Conceptual Network in Creative Morphology: The Linguistic Representation of the Quality of Perception in Chinese
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Date
2024-01-10
Authors
Hung, Hsiao-Hsuan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Sensory language, the linguistic conveyance of sensory perception and experience, has attracted considerable scholarly interest in linguistics and linguistic anthropology. In particular, recent anthropological research on the representation of qualia, the subjective or qualitative properties of sensory experiences, and the revival of linguistic research on mimetic language, including but not limited to sound symbolism, have greatly energized scholarly engagement with the linguistic representation of sensory perception and cross-modal conceptualization of senses. To this date, however, there is no systematic research that explores the role of morphology or word formation in the representation of qualia in Chinese based on large-scale usage data.This dissertation aims to fill this major gap in the research by exploring the dynamic and complex nature of perceptually based conceptualization in a family of reduplication-based mimetic morphological constructions in Chinese. Using a data-driven method, I show that the Chinese morphological pattern [A-BB] is a creative and productive linguistic device of qualia representation in a wide range of sensory perceptual and related experiential domains that form a complex, intertwining conceptual network. Taking a constructionist approach, which argues that the meaning of the whole is larger than the sum of the meanings of the parts, I demonstrate that the schema [A-BB] is associated with the function of psychomimetic conveyance of perceptual qualities. Using sophisticated methods of data analysis and visualization, this dissertation makes new discoveries in Chinese morphology in the representation of sensory perception. In doing so, this dissertation breaks a new path in Chinese sensory language research and offers rich and valuable datasets for future studies.