Publications

Publication details [#11556]

Yu, Ning. 2009. The Chinese HEART in a Cognitive Perspective: Culture, Body, and Language. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter . 444 pp.

Abstract

(From 'Introduction') This book focuses on a single concept, the concept of "heart" in Chinese, encoded in the Chinese character 'xin' (pronounced close to shin). For me, however, working on this research project is drilling the earth for oil: on the surface there is only a very small hole, but once the drill reaches a certain depth, it encounters an immense reservoir of resources. The term "heart" may seem susceptible to a straightforward definition, perhaps as the internal organ that pumps blood for circulation inside the body, but that is a scientific definition of the "physical heart", which, in terms of its bodily functions, should be the same among all human beings, regardless of their cultural or ethnical background. However, what I want to concentrate on in this book is the cultural conception of the "mental heart", which may vary greatly across different cultures or even within one culture across different periods of its history (see, e.g., Doueihi 1997; Erickson 1997; Høystad 2007; Jager 2001; Sharifian et al. 2008a; Wierzbicka 1989, 1992). Behind the Chinese word xin 'heart' there is a long and rich cultural history through which the Chinese concept of "heart" has been formed. Reflecting this long and rich cultural history is an enormous amount of linguistic data in the Chinese language that manifest the Chinese conceptualization of the heart. But this conceptualization of the heart, the cultural models underlying it, and the linguistic usages manifesting it, as far as I know, have never been studied in a systematic manner. (Ning Yu)