清' (purity): 'pure and inspired', as when one looks at the moon over the hills and is disgusted with the busy life and thinks of going away to be a recluse; 'pure and charming', as when one has books in one's study and has flowers well arranged in his vase; 'pure and poor', as when one is somewhat sad and forlorn living out in a dreary valley and forsaken by his relatives; 'pure and crazy', as when one loves secluded spots and rare persons and books; and 'pure and rare', as when one has read the classics of the ages and finds himself at home among rocks and springs, and 'his writing smells of haze and coloured clouds, and his conduct is far removed from the dusts of the busy world'. I am trying in the following to interpret briefly some of these aesthetic notions under seven heads. First, the emotions and personality of the man; second, aesthetic notions borrowed from physical objects in general; third, types of beauty characteristic of spring; fourth, types of beauty characteristic of summer; fifth, types of beauty characteristic of autumn; sixth, types of beauty characteristic of winter; seventh, the beauty of perfect naturalness, which is the highest form of beauty attainable by human artists. The list is, of course, far from complete and deals chiefly with the most characteristic aesthetic ideals. But while an intensive study of this critical vocabulary will increase one's understanding and enjoyment of Chinese paintings, a great majority of the terms have moral connotations also. All human personalities can be described in aesthetic terms, and they usually are in the Chinese language. All painting, all poetry and all art are based upon two elements, which are called, in Chinese, jing 景 or the scene, the picture; the qing 情, or the sentiment or mood of man.

Chinese as a Second Language , 2023

Introducing Chinese Linguistics: A Handbook for Chinese Language Teachers and Learners (henceforth ICL) provides a comprehensive, accessible and innovative introduction to Chinese linguistics, covering key topics such as Chinese phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, the writing system and the role of social and cultural factors in Chinese language use. Although a number of introductory textbooks on Chinese linguistics are available on the market (e.g., Norman, 1988; Sun, 2006; Shei, 2014), ICL is distinctive in that it is tailored to the needs of L2 Chinese language educators and learners. It highlights common challenges encountered by adult L2 learners of Mandarin Chinese and offers pedagogical suggestions based on research findings in Chinese second language acquisition. ICL consists of eight chapters. The first chapter starts with basic concepts in general linguistics and second language acquisition and then moves to a survey of language varieties under the umbrella term of "Chinese language" and a brief history of Mandarin Chinese with emphasis given to dispelling common misconceptions about linguistics and the Chinese language. The following two chapters focus on Chinese phonetics and phonology: Chapter 2 is dedicated to consonants, vowels, syllable structures, and Chinese annotation systems, whereas Chapter 3 discusses tones, intonation, and stress. Chapter 4 examines Chinese morphology and decodes how words are structured in Mandarin Chinese with insightful examples and explanations. The next two chapters attend to important issues in Chinese syntax, with Chapter 5 addressing basic syntactic structures, such as lexical categories, noun and verb phrases and Chapter 6 explaining noncanonical Chinese sentence structures, such as the ba and bei constructions. Chapter 7 is devoted to demystifying the Chinese writing system, a very challenging aspect for L2 learners to acquire. This chapter covers a variety of topics crucial to the Chinese writing system, including an overview of Chinese script evolution, formation of Chinese characters, the basic strokes, components and radicals of Chinese characters as well as Chinese script reforms. The last chapter investigates how social and cultural factors shape Chinese language use. This chapter introduces important concepts in Chinese pragmatics and Chinese language variation

Asian Englishes, 2022

There has been limited research on Chinese English literature (CEL) in the domain of contact literatures. This article reports on a study of a representative Chinese English (CE) literary work well received by a worldwide audience – Qiu Xiaolong’s Enigma of China. With the aim of exploring CE by analysing the unique ‘Chineseness’ in this CE literary work from the paradigms of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, the language innovations and sociocultural meanings embedded in different levels of the work are examined. Further, by adopting a corpus-based approach and conducting keyword analysis, a number of language innovations were identified. These included the use of innovative hybrid compounds at the lexis level, the use of hybrid Chinese sentences of parallelism at the syntax level, and the use of discourses on political ideology and employment of ancient Chinese poems at the level of discourse pragmatics. It is argued that these language innovations are manifestations of a transfer of traditional Chinese culture norms and political ideology. The question of how to integrate CE corpus into courses on English creative writing in China is also discussed.

The author argues that Chinese characters have shaped Chinese poetic art not through their ideographic form but through their monosyllabic sound. Specifically, the pauses in a Chinese poetic line tend to be determined by sound patterns. Since monosyllabic sound is nearly always endowed with meaning, sound patterns tend to be semantic groupings as well. These groupings of meaning, in turn, determine syntax and, by extension, the organization of an entire poem. Given the semantic denseness of Chinese poetry, this structure is crucial to the overall meaning of a poem, to how we read or understand it. So what we have is something like sound 0 prosodic pattern 0 semantic grouping 0 syntax 0 structure. A multilayered integration of all these elements seems to represent the gestalt of Chinese poetic form, with monosyllabic sound as its foundation. At its best, this gestalt engenders a dynamic interplay of all its elements, from which poetic vision emerges.

The present article combines the Chinese traditional and modern linguistic field research. It is widely admitted that modern Chinese linguistic fieldwork practice was introduced from the West, but also that knowledge in the humanities is strongly situated, especially in the field of language studies. The article, in terms of linguistic historiography, offers an overview of Chinese traditional linguistic fieldwork and the spread of modern Western linguistic fieldwork practice in China, and conducts a contrastive analysis between the two to reveal that modern Chinese linguistic fieldwork, though introduced from the West, is, by nature, a combination of Chinese traditional linguistic fieldwork in Fangyan studies and Western linguistic fieldwork practice.

Chinese as a Second Language: The Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 2015

This is a comprehensive review of the book "Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction" by Chaofen Sun

These brief notes accompany the slides available on Slideshare.

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2020

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 2020

This article opens with a reflection on the extrinsic and intrinsic causes of the neglect of Chinese prose in sinological literary studies, followed by the construction of a patterning-based scheme for codifying Chinese prose forms. An in-depth analysis of eight famous texts, drawn from antiquity through the Qing, reveals how continual innovations in extratextual patterning and textual patterning have given rise to manifold and inherently related prose forms over the millennia. The close reading also sheds light on these prose forms' distinctive artistic features, as well as their symbiotic relationships with the three types of genres (narrative, descriptive, and expository) and with broad sociopolitical and cultural developments. It is hoped that these findings will generate serious interest in prose studies among literary sinologists. Keywords Chinese prose forms, Chinese prose art, parallel prose, ancient-style prose, eight-legged essay In Western-language (sinological) studies of Chinese literature, an extraordinary lacuna has eluded the attention of most scholars: the absence of any comprehensive anthology of artistic, nonfiction prose (hereafter just prose), even though prose is an independent literary genre privileged (with poetry) over fiction and drama. Compounding this neglect, all general anthologies of Chinese literature in translation have to date relegated prose to the margins. Monograph studies of Chinese prose art are practically nonexistent. The rich heritage of Chinese prose art has been reduced to mere samples of famous prose works in unguided translations. Thus, as a first step toward restoring prose to its rightful place in sinological literary studies, we have created a comprehensive guided anthology,

This article deals with some issues related to the application of a number of notions of Western linguistics to the analysis of Chinese morphology. The article first investigates some basic articulations of the notion of “word” with respect to the Chinese language, i.e. morpheme, syllable, bound and free root, semi-word. Among the peculiarities which emerge are the centrality of the syllable in the morphological analysis of this language and the tendency to reanalyse syllables as morphemes. The new syllables reanalysed as morphemes may be used as constituents in compound neologisms. The article also proposes some reflections on free and bound roots in Chinese and highlights the fact that Chinese bound roots cannot be assimilated to the so-called semi-words in the languages of Europe, contrary to what has been suggested by Packard (2000), who considers these two kinds of roots to be very similar. Finally, this article presents some issues related to lexical categories and to the categorial indeterminacy of lexical items in the Chinese language.