Chinese Language, Culture and Society

Catalog description

The study of Chinese language and culture and a perspective on the way of life in contemporary Chinese society. Through this course, the students are introduced to a cognitive approach to the study of Chinese language and culture and a broad perspective on the Chinese way of life in contemporary Chinese society. In particular, we will study how the interaction between Chinese language and culture frames the worldview of Chinese speakers, how the usage of the Chinese language manifests the underlying conceptual structure, which in turn is shaped by the physical (including bodily) and cultural experience of its speakers, and how conventional usage of linguistic expressions of Chinese reflects, and possibly influences, the ways in which Chinese speakers see or conceptualize the world. We will focus on conventionalized expressions, which include compound words, idiomatic phrases, and proverbial sayings, in the Chinese language, and study the Chinese conventional ways of talking about reality, both external and internal, as windows into Chinese culture and cognition. More generally, we will try to understand the embodied nature of human cognition as we see how abstract thought is grounded in bodily experience in and with the physical and cultural world. We will also look at various domains of life in contemporary China in order to gain a better understanding of Chinese society. The objectives of this course are threefold: (1) to lead Chinese language students to a linguistic approach to language analysis so that they learn about how individual linguistic expressions fit into a coherent linguistic system; (2) to enable them to see how linguistic structures reflect underlying cognitive, conceptual structures which are derived from the interplay between human embodiment and cultural environment; and (3) to provide them with a broad perspective on contemporary Chinese society.