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.

Chinese idioms as constructions

Chinese Quadrisyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (henceforth QIEs) are highly productive in the modern language. They can be used to understand the cognitive processing of structure and meaning during reading comprehension, as in the patterning of [qian-A-wan-B] ‘1k-A-10k-B’ (e.g. one-thousand army ten-thousand horse). However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of QIEs during reading comprehension. Adopting the framework of Construction Grammar, in the present study, we aimed to study the convergence and divergence between native speakers and L2 learners in the processing of Chinese idiomatic constructions. In the present study, twenty-three native university-level Mandarin speakers and twenty-three L2 learners of intermediate and advanced levels of Mandarin, all speakers of the non Sinosphere, participated in the experiment, and were instructed to make a semantic congruency judgment during the presentation of a QIE. Our results showed that, for both native speakers and L2 learners, semantically transparent idiomatic constructions elicited much shorter RTs than semantically opaque idiomatic constructions. Our behavioral results also showed that native speakers processed low frequency QIEs faster than high frequency ones, implying semantic satiation to impede the interpretation of high frequency idioms. For L2 learners, it was semantic transparency, rather than frequency, that played a more prominent role in idiom processing.

The Metaphorical Interpretation of English and Chinese Body-part Idioms Based on Relevance Theory

As a special language coding way and language phenomenon, metaphor is an important form when humans use language in communication. However, metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary. They are based on our physical experience of the world around us. Idioms are the crystallization of human language and culture and play an important role in human communication. The idiomatic meaning is not simply the sum of the lexical meanings, but often the metaphorical meaning extended from the literal meaning. The paper is based on the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1995), adopts the methods of comparative analysis and text analysis, and takes the idioms of “body metaphor” contained in English and Chinese as the main research object to explore the following questions: 1. What is the interpretation model of the “body-part metaphors” in idioms? 2. In English and Chinese idioms, what are the similarities and differences in the use and interpretation of body-part metaphors? Firstly, the idioms of body-part metaphor are classified based on their projection types, then analyzing the projection methods of each type. Finally, through the new reasoning model guided by relevance theory to analyze the reasoning process of body-part metaphor in English and Chinese idioms, exploring the importance of cognitive context in the interpretation of body-part idioms.

Paraphrasing Chinese Idioms: Paraphrase Acquisition, Rewording and Scoring

Paraphrasing is a process to restate the meaning of a text or a passage using different words in the same language to give a clearer understanding of the original sentence to the readers. Paraphrasing is important in many natural language processing tasks such as plagiarism detection, information retrieval, and machine translation. In this article, we describe our work in paraphrasing Chinese idioms by using the definitions from dictionaries. The definitions of the idioms will be reworded and then scored to find the best paraphrase candidates to be used for the given context. With the proposed approach to paraphrase Chinse idioms in sentences, the BLEU was 75.69%, compared to the baseline approach that was 66.34%.

'Don't ask me, ask the horse': Evaluating resource-based learning

This study focuses on a resource-based learning unit, the ‘Chinese Idioms Cocktail’ and the results of its evaluation at a primary school in Hong Kong. The ‘Chinese Idioms Cocktail’ unit utilises a self-designed PowerPoint presentation with the “True or False” game, cartoon film show, worksheets, 80 thematic printed materials on Chinese idioms, an idioms dictionary and encyclopedia and 10 related websites. The unit was carried out in the library. The authors argue that all library programs should be routinely evaluated to assess their effectiveness and to identify areas that can be improved. The results indicated that all of the resources contributed to the successful completion of the unit, although there were some areas that could be improved.