Habilitation thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University
(pursuant of MU Directive No. 7/2017, Section 6, 1b)
Comparing construals across languages and genres:
A perspective of Cognitive Linguistics
Course: General and diachronic linguistics
Author: Wei-lun Lu, Ph.D.
Submission date: 19 August, 2022
Table of contents
1. General commentary …………………………………………………………………..i
2. Published work 1 ……………………………………………………………………...1
3. Published work 2 …………………………………………………………………….26
4. Published work 3 …………………………………………………………………….56
5. Published work 4 …………………………………………………………………….78
6. Published work 5 …………………………………………………………………...103
7. Published work 6 …………………………………………………………………...122
8. Published work 7 …………………………………………………………………...141
9. Published work 8 …………………………………………………………………...159
10. Published work 9 …………………………………………………………………...182
i
COMMENTARY TO HABILITATION THESIS1
The present thesis, entitled “Comparing construals across languages and genres: A
perspective of Cognitive Linguistics”, is composed pursuant of MU Directive No. 7/2017,
Section 6 (1b), in the form of a collection of 9 previously published scholarly works with a
commentary. The commentary, which follows immediately below, comprises a
characterization of the investigated matter (Section 1), objectives of the work (Section 2),
research questions and employed methodology (Section 3), obtained results (Section 4), a
self-assessment of the work reported in this thesis (Section 5), works cited in the commentary
and the applicant’s share of contribution in each of the publications included in the
habilitation thesis.
1. Investigated matter: variation of construals
One of the basic principles of Cognitive Linguistics is that semantics is equated with
conceptualization (Croft & Cruse, 2004; Langacker, 2008). The principle is different from the
assumption of the truth-conditional (logical) semantics, where the meaning of language is
evaluated in terms of the truth or the falsity of a proposition relative to the world and where
highly abstract semantic generalizations are sought. As a result of such reductionist thinking
of logical semantics, many semantic-pragmatic subtleties are pushed to the periphery of the
human language faculty. In reaction to the context-independent approach to language,
Cognitive Linguistics came along in the 1980s and appealed to a radically usage-based
approach to language, claiming that the meaning of human language emerges from actual
language use by placing emphasis on conventionalized semantic-pragmatic subtleties.
Following this usage-based (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000) commitment of Cognitive
Linguistics, the current thesis explores the variation of construals mediated through the
linguistic encoding of comparable real-life situations (or usage events in Cognitive Linguistic
terms). The comparison of construals is made across languages (when the same semantic
content is expressed) and across genres (within the same language when the same pragmatic
act is performed), which aims to show the range of construal operations allowed for by
different sets of conventionalized linguistic tools (across languages) and by the socioculturally-agreed
conventions related to the pragmatic act (across genres).
1
The in-text citations and the references in the thesis follow the APA format.
ii
1.1 Comparing the construals of narrative viewpoint across languages
The first section of the thesis (Publications 1-4) is a cross-linguistic approach to the construal
of viewpoint (Dancygier, 2012; Dancygier & Sweetser, 2012) in narratives, drawing on
linguistic samples from English and Chinese. In particular, I compare the linguistic
manifestations of narrative viewpoint and the resultant construals that are invoked by the
viewpoint expressions in the two languages.
Narrative viewpoint is a research issue that has attracted increasing scholarly interest
in cognitive linguistics, poetics and stylistics, which can be witnessed in the various
collections of works in different publication venues (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2012; Dancygier
& Vandellanotte, 2017; Vandelanotte & Dancygier, 2017). In most of the above works,
language is understood as the bed of rock that facilitates the emergence of meaning in literary
works as linguistic artefacts, with the mixing, or the switching between narrative viewpoints
being a crucial part of the poetics. Under such rubric, Mental Spaces Theory (Fauconnier,
1997) and Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) have been extensively
applied to the study of text-wide meaning construction (Dancygier, 2012; Fonseca, Pascual &
Oakley, 2020; van Krieken, Sanders & Hoeken, 2016). But lower at the sentential level,
analyses of viewpointing devices from a constructionist perspective (Goldberg, 1995) also
abound. Along this line of investigation, in the reading process of a literary work, the
linguistic form that participates in the composition of the text may help construct a mental
space, and the reader’s attention is guided between the mental spaces in the story as s/he
encounters different linguistic cues that are typically associated with one of the many spaces.
Typical constructions that have been identified with a viewpointing function discussed thus
far in literature include: personal pronouns (Dancygier, 2012; Rubba, 1996), deixis
(Dancygier, 2012; Wu, 2004); at the more grammatical end along the lexicon-grammar
continuum, we can see tense marking (Sanders & van Krieken, 2019), discourse particles
(Engberg-Pedersen & Boeg Thomsen, 2016), and negation (Dacnygier & Vandelanotte, 2016;
Foolen & Yamaguchi, 2016). In addition, there are also constructions or templates that do not
involve a specific linguistic form, such as the inversion of word order (Dorgeloh, 1997; Chen,
2003). As we go beyond what has been traditionally considered the core of verbal
communication, color and character size in picture books (Fukada, 2016), non-verbal cues,
including eye gaze (Sweetser & Stec, 2016), body leaning, head position and facial expression
iii
(Josep Jarque & Pascual, 2016), and body partitioning (Jansen, 2019) are also meaningful in
communicating narrative viewpoint.
To illustrate how a typcical viewpointing construction works in communicating
narrative responsibility, consider the following excerpt, cited from the discussion of
Dancygier (2012, p. 69), which is taken in turn from the narration of a narrating subject (about
someone else’s life) in a novel by Henry Fielding.
He now lived, for the most part, retired in the country, with one sister, for whom he
had a very tender affection… This lady was now somewhat past the age of thirty. (Tom
Jones, p. 17)
In the excerpt, the past tense marker is a viewpoint construction typically seen in literary
narratives, where the narrator starts out from the story viewpoint space, which is an
independent mental space that contains a narrating subject and a reader (or a listener), with
the time of narration being present. In a typical literary narrative, the story viewpoint space
usually has access to all the other mental spaces that develop as the narrative goes along. The
use of the past tense in this example is to set the distance between the narrating subject (in the
story viewpoint space) and the main narrative space, making a clear distinction between the
time of story-telling (which is present) and the time of the reported event (which is earlier
than the time of the story-telling). In this example, the pronoun he is used to refer to a
character situated in the reported event in the main narrative space (which is contains the
reported event and is distant from the story viewpoint space). However, note that the temporal
adverb now is used in the passage, not to refer to the time of the reported event in the main
narrative space being present but to highlight the communicative roles of the narrator and the
listener (Dancygier, 2012, p. 69; see also Nikiforidou, 2012) in the story viewpoint space.
As shown earlier, previous literature has identified various viewpointing means in
narratives (as a means of human communication); however, so far, the cross-linguistic
dimension of viewpoint phenomena and construals invoked by different viewpoint
expressions in different languages has remained under-investigated. This is a research gap in
Cognitive Linguistics, which the current thesis aims to fill.
1.2 Comparing the construals of an event of death across genres
Founded on the usage-based commitment, Cognitive Linguistics has come to pay close
attention to the actual socio-cultural context of language use (Kövecses, 2015; Kristiansen &
iv
Dirven, 2008; Sharifian, 2011). Among the various notions advanced, cultural
conceptualization, which stands for culture-specific ways of expressing and construing
concepts (Sharifian 2011), has been at the forefront of scholarly attention. Previous literature
has identified various conceptual strategies for constructing the construal of an event in a
cultural setting, such as cultural schemas, cultural categories, cultural metaphor, and cultural
metonymy. The second section of the current thesis (Publications 5-9) deals with the variation
of cultural conceptualization in Taiwanese Mandarin and investigates the various cultural
symbols that are used in the pragmatic act of offering solace, using the eulogistic idioms that
are displayed at public funerals as illustration.
This research views eulogy as a genre (Swales, 1990) and the different sets of
Mandarin eulogistic idioms displayed at funerals as sub-genres of eulogy, which means that I
consider the idioms to form sets of semiotic codes used for the purpose of a communicative
convention. It is the role played by the socio-cultural context of the usage of the eulogistic
idioms (輓語 wǎn yǔ) and the resultant construals that I study in the current thesis.
In addition, from a cultural-anthropological or a cultural-sociological point of view, it
is also important to note that the setup of the official eulogy request system allows for an
immediately transparent display of the extra-linguistic factors that are considered crucial in an
event of commemoration by that particular culture. In the act of commemoration, the
variables (such as the profession2
or the religion of the deceased, among others) must be
sufficiently relevant to such an extent that the government decides to create a category that
allows the mourner to choose from whatever that is considered relevant to the object of
mourning. Therefore, this research considers these general categories (occupation, religion),
and the sub-categories that are subsumed under those general categories (i.e., “teacher”, “legal
expert”, “politician”, etc.; “Buddhist”, “Christian”, “Catholic”, etc.) cultural categories
(Lakoff, 1987; Rosch, 1978; Sharifian, 2011), not just because they are interculturally
different but because they reflect properties that emerge from the constant interaction among
the members of a cultural group (Sharifian, 2011, p. 27-28). Therefore, it is reasonable to
assume that each of the cultural categories may conceptually invoke relevant socio-cultural
beliefs and socio-cultural expectations, which can be manifested by the language used in the
expression of the mourning. Accordingly, the research investigates the choice of eulogistic
2
Note that I make a distinction between occupation and profession in my writing—when I emphasize the type of
work that the deceased did when alive, the term occupation is used, while when the socio-cultural expectation is
meant, I tend to use the term profession; otherwise, the terms are interchangeable in my writing when no
emphasis is laid on either the person or the culture.
v
idioms and the variation of construals invoked by the idioms based on the different sociocultural
expectations related to the professional and religious categories.
In addition, the research is theoretically relevant, as from a pragmatic and usage-based
point of view, the mourner’s (electronic) deliverance of a eulogistic idiom at the funeral is
situation-bound (Kecskes, 2010) and can be considered a pragmeme (Mey, 2001) for offering
solace to the family of the deceased. Hence, in this wider sense, the eulogized is not merely
the deceased but also the living. Accordingly, the eulogistic idiom displayed at the funeral can
be considered a way of referring to the deceased as an object of conceptualization, and it is in
this sense that the various culturally relevant figures of speech including metaphor,
metonymy, and allusion, come into the picture as a mourner’s way of creating a construal of
the object of commemoration in the mind of the living. The act of commemoration is done,
and the conceptualization is realized, in a particular socio-cultural setting, so it is natural that
the verbal practice should be analyzed and should be understood against the backdrop of
socio-cultural significance of the commemoration.
Accordingly, the second section of the thesis is a comparison of the construals invoked
by the different sets of eulogistic idioms that are used for the different cultural categories,
with the analytic focus being the use of metaphor, metonymy and allusion in the same
pragmeme of offering solace.
2. Objectives of the work
The thesis addresses the variation of construal mediated through language, which is a
manifestation of the cognitive flexibility of the human mind in the process of meaning
creation meaning through the use of language. To achieve the purpose, the thesis comprises
two research threads.
The first objective is to study how the construal of a usage event created by language
varies with the linguistic toolkit involved in the encoding of a situation across languages. To
this end, I investigate parallel linguistic representations of the same literary scene rendered in
different languages (in my case, English and Chinese). The results are reported in Publication
1 to 4 of the thesis.
The second objective is to study how the construal of a usage event created by
language vary with the socio-cultural factor surrounding the event. In order to do this, I focus
on the cognitive semantic mechanisms involved in the four-character eulogistic idioms in
vi
Chinese that are used for the deceased of different professions and religions at public funerals
in Taiwan. The results are reported in Publication 5 to 9 of the thesis.
3. Research questions and employed methodology
This section lays out the research questions and the research methods employed in the thesis.
3.1 Variation of construal across languages
In the first section of the thesis (Publication 1 to 4), the research questions addressed is one of
comparative stylistic nature: “When a stylistic phenomenon with a cognitive effect is created
in Language A that allows for a usage event to be construed in a particular way, how do users
of Language B render the style and the construal of the event (with the set of linguistic tools
available in Language B)? Can we observe a tendency among the users of Language B that
makes it impossible (or difficult) for them to reproduce the style and the construal from
Language A?”
Methodologically, this part of the research is based on the scrutiny of a selection of
parallel texts of world masterpieces. The choice of parallel texts (or translation) as the study
material is to reasonably control for the semantic content expressed in the comparison of
languages. To compare my target languages (which are English and Chinese), I use world
masterpieces written in English and their multiple published translations in Chinese.3
The
translations selected are commercial publications, which ensures the quality of the language
sample studied; the inclusion of multiple renditions of the same work ensures the reliability of
the generalization made over the renditions.
Below, I expound the advantages of employing multiple parallel texts as the study
material.
Humans are designed as pattern-seeking animals: Since infancy, babies take statistics
of all sorts of sound patterns, turning all acoustic input experienced into stable phonological
categories in mind. Lexical and grammatical patterns emerge later in life, as a result of
innumerable generalizations made from the various meaning-bearing structural inputs. Adult
scientists do the same; in the field of corpus linguistics, databases are built for seeking
regularities in language (and languages). In contrastive construction grammar, studies have
made use of large bodies of data to scrutinize how constructions are similar and how they are
3
Throughout Publications1-4, (my co-authors and) I use an English original and multiple Chinese renditions,
with an exception made in the second half of Publication 1, where one Chinese original and its (only) published
English translation are used.
vii
different across languages. However, the majority of contrastive constructional research is
methodologically based on comparison of two constructions suspected to be similar from two
independent mono-lingual corpora. Such practice certainly has its value— using large
quantities of linguistic data ensures a high extent of precision in the generalizations made, at
least in each of the languages involved. However, such practice may run into an issue of
commensurability— when Construction X (in Language A) and Construction Y (in Language
B) are semantically similar, and can be considered translation equivalents, how much sense
would it make for us to compare the two constructional tools, in the two completely different
human communication systems? In other words, how commensurable are the function of
Construction X and that of Construction Y, in the two sets of radically conventional
constructional tools? Recent studies comparing analogous viewpoint constructions in different
languages have suggested a negative answer. An example is proximal and distal
demonstratives, which may seem to serve similar communicative functions across languages,
and, as a logical result of that, can be surmised to exhibit similar distributional profiles crosslinguistically.
However, it was found that in English-Chinese parallel texts, when the users of
the two languages express highly similar (or almost identical) messages, the usage patterns of
the proximal and the distal demonstratives vary considerably between the two languages (Wu,
2004). Similar observations have also been made regarding prepositions and motion verbs
(Knotková & Lu, 2020), articles and epistemic modals (Tabakowska, 2014), when different
published translations (which ensure the quality of the language samples analyzed) were used
to obtain a confident intra-language generalization.
However, although there have been numerous efforts looking into how large quantities
of parallelly aligned and annotated texts (which are the so-called parallel corpora) may be put
to use in contrastive linguistic and translation research,4
such application of parallelly aligned
texts in studying viewpoint constructions across languages is still rare.
Given the above reasons, the studies presented in Section 1 of the thesis are
methodologically progressive due to the high level of commensurability between the samples
across languages and the level of the confidence in the generalization made across the
different samples within the same target language.
4
An example is Doval and Teresa Sánchez Nieto (2019).
viii
3.2 Variation of construal across socio-cultural settings
The methodology employed in the second section of the thesis (Publications 5-9) is founded
on the usage-based commitment of Cognitive Linguistics, aiming to facilitate comparison of
the construal of an event of death across different socio-cultural settings.
In this thread of research, the questions addressed is one of anthropological linguistic
nature: “As a universal type of events, how is death communicated and construed by humans
through the linguistic toolkit available to them? What role does the socio-cultural aspect of
language use play in shaping the construal?”
To address the questions, I base the research on an investigation of an online mortuary
service provided by the Taiwanese government. The state-run nature of the online service
ensures the authoritativeness and thus representativeness of the data analyzed. The service
system allows the mourners to request a pre-defined eulogy (in the form of four-character
idioms), in order for the eulogy to display on an electronic banner in the funeral hall where a
funeral is scheduled to take place. The system asks the user (the mourner) to choose the
religion and the occupation of the deceased when alive. As a result of the mourner’s choice,
the system turns up eulogistic idioms that fit the descriptions. Specifically, when a mourner
chooses “Christian” (based on the religion of the deceased when alive), the system turns up a
group of idioms that are suitable to the description; by the same token, each occupational
category returns its own idioms that the mourner may choose from.
Methodologically, the setup of the mortuary service system as such ensures rigor and
clarity, as the pre-defined categorization gives us a transparent correlation between the sociocultural
characterization of the object of commemoration and the idiomatic expression used
by the mourner in the pragmeme of helping the family accommodate a death (Parvaresh and
Capone, 2017).
In this thread of research, I study the cultural conceptualization invoked by the
eulogistic idioms that are linked to each of the religious and occupational categories from a
Cognitive Linguistics perspective. In particular, I analyze the cognitive mechanisms (such as
metaphor, metonymy, and subject-object distinction) and the various cultural symbols and
allusions involved in the encoding of the pragmeme of accommodation.
Another methodological dimension that is worth noting of this thread of research is the
fact that the Chinese language is characterized by a highly productive lexical template of fourcharacter
idioms, the fixed length of which ensures the comparability of the results obtained.
ix
Another fact that the idioms constitute an integral part of the Chinese death ritual makes the
cognitive semantic study of the idioms notably valuable from an anthropological point of
view.
4. Obtained results
In the first part of the research, I (along with my collaborators) identify a wide variety of
mismatches between the two languages in terms of viewpoint management, which result in
irreducibly differences in the construal of the same narrated content across the languages.
With the mismatches, I am further able to pinpoint a few language-specific devices that
facilitate the formation of mixed narrative viewpoint and that help achieve the cognitive effect
in the respective languages.
In Publication 1, based on a scrutiny of the opening chapter of Alice in Wonderland
and its 4 Chinese renditions, my collaborator and I observe that the English text
systematically utilizes a specific combination of conventional constructional tools (including
punctuation, letter case and connectives) for the purpose of constructing a gradual shift from a
narrator-responsible viewpoint to a character-responsible one. These elements are, however,
partially missing in the majority of the Chinese texts, which results in the translators’
difficulty in adopting the entire constructional complex from the source language and forces
the translators to use a variety of constructions available to them, sometimes losing the
construal of the mixed viewpoint in the English original. In addition, a comparison of a
Chinese world masterpiece (酒國, The Republic of Wine) with its English translation reveals a
similar result; the productivity of the deictic verb (來/去 lái/qù “come/go”) in the Chinese
resultative construction allows the Chinese text to easily operate on the narrative viewpoint by
using a deictic verb in the resultative construction in the report of a motion event, whereas the
English language is not equipped with a similar set of conventionalized linguistic tools to
viewpoint a motion event. As a result, the above difference creates an irreducible difference in
the viewpoint construal of a motion event between Chinese and English.
Publication 2 is similarly based on a study of Alice in Wonderland and its four Chinese
renditions, which explores the issue of correspondence between the demonstratives in English
(this/that) and Chinese (這/那 zhè/nà “this/that”) and how that influences the viewpoint
construal of a narrated scene. My collaborators and I find that despite a similar two-way
distinction (of proximal-distal), the two languages viewpoint the same reported content in
different ways; the two languages also vary in the frequency of demonstratives as viewpoint
x
constructions (with Chinese being more heavily demonstrative-viewpointed in general). In
addition, it is found that lack of viewpoint correspondence is actually the norm between the
languages. Furthermore, a close look reveals several factors that influence how a narrative is
construed via the use of demonstratives across the languages, which include: the use of shell
nouns as an anaphoric strategy of referent tracking in the narrator’s language (such as 玩意兒
wányì-ér “thing-diminutive” in Chinese), the grammatical profile of the viewpointing
construction (that is, whether the demonstrative is involved as a pronoun or joined by an
adverbializing construction such as 麼 me in Chinese), and the tendency (of the English
language) to pronominalize an event and make reference to it as part of the cleft construction
using it, which is rendered in Chinese as a proximal demonstrative that invokes a characterdominant
viewpoint. In many other cases, the demonstrative viewpoints the narrative in one
language, but the stylistic effect is achieved in the other language with a completely different
viewpoint construction.
Publication 3 is a study of how the stylistic effect of tense shifting, as a main strategy
for creating a mixed viewpoint in English, is typically rendered in Chinese and the resultant
construal of the rendition. The study is based on selected passages from the original English
works of Great Expectations, David Copperfield (both by Charles Dickens) and “A&P” (by
John Updike) and their published Chinese versions. In this paper, I find that in English, tense
marking (which is a device relevant to the encoding of TIME) works with at least two
language-specific stylistic means, which are clause interpolation and the inversion of word
order, to create a mixed narrative viewpoint. However, the three stylistic elements cannot be
found in the Chinese versions systematically. What is also remarkable is that unlike the
frequent involvement of TIME of the English language, the Chinese texts do not use the
perfective aspect or temporal adverbials (which are constructions that invoke TIME)
systematically, which shows the Chinese system’s overall indifference to TIME in managing
viewpoint in discourse. Furthermore, the Chinese renditions, in addition to an overall
indifference to TIME, feature consistent and frequent use of reduplication as the system’s
distinctive stylistic strategy, allowing the text producer to create a vivid, intensified, and as a
result, character-dominant construal of the narrated content.
Publication 4 is a natural continuation of Publication 3, which investigates how the
viewpoint effect created by the English inversion is rendered in the Chinese versions and the
resultant viewpoint construal. The study sampled passages from Great Expectations and its
Chinese renditions. In the study, I observe that in addition to inversion, the English linguistic
xi
toolkit allows for the language sample to exhibit a zoom-in effect through use of punctuation,
the participial clause, and an ad hoc constructional schema of [some] – [X] with the middle
three instantiations sharing an identical phonological schema, as in some stricken with terror,
some sobbing and weeping, and some covering their faces. In this example, the identical
phonological schema and the shared character-responsible narrative viewpoint makes the
three instantiations of the schema iconic. In comparison, the Chinese renditions employ the
presentative construction and a focus particle to approximate the character-based viewpoint,
but the zoom-in effect is not present in any of the Chinese versions due to a lack of a similar
composition of the stylistic strategies. In addition to the difference in construal, another
important difference between the language samples is the generally longer iconic part in the
Chinese versions, due to the productivity of four-character templates at the phonological pole
in Mandarin Chinese. In other words, the character-dominant viewpoint is similar across the
languages, but the part of the text that is iconic tends to be longer in Chinese.
In the second part of the research, I identify various cultural symbols and figurative
devices that contribute to the variation of the construal of death in the genre of eulogy in
Chinese; the religion- and occupation-specific construals of death are multiply motivated by
various socio-cultural and historical factors.
Publication 5 serves to contextualize the second thread of research. The article
introduces the eulogistic idioms as situation-bound utterances by considering the pragmatic
act against modern funeral practice of the Taiwanese society in the digital form. The
eulogistic idioms are fixed in length (of four characters) and are presented in the written mode
in the funeral hall (on a white cloth banner in the past and on an electronic screen nowadays),
so the idioms have a very high level of formulaicity. In addition, I identify four extralinguistic
factors that are important in the analysis of how humans communicate death in a
cultural setting (at a Taiwanese funeral), including the affiliation and the job title of the
mourner, the occupation of the deceased when alive, the religion of the deceased when alive,
and the Taiwanese cultural practice of adopting an English nickname for the purpose of
impression management. The study also finds a warning on the website that misusing another
person’s name to request a eulogy constitutes a crime (which presupposes that such
transgression is not uncommon).
Publication 6 reports the construals of death in the sub-genres of idioms for Buddhists
(which contains 59 idioms) and for Christians (8 idioms) in Chinese. Specifically, six main
metaphorical conceptualizations are reflected in the Buddhist sub-genre, including DEATH IS
xii
REBIRTH, DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH, DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH,
REBIRTH IS WEST, LIFE IS A CIRCLE, A PERSON IS A LOTUS, and HEAVEN IS (A POND/SEA) FULL OF
LOTUSES. On the other hand, there are three conceptualizations identified in the Christian subgenre,
including DEATH IS REST, HEAVEN IS AN ETERNAL HOME and DEATH IS A RETURN
JOURNEY. An analysis of the metaphor involved in the eulogistic idioms reveals vast
differences in how death is construed by the two religious communities in Taiwan. In addition
to the differences, the chapter also identifies a similarity in metaphor use, which is DEATH IS
REST. However, a type-frequency count of the REST metaphor shows different weight of the
conceptual metaphor in the two communities (3/8 in the Christian category and 1/59 in the
Buddhist one).
Publication 7 presents an analysis of the sub-genre of eulogistic idioms for politicians,
which is based on an analysis of all the 16 idioms of that category in the online service
system. The study firstly shows that for the idioms used in the commemoration of politicians
frequently involve the notion of COUNTRY or PEOPLE in the conceptual profile or the
conceptual base. Secondly, allusion is found to be a significant strategy in Taiwanese political
eulogies, which affords access to a highly specialized cultural knowledge structure as the
conceptual basis for understanding and evaluating the deceased, with typical examples
including 甘棠 gāntáng ‘birchleaf pear (Pyrus betulifolia)’, 麒麟閣 Qílín Gé ‘Qilin Building’,
and 峴首 Xiànshǒu ‘Mountain Xianshou’. In addition to that, culture- and profession-specific
metaphors and metonymies also abound in this sub-genre. An example is the TEXTILE
metaphor, which can be conceptually characterized as LINES ARE (POLITICAL) BUSINESS;
ATTENDING (POLITICAL) BUSINESS IS ORGANIZING FIBERS; ORGANIZATION IS WISDOM IN
DEALING WITH (POLITICAL) BUSINESS. At the social level, I find that through the cultural
conceptualizations invoked by the eulogistic idioms, politicians in the Taiwanese society are
always remembered exclusively in the political domain (where COUNTRY or PEOPLE is of
conceptual significance), which is different from the American conceptualization, where
personal traits are often remembered with a note of affection.
Publication 8 investigates the eulogistic idioms for teachers (12 idioms), media
workers (10 idioms) and legal experts (8 idioms) as three more sub-genres of eulogy. Across
the professions, I firstly observe an overall abundance of cultural elements and assumptions
that underlie the use of eulogistic idioms, such as PLANT metaphors in the domain of
EDUCATION, SOUND metaphors in MEDIA, and CLEANLINESS metaphors in LAW. Second,
allusions to historical figures (such as 楊時 Yáng Shí, 游酢 Yóu Zuò, 程頤 Chéng Yí, and 馬
xiii
融 Mǎ Róng) are also present in the idioms for teachers but not in the other categories. In
addition to the cultural metaphors and allusions, my analysis shows that whether the mourner
places himself onstage as an object of conceptualization is a factor that correlates with a
student viewpoint in the sub-genre of eulogies for teachers. Such objective construal of the
mourner and an accordingly less objective construal of the deceased is not found in the other
sub-genres of eulogy.
Publication 9 deepens our understanding of religion-specific construals addressed in
Publication 6 from a constructionist perspective. In particular, the analysis presented in the
chapter elaborates on the role played by lexical instantiations in metaphor research; the REST
metaphor exists in both the Buddhist and the Christian sub-genre but the exact lexical
constructions that evoke the metaphor are different in the two sub-genres. Specifically, REST
is prompted by 歇 xiē ‘break’ in the Buddhist eulogy but by 息 xí ‘stop’ in the Christian subgenre.
The nuanced semantic shades of the lexical constructions used in the sub-genres reflect
the different worldviews of the two religions. In addition, although both religions share the
metaphorical conceptualization of LIFE IS A JOURNEY; DEATH IS A JOURNEY FROM THIS WORLD
TO THE HEAVENS, the exact motion verb that instantiates the JOURNEY is different in the two
religions, with JOURNEY prompted by 往 wǎng ‘towards’ in the Buddhist idioms and by 歸 guī
‘return’ in the Christian idioms. Although the metaphorical conceptualization is shared across
the religious communities, the nuanced semantic difference in the lexical instantiations gives
away the worldview that underlie.
5. Self-assessment of the research work reported
The research reported in the thesis is expected to create impact in the fields of Cognitive
Linguistics (especially viewpoint research and metaphor research), pragmatics and
anthropological linguistics. A self-assessment is stipulated as follows.
First of all, the research shows that the construal of a scene constructed through the
linguistic mode is restricted by the linguistic toolkit available to the users of a particular
linguistic community and is, as a result, bound to be highly conventional and languagespecific,
as is evidenced by the findings throughout Publications 1-4. In general, what the
findings reveal is a general lack of cross-linguistic correspondences; in the same usage event,
different text producers in different languages have completely different ways of utilizing the
same cognitive capacity in their parallel encoding of similar events, which is reflected in their
actual use of language. This has an important implication: although the general human
xiv
cognitive infrastructure may be universal, the cognitive and construal operations in different
languages simply have to follow the linguistic conventions in the respective languages.
Viewpoint taking in language in general, and in literary narratives more specifically, is a
natural epiphenomenon of the radically conventional nature of grammar (Croft 2001;
Verhagen 2012).
Moreover, the research helps answer part of a long-standing puzzle of why Chinese
has been considered a vague and context-dependent language. When it comes to the
management of narrative viewpoint, the typological nature of Chinese (which is its lack of an
obligatory tense marking system) does not require its users to encode the narrative viewpoint
by sentence; instead, the viewpointing strategies of the Chinese language (such as
reduplication) are non-obligatory, which naturally leaves the narrative viewpoint of some
sentences unspecified and contingent on the existence of another viewpointing strategy in
context. This part of the research is theoretically valuable, as it helps demystify the generally
acknowledged vagueness of the Chinese language through the lens of linguistic relativity.
Secondly, the research shows the role played by socio-cultural factors in shaping the
construal of an event of death. The study pinpoints the Chinese concept of 面子 miànzi ‘face’
as a culture-specific force that facilitated the establishment and shaped the setup of the eulogy
request system. In addition, the religion and the profession of the deceased when alive are
found to play an important role in shaping the construal in the communication around an
event of death, as different religions and professions invoke different worldviews and sociocultural
values that are manifested by different cultural symbols, metaphor, metonymy,
allusions and different degrees of subjectivity that create variation in the construal of a death
event in eulogy. The conceptualization of the event of death reported is highly culture-
specific.
Furthermore, the research shows the relevance of subject/object distinction (i.e. the
notion of “viewing arrangement” in Cognitive Grammar) to analyzing the language of death.
Specifically, in the sub-genre of eulogies for teachers, some idioms place the mourner and
their relationship with the object of the mourning onstage as an object of conceptualization
along with the mourned, which is different from what is typical of the other professions
(where the mourner stays entirely offstage as a mere subject of conceptualization). The
different subject-object distinction at the conceptual level is motivated by the cultural
characterization of the profession involved, which constitutes an innovative finding in the
study of the language of death.
xv
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Nuttall, P. Stockwell & W. Yuan (Eds.). Cognitive Grammar in literature (pp. 101-
116). Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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communication. Cognitive Linguistics, 30(2), 351–375.
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Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
xviii
6. The applicant’s contribution in the publications included
My share of contributions in each of the published articles is stipulated in the tables below.
All the numbers had been discussed with the collaborators for the co-authored publications (1,
2, and 9) before the submission of the commentary. In such cases, a substantiation follows to
report the division of labor.
[1]5 Lu, Wei-lun and Arie Verhagen. 2016. Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually
work across languages? An exercise in parallel text analysis. Viewpoint and the fabric of
meaning: Form and use of viewpoint tools across languages and modalities, ed. by
Barbara Dancygier, Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen, 169-190. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
60 60 60 60
Substantiation: I (first author) was responsible for the collection of the data, data analysis,
the writing of the main body of the analysis and part of the method, introduction and
conclusion. The second author was responsible for the writing of part of the introduction and
conclusion, and the proofreading of the entire text.
[2] Lu, Wei-lun, Arie Verhagen and I-wen Su. 2018. A Multiple-Parallel-Text approach
for viewpoint research across languages: The case of demonstratives in English and
Chinese. Expressive minds and artistic creations, ed. by Szilvia Csábi, 131-157. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
85 85 85 85
Substantiation: I (first author) was responsible for the collection of the data, data analysis,
the writing of the main body of the analysis and most parts of the method, introduction and
conclusion. The second author was responsible for the writing of small parts of the
5
Bibliographic record of a published scientific result, which is part of the habilitation thesis.
xix
introduction and conclusion, and the proofreading of the entire text. The third author was
responsible for writing a small part of the conclusion and for proofreading parts of the text.
[3] Lu, Wei-lun. 2019. Time, tense and viewpoint shift across languages: A MultipleParallel-Text
approach to “tense shifting” in a tenseless language. Cognitive Linguistics
30(2), 377-397.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
100 100 100 100
[4] Lu, Wei-lun. 2020. Viewpoint and subjective construal across languages: English
inversion, associated strategies and their Chinese renditions in multiple parallel texts.
Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7(2), 333-355.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
100 100 100 100
[5] Lu, Wei-lun. 2017. Socio-cultural factors in analyzing the pragmeme of
accommodation: A case study of the official online eulogy request system in Taiwan. The
pragmeme of accommodation and intercultural pragmatics: The case of interaction around
the event of death, ed. by Vahid Parvaresh and Alessandro Capone, 111-127. Zurich:
Springer.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
100 100 100 100
xx
[6] Lu, Wei-lun. 2017. Religion and worldview in metaphor use: Cultural
conceptualisations of death in Taiwanese Buddhist and Christian eulogistic idioms.
Advances in Cultural Linguistics, ed. by Farzad Sharifian, 49-64. Singapore: Springer.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
100 100 100 100
[7] Lu, Wei-lun. 2020. Cultural “signs of life” in politics: A case study of eulogistic
idioms for Taiwanese politicians. Signs of life: Changes and continuity in language,
thought and identity, ed. by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian,
139-154. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
100 100 100 100
[8] Lu, Wei-lun. 2020. Viewpoint and metaphor in culture: A Cognitive Linguistic
analysis on a selection of Chinese eulogistic idioms used in Taiwan. Cognitive Linguistic
Studies 7(1), 260-279.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
100 100 100 100
[9] Lu, Wei-lun and Svitlana Shurma. 2021. Rituals. Analysing Religious Discourse, ed.
by Stephen Pihlaja, 217-234. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
55 55 55 55
Substantiation: I (first author) was responsible for the collection of the data, data analysis,
the writing of the main body of the analysis, the method and the conclusion. The second
xxi
author was responsible for the writing of the introduction and part of the conclusion and for
proofreading and editing the entire text.
Date: 19 August, 2022 Signature:
Publication 1
[1] Lu, Wei-lun and Arie Verhagen. 2016. Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across
languages? An exercise in parallel text analysis. Viewpoint and the fabric of meaning: Form and
use of viewpoint tools across languages and modalities, ed. by Barbara Dancygier, Wei-lun Lu and
Arie Verhagen, 169-190. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
60 60 60 60
Substantiation: I (first author) was responsible for the collection of the data, data analysis, the
writing of the main body of the analysis and part of the method, introduction and conclusion. The
second author was responsible for the writing of part of the introduction and conclusion, and the
proofreading of the entire text.
1
Viewpoint and
the Fabric of
Meaning
Form and Use of Viewpoint Tools
across Languages and Modalities
Edited by
Barbara Dancygier
Wei-lun Lu
Arie Verhagen
2
ISBN 978-3-11-036907-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036546-7
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039307-1
ISSN 1861-4132
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
♾ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
3
Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually
work across languages? An exercise in
parallel text analysis
Abstract: This chapter provides a parallel-text-based analysis of shifting viewpoints
in English and Chinese. The data come from Alice in Wonderland and its
four published Chinese translations, and from Jiu Guo and its published English
translation. We observe that the English text systematically utilizes a specific
combination of conventional constructional tools (including punctuation, letter
case and connectives) for the purpose of constructing a gradual shift from one
viewpoint to another. These elements are however partially missing in Chinese,
which results in the translators’ difficulty in adopting the entire constructional
complex from the source language and forces them to use a variety of constructions
available to them, sometimes losing the stylistic effect of the English original.
A comparison of the Chinese original with its English translation reveals a
similar result. The productivity of deictic verbs in Chinese resultative constructions
allows the Chinese text to easily mix viewpoints using deictic verbs, whereas
the English text does not exhibit such a tendency. We conclude by discussing how
the study of parallel texts reveals the radically conventional nature of grammar
and provides a powerful addition to research tools in cognitive linguistics.
1 Introduction
The questions that comparative stylistic research is dealing with are simultaneously
quite concrete and quite general. On the one hand, we are interested in a
very concrete question of cross-linguistic comparison: How exactly is a specific
discourse pattern in English – one in which the dominant viewpoint shifts from
the narrator to a character in a story rather smoothly – rendered in Chinese, a lanNote:
Parts of this study were presented at the 12th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference
(ICLC-12) and the 2014 Conference on Language, Discourse and Cognition (CLDC 2014). We
thank the conference participants for suggestions. We also thank two reviewers for insightful
comments on a previous version, with the usual disclaimers applying. The completion of this
paper was partially supported by the project “Employment of Best Young Scientists for International
Cooperation Empowerment” (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0037) co-financed by the European Social
Fund and the Czech Republic.
4
170       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
guage that does not have direct parallels of the linguistic features that constitute
the English pattern? On the other hand, and at the same time, we are interested
in a much more general theoretical and methodological question, namely, how
precisely this type of question may and should be investigated: What procedures
and what kind of data are appropriate, and especially: What is the status of concepts
that we use in such a comparative study? The main goal of this paper is to
address these general methodological and conceptual questions. We will do so by
means of a detailed comparison of a small number of highly significant text fragments
involving mixed viewpoints, using parallel texts: four translations from an
English original to Chinese, and one from Chinese to English.
2 Method, data and research question
The use of parallel texts – putting an original alongside its translation(s) and
comparing them for the purpose of semantic and grammatical analysis – already
has some history and some systematic reflection in linguistics in general (Barlow
2008; Chamonikolasova 2007; Cysouw and Wälchli 2007; Van der Auwera et. al
2005). The use of parallel texts is highly beneficial, as by seeing the author and
the translators as sensible text producers that try to get across the same conceptual
contents in different languages, it allows us to compare how a usage-event
is verbalized by the speakers of different languages, i.e. with different sets of linguistic
tools available to each text producer.¹ Moreover, it allows us to compare
languages in a more time-efficient way than experimental methods would, if the
researcher has adequate knowledge of all or most of the languages involved.²
The method has also gained interest in cognitive linguistics in recent years;
witness Rojo and Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2013), Slobin (1996, 2003), Tabakowska
(1993, 2014), Verkerk (2014), among others. However, in the study of viewpoint
phenomena, the parallel-corpus-based approach is still almost new, Tabakowska
(2014) being the only study, as far as we know. Tabakowska investigates viewpoint
manifestations in Alice in Wonderland in terms of the theoretical framework
1 The method also has its own specific limitations, as translational discourse may be different
from natural discourse. See Xiao (2010), for instance, for how translational Chinese is different
from Chinese discourse that is spontaneously produced by native speakers. Another issue taken
with parallel texts is that translations are largely confined to the written genre (Verkerk 2014:34).
But in spite of the above constraints, the parallel text is still a powerful tool for contrastive linguistic
research.
2 For a more comprehensive overview of use of parallel texts in linguistics research, see Verkerk
(2014) and Wälchli (2007).
5
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       171
of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 2008), using the original and five different
Polish translations. Most extensively, she discusses reference (in view of
the fact that Polish, unlike English, lacks the systematic distinction into definite
and indefinite articles), and then more briefly the use of aspect (involving differences
between the Polish imperfective and the English progressive), epistemic
modality, de-idiomatization and iconicity, as tools for viewpoint construction in
Alice and its Polish translations. They function as signals for different aspects of
common ground shared by Alice, the narrator and the reader, and thus as indicators
of a particular point of view in a clause or text fragment. However, although
Tabakowska mentions the classical narratological and stylistic phenomenon
of Speech and Thought Representation (STR), and especially that of viewpoint
mixture in so-called Free Indirect Discourse (FID), she does not include these in
her analysis. Given their importance and pervasiveness, we consider it useful to
focus on these in this study. Our goal, moreover, goes beyond a demonstration of
the usefulness of a cognitive semantic approach to translation studies: We will
argue that the detailed study of translations (in this case in English and Mandarin
Chinese) of STR fragments provides evidence for the radically language-specific
nature of the grammatical tools for ‘implementing’ viewpoints.³
Given that verbalizations of the same usage event are largely aligned sentence
by sentence in parallel texts, the special organization of such texts creates
a methodological opportunity that allows us to look into this research issue: How
may grammatical constructions involved in viewpoint management be compared
cross-linguistically? To put it more precisely, when we see a viewpoint construction
of Language A in a certain stretch of discourse, do we also systematically
find some counterpart or translation equivalent in its translation in Language B?
If not, what do we find in Language B and what does that tell us about viewpoint
management cross-linguistically?
To answer this query, we also begin, like Tabakowska, with a study of Alice in
Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, now alongside its Chinese translations published
in Taiwan. Alice in Wonderland is well known for its juxtaposition of the narrator’s
voice with the protagonist’s voice that reflects the author’s split personality (see
Tabakowska 2014 for a review and for further references). We use four Chinese
translations, done by Yuan-ren Chao, by Li-fang Chen, by Hui-hsien Wang, and
by Wenhao Jia and Wenyuan Jia. We focus on a special, highly significant pattern
of STR in the original, and the different ways in which the translators have dealt
with it in the Mandarin translations, constrained by the conventional grammatical
patterns of that language.
3 As we will see, grounding predications of the type that Tabakowska focuses on, will ultimately
turn out to be important in our analysis as well, especially in the section on Jiu Guo.
6
172       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
To counterbalance the possible impression that English would provide a
‘richer’ toolkit for viewpoint management than Mandarin, we also present a brief
case study of translation in the opposite direction: from Mandarin to English; the
original text is Jiu Guo (The Republic of Wine), a Chinese masterpiece written by
Mo Yan, Nobel laureate in 2012, and the translation into English, done by Howard
Goldblatt. Our choice of Jiu Guo was motivated by the hallucinatory realism of Mo
Yan’s writing, which was one of the main reasons for Mo Yan’s receiving the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
3 Mixing viewpoints in Alice in Wonderland and
its four Chinese translations
First we will demonstrate a recurrent textual patterns of mixing viewpoints used
by Lewis Carroll. Our examples all come from the first chapter, but readers can
easily verify that it is in fact characteristic of, and occurs throughout, the whole
book. In section 3.1, we identify the grammatical patterns which allow the author
to construct this specific pattern. As we will show, at least part of this pattern is
specific to the grammar of English – it is based on an English convention for connecting
a reported clause to a reporting one, a convention that does not as such
exist in Mandarin. In section 3.2, we present the corresponding passages in the
Mandarin versions to demonstrate and evaluate different strategies employed in
the translations.
3.1 Analysis of the English text
The very first sentence (and paragraph) of Alice in Wonderland reads as follows:
(1) a. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and
of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her
sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is
the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’
The fragment appears to start with an outsider’s view of Alice sitting on the bank
(though with some hint of an internal mental state: experiencing boredom),
and ends clearly and unambiguously with a direct evocation of a highly specific
thought of Alice, in her own words (“direct thought”). It is worthwhile to consider
in some detail how exactly the point of view progresses from (almost) completely
7
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       173
outside to completely internal to Alice. At least the following elements, and their
specific combination, play a role. One is the coordinating conjunction and⁴ at
the beginning of Alice’s direct thought, and the fact that and is in lower case
(preceded by a comma). The use of the coordinating conjunction and, in lower
case, presents Alice’s direct thought as a straightforward continuation of the text
segment preceding it – so this preceding segment must at least to some extent
also represent Alice’s thought; put differently, in terms of content: The (rhetorical)
question in quotation marks is Alice’s thought; it must be based on some
consideration presented in the text preceding it (but it had no pictures or conversations
in it); so this must also to some extent contain Alice’s thought; the
combination of the comma, conjunction, and lower case marks the direct thought
as part of a train of thoughts. But up until the first quotation mark, this train of
thoughts is not presented as a direct representation, in Alice’s own words, so here
it is partly the narrator who is responsible for the wording and the presentation of
Alice’s thought: in this sense, this segment – the first conjunct of and – shows a
mixture of viewpoints: the content primarily gives Alice’s point of view (what she
perceives as a result of her ‘peeping’ into her sister’s book), but it is presented to
us in the narrator’s voice.
Another element is the combination of the contrastive conjunction but and
the negation (no pictures or conversations) in the fragment itself. As these evoke
a configuration of mental spaces with different epistemic stances towards the
same object of conceptualization (Verhagen 2005, ch.2, and references cited
there), they in fact invite the reader to imagine some mental agent who might be
looking for or expecting to see pictures or conversations. In the present context,
the best candidate is of course Alice (an expectation that is quickly fulfilled with
the repetition of the words pictures or conversations in Alice’s direct thought);
this makes the use of and at the start of the direct thought as natural as it is.
So the contrastive conjunction and the negation are linguistic cues pointing to
Alice’s viewpoint, her world view and expectations, even though the narrator is
(co-)responsible for the wording;⁵ this also contributes to this fragment creating
4 Strictly speaking, the element and may also function as a discourse marker. In this context,
however, its status as a conjunction seems clear. Moreover, as we will see, there are other instances
of the same pattern in which the place of and is taken by an element that is unambiguously
a conjunction.
5 One might want to take this as a basis for labelling this clause as Free Indirect Discourse (FID),
but it does not show the linguistic characteristics traditionally associated with it, especially not
a mixture of past tense with proximal adverbs (such sentences do occur elsewhere in the the text,
e.g. she was now only ten inches high). On the other hand, this observation could be a starting
point for a criticism of the traditional conception of FID, but we will not pursue that issue here.
8
174       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
a ‘smooth’ transition between the initially external (narrator) viewpoint and the
final internal (Alice) viewpoint.
Thirdly, there is the relative ordering of the reported and the reporting
clause, i.e. the medial placement of the reporting clause, between two parts of the
reported clause.⁶ In order for the gradual shift in viewpoint to work, the reporting
clause must not be placed before the reported clause (as in prototypical direct
discourse). Compare (1a) with the constructed example (1b) below.
(1) b. … but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and/so Alice thought: ‘(and)
what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?’
The stylistic effect of a smooth transition between external and internal viewpoints
no longer exists in (1b), where the full clause in the narrator’s discourse is
now structurally severed from Alice’s direct thought. As a consequence, the use of
a coordinating conjunction at the beginning of this direct thought is also less felicitous
(and would have to be interpreted differently here, perhaps as a discourse
marker; hence the parentheses): it cannot immediately connect to a relevant piece
of information in the preceding context. The structural independence of the two
text segments in the narration thus has important consequences for the management
of the viewpoints in the text. As stated above, the thought that the book contains
no pictures or conversations is primarily Alice’s (though filtered through the
narrator’s voice); in (1b), by contrast, we are now pushed towards reading the butclause
as an explanation of Alice’s (naïve) response to the book by the narrator.
Sentence (1a) is definitely not the only one exhibiting this particular effect
of a very gradual transition from narrator’s to Alice’s viewpoint, dependent on
precisely this combination of linguistic items. Example (2) is another instance,
which we will explain in a bit less detail.
(2) … but she could not even get her head through the doorway; ‘and even if my
head would go through,’ thought poor Alice, ‘it would be of very little use
without my shoulders. […]’
As we can see, (2) is structurally highly similar to (1a). Both excerpts comprise a
full narrative clause followed by a secondary boundary mark⁷, a lower case coor-
6 According to Quirk et al. (1985: 1022) “[m]edial position is very frequent”; see also McGregor
(1990) and Vandelanotte (2009).
7 Secondary boundary marks include the comma, the semicolon and the colon, as opposed to
terminal marks, which include the full stop, the question mark and the exclamation mark (Huddleston
and Pullum 2002).
9
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       175
dinating conjunction that starts the direct thought of the character (containing a
repetition of an element in the first conjunct: here head), with a medial reporting
clause. The only difference is the use of a semicolon at the end of the full clause
in the narration. A semicolon also indicates interdependency of the conjoined
clauses, so it still contributes to the slow shifting of the viewpoint when used in
this position, like the comma in (1a).
As the narrative unfolds, the next passage that shares the same pattern, now
with the coordinating conjunction for, is (3).
(3) … she felt a little nervous about this; ‘for it might end, you know,’ said Alice to
herself, ‘in my going out altogether, like a candle…
In (3), the combination of structural tools that creates a shifting viewpoint
mixture is almost identical to (1a) and (2), including the full clause in the narrator’s
discourse, followed by a semicolon and Alice’s subsequent self-oriented
direct speech, interrupted by a reporting clause.⁸ All of the examples above stem,
as we said, from the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland, but the pattern occurs
throughout the entire story: 21 of the 26 cases of the phrase thought Alice occur
in precisely this pattern (in only 5 cases is the formula sentence final), and the
same holds for about half of the 115 cases of the phrase said Alice (the difference
between thought and said is mostly due to the fact that the latter also occurs
in descriptions of conversations, with another participants taking the turn after
Alice has said something).
Based on these observations, we can formulate a general pattern for a recurrent
stylistic strategy in Alice in Wonderland, a schematic viewpoint construction
for constructing a gradually shifting mixture from the narrator’s to the protagonist’s
viewpoint:
(4) [CL] – [SecBound Mark] – “[CoorConj] – [Frag1]” – [Reporting CL] – “[Frag2]”
In this schema, [CL] stands for a Full Clause, [SecBound Mark] for a Secondary
Boundary Mark, [CoorConj] for a Coordinating Conjunction, and [FragX] for Frag-
ment-of-a-sentence.
Below, we will first examine whether the translators have a consistent strategy
for expressing the view-pointing effect in the Chinese passages corresponding
to the English ones that are characterized by (4). As we have seen, the viewpointing
effect in the English text is achieved through a consistent and recurrent
8 Notice that the element for, playing a crucial role in the gradual transition from the narrator’s
to (100 %) Alice’s discourse, is unambiguously a coordinating conjunction (cf. note 5).
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176       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
constructional complex, and we would like to see whether the translators, in the
same context, are similarly able to craft a (more or less) consistent constructional
means for the same stylistic end of mixing viewpoints.
3.2 Analysis of the four Chinese translations
In this section, we will first discuss the commonalities of the four translations
to describe how Chinese can accommodate the shifting viewpoint mixture in
the original, and then we will further explore whether and how such recurring
choices are capable of rendering the shifting viewpoint effect of the original text.
However, the very first observation that we can make about the four translations
is that no consistent set of structural tools is used to produce the stylistic
effect of a shifting mixture of viewpoints.
The absence of such a consistent set of structural tools may be surprising at
first sight, but the reasons quickly become clear when we consider some properties
of the grammar of Chinese, especially with regard to the ordering of clauses:
Chinese does not have a conventional pattern for a medial reporting clause
(though such an arrangement does not sound completely intolerable); the preferred
convention clearly is to place a reporting clause before the reported one.
The four translations of (3a) adhere to this convention by consistently placing the
reporting clause before Alice’s direct thought; (5) and (6) are typical examples.
11
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       177
(5) …她 有時候 偷偷 地 瞧 她 姊姊 看 的 是 什麼
ta youshihou tou-tou di qiao ta jie-jie kan de shi sheme
she sometimes secret-RED LK see she sister read LK PRT what
書， 可是 書 裡 又 沒有 畫兒， 又 沒有
shu, keshi shu li you meiyou hua-er, you meiyou
book but book in also NEG picture-DIM also NEG
說話， 她 就 想道， 「一本書 裏 又 沒有
shuohua, ta jiu xiang-dao, “yi-ben-shu li you meiyou
speech she PRT think-COMP one-CL-book in PRT NEG
畫兒， 又 沒有 說話， 那樣書
hua-er, you meiyou shuohua, na-yang-shu
picture-DIM also NEG speech that-kind-book
要 牠 幹什麼 呢？」 (Chao)
yao ta gansheme ne?”
want it what for PRT
‘… She sometimes secretly looked what book her sister was reading, but
the book did not have any picture, nor did it have any conversation, so she
thought “A book that does not have any picture, nor any conversation, why
would one want a book like that?”’
(6) 雖然 她 也 曾 在 一旁 窺視 姊姊 所
suiran ta ye ceng zai yipang kuishi jie-jie suo
although she also at one point LOC next to peep sister REL
閱讀 的 書籍， 卻 因 書 中 無 圖 也
yuedu de shuji, que yin shu zhong wu tu ye
read LK book but because book in NEG picture also
無 對話 的 內容 而 覺得 索然無味。 愛麗思
wu duihua de neirong er juede suoranwuwei. ailisi
NEG conversation LK content CONJ feel bored stiff Alice
心 想： 「沒有 圖案 也 沒有 對話 的
xin xiang: “meiyou tuaan ye meiyou duihua de
heart think NEG picture also NEG conversation LK
書 有 什麼 用處 呢？」 (Wang)
shu you sheme yongchu ne?”
book have what use PRT
‘Although she at one point peeped at the book that her sister was reading,
she felt bored from the content of the book that contained no picture and
no conversation. Alice thought: “What is the use of a book that contains no
picture and no conversation?”’
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178       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
The consequence of this grammatical convention of Chinese is that it deprives
translators of the possibility of exploiting the same structural tools that are used
throughout the original, i.e. a medial reporting clause, for the same stylistic
purpose; as a result, translators seem to be forced to find other linguistic tools
available to them, or to abandon the attempt to render the shifting of viewpoints
in the Chinese translation.
However, when we look at the translations of (2), it turns out that three out of
four actually have the reporting clause in medial position; (7) and (8) are exam-
ples.
(7) 但是 她 連 頭 都 擠不進 那扇門。 「就算
danshi ta lian tou dou ji-bu-jin na-shan-men. “jiusuan
but she PRT head PRT squeeze-NEG-in that-CL-door even if
我 的 頭 擠得進，」 可憐 的 愛麗絲 心想，
wo de tou ji-de-jin,” kelian de ailisi xin-xiang,
I LK head squeeze-PFV-in poor LK Alice heart-think
「肩膀 也 擠不進去… (Chen)
“jianbang ye ji-bu-jin-qu…
shoulder also squeeze-NEG-in-go
‘But she could not squeeze her head into that door. “Even if my head could
be squeezed in,” poor Alice thought, “my shoulder would not go through…”’
(8) 但 她 連 頭部 都 鑽不進 門口： 「就算 我
dan ta lian tou-bu dou zuan-bu-jin menkou: “jishi wo
but she PRT head-part PRT squeeze-NEG-in entrance even if I
的 頭 能 勉強 塞進 門口，」 愛麗絲
de tou neng mianqiang sai-jin menkou,” ailisi
LK head AUX with force squeeze-in entrance Alice
悲傷 地 想， 「我 的 肩膀 擠不進去… (Wang)
beishang di xiang, “wo de jianbang ji-bu-jin-qu…
sad LK think I LK shoulder squeeze-NEG-in-go
‘But she could not even get her head through the door: “Even if my head
could be forced into the door,” Alice thought sadly, “my shoulder would not
go through…”’
The inconsistency among the translations of (1a) and (2) is striking, which raises
a question: What is Chinese language usage really like in this respect, in natural
(not translated) discourse? One possibility is that Chinese, unlike English, does
not allow a nominal head and a post-modifier to be split (as in (1a)), but does
allow splitting the two clauses of a conditional (as in (2)). So the question is: Does
13
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       179
a medial reporting clause occur in natural (written) discourse of Chinese at all? In
order to answer this question, we consulted the Sinica Corpus of Modern Chinese.
We looked up all instances of xin-xiang (‘heart-think’, used in Chen’s translation)
and pansuan (‘calculate’, used in Jia & Jia’s translation), and determined the position
of the reporting clauses headed by one of these verbs relative to the associated
reported clause. There were 127 reporting clauses with xin-xiang, all of which
preceded their reported clause; there were 12 reporting clauses with pansuan, 9
of which occurred initially relative to the reported clause, and 3 finally. In other
words, the overwhelming majority of reporting clauses occurs initially, and none
of them are medial, in the corpus. Thus, we may safely conclude that the conventional
ordering patterns for reporting and reported clauses in English and
in Chinese are different. As recognized in the comprehensive Quirk et al. (1985:
1022), English has three conventionalized patterns – initial (‘reporting-reported’),
final (‘reported-reporting’), and medial (‘reported1-reporting-reported2’)  – the
last of which can be used in the construction of gradual viewpoint shift.⁹ Chinese,
on the other hand, has at most two conventional patterns, initial and final, possibly
with a preference for the former.¹⁰
Thus, there is a tension between the grammatical conventions of Chinese and
the ‘local’ communicative goal of construing a shift in viewpoint from narrator to
character. In three out of the four translations of (2), translators have chosen to
use a non-conventional pattern, allowing them to follow the order of clauses in
the original English text and thereby to try to construct the view-pointing effect in
the original, but not, of course, undoing the tension. The unconventional clause
ordering seems to some extent tolerable (also according to the first author’s intuitions).
Thus, it is not expected to block an average Mandarin reader’s understanding
of the situation being described; at the same time, its effect, as a nonstandard
device, is not that of a smooth shift from the narrator’s viewpoint to
Alice’s, as in English. Notice that neither (7) nor (8) has a coordinating conjunction
at the beginning of Alice’s direct thought (the original, see (2), has and);
recall that we argued that this use of a coordinating conjunction is integral to
the construal of a smooth transition between viewpoints in the English narrative,
which thus clearly cannot be straightforwardly constructed in Chinese.
In fact, in the Chinese translations of these three passages, coordinating conjunctions
are missing at the beginning of Alice’s direct thought in all cases but
9 Conceivably, there may also be functional differences between initial and final position of the
reporting clause, but we do not discuss that possibility any further here.
10 But this might also be dependent on the reporting verbs (witness the difference between xinxiang
and pansuan). Again, we leave this issue for future research.
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180       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
one. Of the twelve translated passages involved, only one (the translation of (3)
by Chen) has a coordinating conjunction: yinwei in (9):
(9) 她 有一點 擔心， 「因為，」 愛麗絲 自言自語： 「再
… ta youyidian danxin, “yinwei,” ailisi ziyanziyu: “zai
she a little worry because Alice talk to oneself further
縮下去 的 結果， 有可能 是 我 整個 人
suo-xiaqu de jieguo, youkeneng shi wo zhengge ren
shrink-IPFV LK result possible PRT I entire person
就 像 一個 蠟燭 般… (Chen)
jiu xiang yi-gen lazhu ban…
PRT like one-CL candle PRT
‘She was a little worried, “because,” Alice spoke to herself: “the result of my
going even smaller could be my going out like a candle…”’
The systematic absence (compared to the English original) of coordinating conjunctions
in this significant position points to another difference in the relevant
grammatical constructions available in English and in Chinese. In Chinese, the
coordinating conjunction that is semantically closest to English and is erqie, but
this is typically not used for temporal or causal relations, while the relations in
fragments of the type characterized in (4) precisely do have some causal (viz.
inferential) aspect (it is the absence of pictures that makes Alice draw a conclusion
about the book’s function, etc.). The distribution of erqie is in fact quite
different from that of English and. In particular, erqie does not typically occur
utterance initially in direct discourse; in the Sinica Corpus of Modern Chinese,
we find no tokens of erqie introducing direct discourse, in a total of 2,637 tokens
in the corpus. The only initial conjunction we find is in the translation by Chen in
(9), where the English original in fact has a causal conjunction (for in [3]): yinwei
‘because’. Interestingly, this conjunction has a distributional profile that is actually
more similar to English and than erqie, in particular in direct discourse: In
the Sinica Corpus, we find four tokens of yinwei opening direct discourse, in a
total of 5,000 in the whole corpus.
Finally, a closer look at the remaining translations of (3) reveals the possibility
of yet another strategy, which comes down to an attempt to follow the English
original and adhere to the conventions of Chinese at the same time. Consider
Wang’s translation in (10):
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Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       181
(10) 愛麗絲 有點兒 緊張 地 想： 「再 繼續 縮下去，
ailisi youdianer jinzhang di xiang: “zai jixu suo-xiaqu,
Alice a little nervous LK think further continue shrink-IPFV
可能 會 完蛋 的，」 又 對 自己 說， 「如果
keneng hui wandan de,” you dui ziji shuo, “ruguo
AUX AUX doomed PRT again to self say if
全 身 的 皮膚 都 不見 了， 像 隻 蠟燭
quan shen de pifu dou bujian le, xiang zhi lazhu
whole body LK skin all gone CRS like CL candle
般… (Wang)
ban…
PRT
‘Alice thought a little nervously: “(If I) keep going smaller, I am doomed,”
again (she) spoke to herself, “if my skin is gone, like a candle…”’
The first clause in the original is she felt a little nervous about this, a description
of Alice’s mental state, but not a reporting clause. The translator turned this
clause about nervousness into a reporting clause, with the proper name Alice as
the subject, and then further on inserts another (subjectless) reporting clause, in
medial position. While the latter splits the direct thought in two and thus more or
less directly reflects the English original, the first intervention makes Alice’s viewpoint
explicit (more so than in the original) in the first clause, thereby preventing
it from being read as the narrator’s explanation for her state of mind, and it conforms
to the conventions of the Chinese language (moreover, as the first part of
the direct thought in [10] constitutes a full sentence, the second reporting clause
might also be taken as initial, introducing a new thought; notice the element you,
“again”). There is a tension between the attempt to preserve a stylistic effect by
respecting the author’s practice of placing the reporting clause medially and the
conventions of the target language (that the reporting clause preferably precedes
the reported one); (10) shows a compromise between these two competing forces.
We have now looked at 12 translations of a single consistent linguistic pattern
of viewpoint mixing and shifting in Alice in Wonderland. Looking closely at the
translations, the first thing that we observe is that there does not seem to be a
single consistent linguistic pattern to evoke this mixture and shifting in Chinese,
and that this is certainly due, at least to a very large extent, to differences in conventionalized
grammatical patterns for relating reported to reporting clauses.
Table 1 below summarizes the four translators’ choices.
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182       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
Table 1: Position of the reporting clause with respect to the direct discourse
Translation of (1a) Translation of (2) Translation of (3)
Y.R. Chao Initial Initial Initial
L.F. Chen Initial Medial Medial
H.H. Wang Initial Medial Initial (10)
W. Jia & W. Jia Initial Medial Medial
Among the four translations, there is one (by Y.R. Chao) that sticks strictly to
the preferred pattern of Chinese grammar. In his translations of all three fragments,
he places the reporting clause before Alice’s direct thought. This translator
chooses to render the viewpoint effect by combining less schematic, lexical
constructions and reporting Alice’s thought verbatim in the narration, instead of
trying to use a general constructional schema as in the English text. For instance,
in (5), the Chinese expression you is an emphatic negation marker, and also a part
of the larger composite construction you… you… (functioning somewhat similarly
to neither… nor… in English). The narration in (5) contains you meiyou hua-er, you
meiyou shuo hua, which is repeated verbatim in Alice’s direct thought. This full
and literal repetition aligns Alice’s viewpoint at the end of the fragment with that
reported by the narrator and thus helps make the transition less abrupt, which
is functionally similar to the structural pattern in the English text – in fact, it is
an ‘enhanced’ version of the lexical repetitions present in the English text (cf.
above). But the other three translators choose to partially follow the clausal order
of the English text more closely, while also selectively adopting other constructions,
such as lian… dou… in (7) and (8), to embed Alice’s viewpoint in the nar-
ration.¹¹
The specific mixing and shifting of viewpoints in Lewis Carroll’s text is a
result of the author’s strategic exploitation of the conventional tools available to
him in his language, with the medial placement of the reporting clause being an
indispensable element of the stylistic schema. Since this medial placement is not
a conventionalized pattern in the grammar of Chinese (although it is not totally
impossible either), this language does not provide its users with a consistent way
of rendering a consistent pattern of viewpoint construction in the English original,
as we see reflected in the variety of different translation strategies.
The crucial term here is “conventional”. The relevant differences do not only
involve grammatical rules in the traditional sense, i.e. regular patterns for combining
words and phrases into sentences, but also typographic factors, which
11 Readers are referred to Lai (2008) and Wang and Su (2012) for a thorough analysis of the lian…
dou… construction.
17
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       183
are equally conventional tools stemming from a specific cultural development,
according to usage-based principles. Given the logographic writing system of
Chinese, the distinction between upper case and lower case is meaningless, as
opposed to the segmental writing system of English. So as a number of important
constitutive elements in a relevant constructional complex in the source
language is missing in the target language, any adoption of the constructional
schema in the target language is necessarily going to be only partial, and will not
do the same job as it does in the source language.
A difference between languages in the conventional tools available for viewpoint
management does not entail that the ultimate viewpoint relations constructed
by readers in interpreting a text are going to be radically different as well.
After all, different sets of tools may serve to create similar products. Linguistically
mediated meaning construction always combines the use of words and constructions
with inferences based on common ground. The relative proportion of what
comes from explicit signals and what from inferencing may differ between languages,
while the combined results for particular texts may well be similar. Parallel
texts provide an excellent basis for investigating precisely the question in what
ways and in what dimensions the explicit, conventionalized tools for viewpoint
management in languages differ or coincide, and thus ultimately also: how the
general conceptual space of viewpoint management is and can be structured. We
will return to this issue at the end of the next section and in our conclusion.
4 Mixing viewpoints through deixis in Jiu Guo and
its English translation
We will now reverse the perspective, and briefly look at the way viewpoint is
managed in an original Chinese text and how this comes out in its translation.
As we have seen, English has quite a rich set of clause combining tools that may
be used in viewpoint management, while Chinese has a comparatively less elaborate
set of such tools. However, Chinese may well have more elaborate tools than
English in some other domain. A case in point is constituted by the occurrence
of the morphemes lai ‘come’ and qu ‘go’ in verbal resultative constructions (cf. Lu
et al., in preparation).¹² Consider (11a), (11b), (12a) and (12b), where examples (a)
12 The term “resultative” as used in Chinese linguistics is different from that in English. The
latter denotes an argument structure construction with two participants, the second of which
reaches a specified state as a result of the process described by the verb ([NP-V-NP-Result-state],
as in He cried his eyes red; cf. Goldberg and Jackendoff 2004). The former denotes a verbal con-
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184       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
are taken from the narration of the Chinese original, and examples (b) are their
counterparts in the published English translation.
(11) a. 丁钩儿 接过 酒瓶子， 晃晃， 蝎子 在
dinggouer jie-guo jiuping-zi huang-huang xiezi zai
Ding Gou’er take-over wine bottle shake-RED scorpion LOC
参须 间 游泳， 怪 味道 从 瓶口
sen-xu jian youyong guai weidao cong ping-kou
ginseng root LOC swim strange odor LOC bottle mouth
冲出来。
chong-chu-lai
rush-out-come
‘Ding Gou’er took over the bottle, shook it, scorpions swimming among
the ginseng roots, with a strange odor rushing out (coming [towards
origo]) from the mouth of the bottle.’
(11) b. He shook the bottle, and the scorpions swam in the ginseng-enhanced
liquid. A strange odor emanated from the bottle.
(12) a. 他 感到 乏味、 无趣， 便 把 她 推开。 她
ta gan-dao fawei wuqu bian ba ta tui-kai ta
he feel-PFV bland uninteresting then PRT she push-aside she
却 像 一只 凶猛的 小豹子 一样，
que xiang yi-zhi xiongmeng-de xiao baozi yiyang
nevertheless like one-CL fierce-LINK leopard cub same
不断地 扑上来…
buduandi pu-shang-lai
relentlessly pounce-up-come
‘He felt uninterested and then pushed her away. But she was like a fierce
leopard cub and relentlessly threw herself (upon him) – coming [towards
origo].’
(12) b. That was a turn-off, it killed his desire, and he pushed her away. But, like a
plucky fighting cock, she sprang back at him hard, catching him off guard
and making resistance all but impossible.
struction indicating a verbal process leading to some result associated with the meaning of the
verb, i.e. a kind of ‘intrinsic’ result (cf. certain particle constructions in English like come in, jump
up, where the particles also indicate resultant states of the verbal process, and thus turn the
verbal expression as a whole into one of achievement, not just a process. Readers are referred to
Chao (1968) or Li and Thompson (1981) for a detailed description of these resultative constructions
in Chinese.
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Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       185
We can observe that the way viewpoints are constructed in the Chinese original
and in the English translations differ, due to the occurrence of lai in the verbal
complex of the sentences in the Chinese version of the story. In (11a), the viewpoint
presented in the narration is a mixture of the narrator’s and the protagonist’s
(Ding Gou’er’s). The way Ding Gou’er is referred to, by his full name, is
an indication of the narrator’s perspective; the resultative verbal construction
presents the manner and the end-state of the movement (rushing out), while the
combination with lai invites the reader to take the point of view of the one perceiving
the odor, i.e. the character. This kind of mixture can be produced straightforwardly
in Mandarin, due to the fact that there is a conventional way of marking
deixis on a verb (here by adding lai). Since English lacks such a tool, the mixing
of viewpoints cannot be represented so easily; the choice of the verb emanate
by Goldblatt makes the movement explicit and leaves the character’s viewpoint
implicit.
Fragment (12a) shows the same mixture of viewpoints. Ding Gou’er is referred
to by a third person pronoun he, so the deictic center is the narrator. On the other
hand, with lai in the verbal complex, the event of her throwing herself at him is
explicitly and effortlessly presented as perceived from the protagonist’s point of
view, in the Chinese version. In the English translation, the latter point of view is
much more left to inference, for example through the addition of lexical elements
suggestive of his attitude (off guard, resistance).
There is a lexical construction in English that can be considered a translation
equivalent of the deictic verbal element lai in Chinese, viz. the lexeme come.
But what is crucial here is the difference between the conventional combinatorial
properties of these elements in the two languages. In the original Chinese
version of the story, the stylistic effect of mixed viewpoints is achieved through
a combination of an objective reference to the protagonist, presentation of the
protagonist’s perceptual content, and the use of a deictic verbal morpheme. The
stylistic ‘recipe’ is different in the English version, as the constructional possibility
of the deictic verbal morpheme is missing, so the translator has to resort to
linguistic means available in the target language, such as the lexical items mentioned
above, or, more subtly, the spatial preposition at in (12b).¹³ Note that the
13 It was suggested to us that at might have a strong association with come, stronger than with
go, and because of that it might represent (deictic) viewpoint. However, a Google search for both
came at him and went at him returned numbers of results in the same order of magnitude, and
went back at him in fact occurred considerably more frequently than came back at him, so that
a connection between at and deictic viewpoint must at least involve more than association with
come. Still, looking at possible viewpoint effects of the use of spatial prepositions in English is a
valuable direction of investigation (in this context, the use of came would work better than went,
while another preposition (e.g. to, after) would not have that effect).
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186       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
construals created by the use of a deictic verb and by a preposition are bound
to be different, as different parts of a conceptual scene are profiled (Langacker
1987). Therefore, although the difference in linguistic conventions does not make
translation impossible, the ways viewpoint mixture can be linguistically achieved
(and conceptually appreciated) in the two languages remain irreducibly different.
As we mentioned at the end of section 3, different ‘compositional pathways’ may
well lead to comparable overall interpretations of viewpoint relations, but the
pathways are as much a factor in the style of a text as the overall interpretation.
Creating a complex mixing of viewpoints for the same usage event in another
language at least involves an irreducibly different constructional composition of
the mixed viewpoints.
Again, this analysis demonstrates the methodological advantages of using
parallel texts in cross-linguistic viewpoint research. First of all, the method shows
us that the distribution of viewpoint constructions – in this case, the translation
equivalents lai and come – varies according to the conventions of the languages
involved. Therefore, although English also has viewpoint expressions like come
see for yourself, go figure that may create a construal similar to one that involves
lai and qu ‘go’ in Chinese, the linguistic manifestation of mixing viewpoints in
the same usage event is bound to be constrained by the relevant conventions of a
specific language. Second, on this basis, the method provides a methodological
cutting edge for investigating the relation between the general conceptual space
of viewpoint and the dimensions in which languages may differ in their explicitly
coded, conventionalized tools for viewpoint management.
5 Conclusion
In sections 3 and 4, we considered very different linguistic phenomena and translation
samples of different directions, which we believe point to the same methodological
and theoretical significance.
First of all, we see an important methodological advantage: Putting parallel
passages in different languages side by side, especially when the languages
involved are not at all related, focuses the investigator’s attention on elements
that would otherwise easily remain below the level of conscious awareness.
Indeed, some of the details of the shifting viewpoint pattern in Alice in Wonderland,
such as the role of the coordinating conjunction and that of lower case, only
became apparent to us in the comparison with the Chinese translations.
Secondly, there is a fundamental theoretical consequence of the approach
we implemented here. Ultimately, all management of viewpoints in discourse,
21
Shifting viewpoints: How does that actually work across languages?       187
especially of viewpoint mixing, depends not only on general cognitive abilities
(empathy, Theory of Mind), but crucially also on the linguistic tools for viewpoint
management that language users have at their disposal, and what we can now
clearly appreciate is that these are language and culture specific, having been
transmitted (with slight modifications) to present day language users over the
generations. Thus, although the necessary cognitive infrastructure is presumably
universal, there will not be universal linguistic patterns of viewpoint management.
The systematic possibility of shifting smoothly from mainly-narratorviewpoint
to mainly-character-viewpoint in Alice in Wonderland is dependent
on certain conventions of the English language, and the systematic possibility
to effortlessly combine manner of movement and viewpoint in Jiu Guo is dependent
on certain conventions of the Chinese language. That is, we can establish a
conclusion about categories of viewpoint organization in discourse that parallels
Croft’s (2001) conclusion about syntactic categories: As such categories can
only be defined in terms of properties of constructions, and the latter are necessarily
language specific, the categories are of necessity also language specific.
Similarly, as linguistic patterns of viewpoint mixing can only be defined (in a
way that allows instances of them to be identified in texts) by reference to conventional
linguistic items, with all their language specific properties, they are
also of necessity language specific (van Krieken, Sanders & Hoeken, this volume,
come to a similar conclusion). The generality suggested by terms like “direct” and
“indirect discourse” for certain patterns of viewpoint organization may thus be
misleading. It induces investigators to ask questions like: “How is FID expressed
in Language X?” (cf. Hagenaar 1992), while these are in fact unanswerable, as
the presuppositional condition (that a language independent way of identifying
different types of STR exists) cannot be met as a matter of principle. This is not to
say that attempts to answer such a question have not produced interesting and
insightful results (as Hagenaar [1992] in fact demonstrates). But to the extent that
they have, we conclude that they should be ‘reconceptualized’ as insights about
the variability in the possible conventional coding of different aspects of viewpoint
management.
What exactly the properties of the items involved in viewpoint management
in a specific language are will have to be established by a large scale investigation
of actual language use. Thus, our characterizations of the English and Chinese
phenomena discussed here, may in some respects be inaccurate or incomplete.
For example, in section 3, we did not look at a large number of verbs of communication
and cognition, so there might be different ordering patterns associated
with different semantic types of verbs in Mandarin, or in English, or in both. But
our theoretical point is not weakened by this kind of uncertainty, because of the
method of studying parallel text fragments: The conclusion that viewpoint con-
22
188       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
struction in discourse is language specific can already be drawn on the basis of
careful analysis of specific parallel instances of language use, precisely because
they are parallel.
Finally, the use of parallel texts has a high potential in helping set a research
agenda for cross-linguistic viewpoint research, especially if the scope can be
extended to cover a representative sample of languages, and preferably also discourse
types (there are limitations here; we do not foresee parallel day-to-day
conversations in the near future, for example). It will allow a better understanding
of how various languages represent viewpoint and what aspects of viewpoint
construction are systematically distinguished in the grammars of many different
languages and which only in a few. The methodology of parallel text analysis can
contribute significantly to a solid empirical foundation for answering this intriguing
and important question.
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Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lu, Wei-lun, I-wen Su & Arie Verhagen. In preparation. Constructions as cultural tools of
viewpoint operation: A case study of deictic verbs in Chinese-English parallel texts.
McGregor, William B. 1990. The metafunctional hypothesis and syntagmatic relations.
Occasional Papers in Systemic Linguistics 4. 5–50.
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advances in some theoretical models and applications. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Slobin, Dan I. 1996. Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In
Masayoshi Shibatani & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Their form
and meaning, 195–220. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Slobin, Dan I. 2003. Language and thought online: Cognitive consequences of linguistic
relativity. In Dedre Gentner & Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in mind: Advances
in the study of language and thought, 157–192. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tabakowska, Elżbieta. 1993. Cognitive linguistics and poetics of translation. Tübingen,
Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Tabakowska, Elżbieta. 2014. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in grammatical wonderlands. In Chloe
Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell & Wenjuan Yuan (eds.), Cognitive grammar in
literature, 101–116. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.
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approach. Berlin: De Gruyter.
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parallel corpus – a pilot study. In Björn Hansen & Petr Karlik (eds.), Modality in Slavonic
languages. New perspectives, 201–217. München: Sagner.
Verkerk, Annemarie. 2014. The evolutionary dynamics of motion event encoding. Nijmegen: MPI
Series in Psycholinguistics.
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corpus-based study of Mandarin lian…dou and lian …ye constructions. Journal of Chinese
Linguistics 40(1). 84–101.
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Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 15(1). 5–35.
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Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10(1). 11–55.
Research materials used
Carroll, Lewis. 2014 [1865]. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. http://www.gutenberg.org/
ebooks/11(accessed 28 September 2015).
Carroll, Lewis. 1939. Alisi Manyou Qijing Ji (Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Trans. Yuan Ren
Chao). Shanghai: The Commercial Press.
Carroll, Lewis. 2005. Ailisi Mengyou Xianjing (Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Trans. Wenhao
Jia and Wenyuan Jia). Taipei: Shangzhou Publishing.
24
190       Wei-lun Lu and Arie Verhagen
Carroll, Lewis. 2006. Ailisi Mengyou Xianjing (Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Trans. Li-fang
Chen). Taipei: Gaobao Publishing.
Carroll, Lewis. 2011. Ailisi Manyou Qijing (Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Trans. Hui-hsien
Wang). Taipei: Licun Culture Publishing.
Mo, Yan. 2008. Jiu Guo [The Republic of wine]. Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Publishing.
Mo, Yan. 2011. The Republic of wine (Trans. Howard Goldblatt). New York: Arcade Publishing.
Sinica Corpus of Modern Chinese
http://app.sinica.edu.tw/kiwi/mkiwi
25
Publication 2
[2] Lu, Wei-lun, Arie Verhagen and I-wen Su. 2018. A Multiple-Parallel-Text approach for viewpoint
research across languages: The case of demonstratives in English and Chinese. Expressive minds
and artistic creations, ed. by Szilvia Csábi, 131-157. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
85 85 85 85
Substantiation: I (first author) was responsible for the collection of the data, data analysis, the
writing of the main body of the analysis and most parts of the method, introduction and conclusion.
The second author was responsible for the writing of small parts of the introduction and conclusion,
and the proofreading of the entire text. The third author was responsible for writing a small part of the
conclusion and for proofreading parts of the text.
26
27
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28
CHAPTER 6
A Multiple-Parallel-Text Approach
for Viewpoint Research Across
Languages
The Case of Demonstratives in English and Chinese
WEI-LUN LU, ARIE VERHAGEN, AND I-WEN SU
6.1. INTRODUCTION
Recentyearshavewitnessedasubstantialincreaseincognitiveapproaches
to literary studies as an emerging field called cognitive poetics or cognitive
stylistics (Lakoff and Turner, 1989; Tsur, 1992; Semino and Culpeper,
2002; Stockwell, 2002; Gavins and Steen, 2003; Freeman, 2006; Brône
and Vandaele, 2009; and Harrison et al., 2014; among others), which has
generated a meaningful body of research on literary texts in various languages.
However, so far little attention has been paid to the cross-linguistic
dimension of cognitive poetic research, although exceptions do exist
(Tabakowska, 1993, 2014; Wu, 2004; Freeman and Takeda, 2006). In this
chapter, we pick up on this insufficiency and try to promote the use of
the multiple-parallel-text (MultiParT) approach as an innovative research
methodology in contrastive cognitive poetics and linguistics in general.
In particular, we discuss demonstratives in English and Chinese as a representative
case to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed MultiParT
method.
29
[132] Multiperspectivity: Proximity and Distance
Demonstratives are deictic elements in language that help users identify
which entity is being referred to within a frame of reference. The cognitive
function of demonstratives is to single out a nominal referent and to direct
the conceptualizer’s attention to a certain referent from an open-ended set
of possible candidates (Langacker, 2008, 277). At an interactional level, a
speaker uses a demonstrative to intersubjectively share referential focus
within the current discourse space, so as to coordinate the joint focus of
attention (Diessel, 2006; Langacker, 2008, 291).
The assumption underlying the present study is that we take demonstratives
in literary narratives as the author’s cognitive stylistic devices
that create and attempt to manage joint attention with the reader, thus
viewpointing (Dancygier, 2012) the narrative in a certain way. By using a
demonstrative construction (as a form–meaning pairing, in the sense of
Goldberg, 1995) to single out a referent in a narrated event, the narrator
adjusts joint attention created by his or her language use in the reader’s
awareness by guiding the reader’s construal of the mental distance between
himself or herself and the nominal referent in the narrative, resulting in a
certain literary style. When the narrator uses a proximal demonstrative to
mark reference, this creates a construal in which the referent is somehow
close to the reader, whereas when a distal demonstrative is used, the referent
is construed at a longer distance from the reader.1
In this chapter, we
limit our focus to this, that, these, and those in English and their counterparts
zhe [this] and na [that] in Mandarin.
6.2. METHODOLOGY
The use of parallel texts has been a useful methodology in various fields
of linguistics, including typology, pragmatics, and semantics (Van der
Auwera, Schalley, and Nuyts, 2005; Chamonikolasová, 2007; Cysouw and
Wälchli, 2007; Barlow, 2008) and has proven highly advantageous. The
benefit of such methodology lies in its parallel alignment of various verbalizations
of the same usage event: If we take a translator as a sensible
text producer with a good intention of communicating the same message
to his or her reader as does the source text, he or she is bound to deliver
the content in the target language in a way that is as close to the source
text as he or she can make it, trying to keep the cognitive and stylistic
effects at all levels. Therefore we believe the use of parallel texts constitutes
an optimal methodological approach to contrastive linguistic and
literature research.
30
a muLtiPLe-ParaLLeL-text aPProaCh for vieWPoint researCh [133]
Although the use of parallel texts has also gained increasing interest
in cognitive linguistics (e.g., Slobin, 1996, 2003; Rojo and IbarretxeAntuñano,
2013; Tabakowska, 1993, 2014; Verkerk, 2014; and Lu et al.,
submitted; among others), the method is still underutilized in the field,
let alone in cognitive poetics. There are various studies on demonstratives
(or even on referring expressions or deixis, in broader terms), but
the majority of them are based on the use of monolingual corpora (e.g.,
Gundel et al., 1993; Himmelmann, 1996; and Piwek, Beun, and Cremers,
2008; among others), with relatively rare uses of translation or parallel
texts. In particular, in the study of demonstratives, the approach is still
almost new, with only two exceptions that we are aware of, which will be
introduced below in detail.
Wu (2004) is one whose scope and concern are the closest to those of
the present study. In a detailed manner, the author compares the use of
demonstratives in a story originally written in English and its Chinese
translation, and the other way round. However, a factor that is not taken
into account in the research design is individual variation, with only one
version of translation included in the corpus—with data from only one
speaker, idiolect becomes a variable that could not be controlled for, so no
generalization over the language(s) of a community of speakers could be
made. As individual variation and the distinction between the individual
andcommunitylevelinthestudyoflanguagehaverecentlygainedmoreand
more attention in cognitive linguistic research (see Dąbrowska, 2015, and
references cited therein), we believe the parallel-text methodology should
take that into account as well.
Tabakowska (2014) reported another important study in the same
direction, discussing the general influence of grammar on point of view
in translation. Tabakowska compares the English original of Alice in
Wonderland with its five Polish translations, and especially comments
on how the six versions make reference, given the grammatical fact that
Polish, unlike English, lacks a systematic distinction between definite
and indefinite articles (which is also the case in Mandarin). However, the
scope of her paper also includes, in addition to demonstratives, modality,
de-idiomatization, and iconicity, which is so extensive that it prevents the
author from discussing how demonstratives are used as cognitive stylistic
devices of proximal and distal viewpointing, and this is exactly what we
address in this chapter.
The general research issue that we try to address is as follows: Is
there a systematic way to compare viewpointing constructions crosslinguistically?
When we identify a viewpointing construction in Language
31
[134] Multiperspectivity: Proximity and Distance
A, do we systematically find its counterparts in Language B (see Dancygier,
2016; Lu and Verhagen, 2016)? The hypothesis is that because all translators
base their language production on the source text, the viewpoint
representation should ideally be identical in both languages. Even if viewpoint
representations do not completely match in the two languages, at
the very least we should expect to be able to find a relatively high degree
of correspondence.
With the research issues in mind, our research focuses on world masterpieces
of literature and their multiple published translations in the same
target language. First, such works are likely to be widely translated into
many languages, so researchers may take advantage of that and investigate
a wide span of languages in an efficient way. More important, world masterpieces
also stand a good chance of getting translated and published more
than once in one language, which allows us to observe written-language
production from more than one representative speaker in the same lan-
guage.2
Third, published (commercial) translations are usually carefully
edited and proofread by the publisher to ensure reception of its language
and style by potential readers, who are presumably all native speakers of
the target language investigated.
Inourstudy,weusethefirstchapterofLewisCarroll’sAliceinWonderland
and its four published versions in Mandarin, translated by Yuan Ren
Chao, Li-fang Chen, Hui-hsien Wang, and Wenyuan Jia and Wenhao Jia
(cotranslators).
6.3. FINDINGS
First and foremost, what we find in our multiple parallel texts reveals
highly frequent cross-linguistic mismatches between the English and the
Chinese versions. We have three general observations of how the individual
text producers provide very different takes on the same literary scene,
which all nullify the hypothesis in an empirical way. In Section 6.3.1, we
show a vast difference in the frequencies of the demonstratives, with those
of the Chinese versions generally outnumbering those of the English text.
Subsection 6.3.2 presents the highly frequent mismatches across the two
languages involved. Building on the lack of perfect cross-linguistic correspondences
that we present in Section 6.3.2, Section 6.3.3 nevertheless
shows the general intralanguage consistency across the Chinese versions
investigated.
32
a muLtiPLe-ParaLLeL-text aPProaCh for vieWPoint researCh [135]
6.3.1. Difference in Frequency as the Most Prominent
Systematic Difference
The first and foremost observation that sticks out in the set of parallel texts
that we collected is the vast difference in frequency in the use of demonstratives
in the two languages. In general, the demonstratives in the Chinese
versions outnumber those in the English text. Table 6.1 shows the tendency.
We also subsequently present some selective excerpts as illustration.
Instances (1a)–(1c) show how a scene is presented in English without any
demonstrative viewpointing but is heavily demonstrative-viewpointed in
at least two Chinese versions. Demonstratives in all examples are shaded.
(1a) So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day
made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisychain
would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when
suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
(1b) 所以 她 就 無精打采 地 自己 在
suoyi ta jiu wujingdacai di ziji zai
so she PRT bored LK self LOC
心裡 盤算– （她 亦 不過 勉強 地
xinli pansuan– ta yi buguo mianqiang di
heart think she PRT only try to LK
Table 6.1. FREQUENCY OF DEMONSTRATIVES
IN THE ENGLISH VERSION AND THE FOUR
CHINESE VERSIONS4
Proximal Distal Total
Carroll 14 11 25
Chao 34 49 83
Chen 27 9 36
Wang 35 23 58
Jia 36 16 52
33
[136] Multiperspectivity: Proximity and Distance
醒著， 因為 這 熱天 熱得 她 昏昏
xing-zhe yinwei zhe retian re-de ta hun-hun
wake-IPF because this hot day hot-PFV she dizzy
地 要 睡）– 到底 還是 做 一枝
di yao shui daodi haishi zuo yi-zhi
LK MOD sleep on earth or make one-CL
野菊 花圈兒 好 呢？ 還是 為著 這
yeju huaquan-er hao ne haishi weizhe zhe
daisy chain-DIM good PRT or for this
種 玩意兒 不值得 站起來 去 找 花
zhong wanyi-er bu-zhide zhan-qilai qu zhao hua
kind thing-DIM NEG-worth stand-up go find flower
的 麻煩 呢？ 她 正在 納悶
de mafan ne ta zhengzai namen
LK trouble PRT she being contemplate
的 時候， 忽然 來了 一隻 淡紅 眼睛
de shihou huran lai-le yi-zhi danhong yanjing
LK when suddenly come-PFV one-CL pink eye
34
a muLtiPLe-ParaLLeL-text aPProaCh for vieWPoint researCh [137]
的 兔子， 在 她 旁邊 跑過。
de tuzi zai ta pangbian pao-guo
LK rabbit LOC she next to run-past
“So out of boredom, she calculated in her heart—(She only tried to stay
awake, as this hot day made her so sleepy)—Is it at all better to make a daisy
chain? Or is it, for this kind of things, not worth the trouble of standing up
to bother the flowers? As she was wondering, suddenly there came a white
rabbit with pink eyes running past her.” (Chao)
As is obvious, (1b) presents two nominal referents that are proximally
viewpointed in Chao’s version but not in the English text, which are zhe
retian [this hot day] and zhe zhong wanyi-er [this kind of things]. However,
as we look deeper into the examples, an interesting fact emerges—the
nominal referent wanyi-er [thing-DIM] actually refers back to the daisy
chain that Alice makes, which, however, is verbalized as such only in
Chao’s version. To be precise, Chao’s text creates wanyi-er as a shell noun
(Schmid, 2000) that anaphorically traces back to a referent in its prior text
(the possible event of making a daisy chain), but such backtracking does
not occur at all in Carroll’s version. We return to this point in the discussion
in Section 6.4.
(1c) 她 開始 打算 編 個 雛菊 花環，
ta kaishi dasuan bian ge chuju huahuan
she start plan make CL daisy wreath
可是 又 不知道 起身 去 摘 雛菊
keshi you bu-zhidao qishen qu zhai chuju
but PRT NEG-
know
rise go pick daisy
35
[138] Multiperspectivity: Proximity and Distance
是不是 太 費事 了。 （這 天 天氣
shibushi tai feishi le zhe tian tianqi
whether too trouble CRS this day weather
非常 炎熱， 使 她 昏昏欲睡。） 這
feichang yanre shi ta hunhunyushui zhe
very hot make she dozy this
時， 一隻 有著 粉紅色 眼睛 的
shi yi-zhi you-zhe fenhong-se yanjing de
time one-CL have-IPF pink-color eye LK
白兔 從 她 身邊 跑了 過去。
baitu cong ta shenbian pao-le guoqu
white rabbit from she next to run-PFV past
“She started planning to make a ring of daisies, but did not know whether
it would be too much a hassle to rise and pick daisies. (This day, the weather
was very hot, which made her dozy.) At this moment, a white rabbit with pink
eyes ran past her.” (Jia and Jia)
Example (1c) shows a different strategy of viewpointing the same scene by
proximally presenting the setting, that is, the day and the time of speaking,
elaborated as zhe tian and zhe shi. The use of zhe tian is highly similar
to zhe retian in Chao’s version, whereas the other deictic construction zhe
shi involves a completely different narrative strategy. We argue that the
use of the proximal viewpointing construction zhe shi brings the reader
deep into the narrated scene by inserting the proximal demonstrative as
an indicator of Alice’s voice, the stylistic effect of which is, however, rendered
in Carroll’s version in a very different way (to be specific, by use
36
a muLtiPLe-ParaLLeL-text aPProaCh for vieWPoint researCh [139]
of the adverb suddenly). We further discuss in Section 6.4 the fact that
different languages prefer different stylistic strategies for similar viewpointing
effects.
We believe the preceding set of examples testifies to the simple fact that
Mandarin makes more frequent use of demonstrative constructions than
English to viewpoint the same literary scene. As further examples similarly
show, the generally much higher productivity of demonstratives in
the Chinese versions compared with that of the English text is consistent
throughout the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland.
Now there is the fact that the Chinese versions have an overall higher
frequency of demonstratives than the English text, but what is the
explanation for that? An intuitive approach would be to look into the
individual grammatical systems, which might turn up an answer along
the following lines:  English is a language that systematically uses a
determiner (including articles and demonstratives) to ground a count
noun, which, however, is not the linguistic convention in Chinese, and
because Chinese does not systematically use (definite) articles (see Li
and Thompson, 1981, 131; Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski, 1993, 300),
demonstratives should do the job of deciding the reference in context
and are expected to be more productive. And that was generally what
was done and claimed in most previous studies based on monolingual
corpora.
In Section 6.3.2, we use our data to judge the appropriateness of this
“vanilla” (Croft, 2005) approach of looking only into the respective linguistic
systems.
6.3.2. Frequent Mismatches Throughout the Texts
The second important observation that we can make from the multiple
parallel texts collected is an overall lack of correspondence within
a certain stretch of the texts between the English original and the four
Chinese versions, which means that it is not just the frequency that matters,
but that lack of cross-linguistic correspondence seems to be the reality.
This empirically nullifies our hypothesis. Excerpts (2a)–(2d) are clear
illustrations.
(2a) There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so
VERY much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!
I shall be late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she
ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural);
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[140] Multiperspectivity: Proximity and Distance
(2b) 就是 看見 一隻 淡紅 眼睛 的 白
jiushi kan-jian yi-zhi danhong yanjing de bai
even see-PFV one-CL pink eye LK white
兔子， 本來 亦 不是 件 怎麼 大了不得
tuzi, benlai yi bushi jian zeme daliaobude
rabbit originally also/either NEG CL what big deal
的 事情； 並且 就是 阿麗思 聽見 那
de shiqing bingqie jiushi alisi ting-jian na
LK thing and even Alice hear-PFV that
兔子 自言自語 地 說， 「噯呀！ 噫呀！ 我
tuzi ziyanziyu di shuo, aiya yiya wo
rabbit talk to self LK say INTERJ INTERJ I
一定 要 去 晚 了」 她 亦
yiding yao qu wan le ta yi
for sure MOD go late CRS she also
不 覺得 這 算 什麼 十二分 出奇
bu juede zhe suan sheme shierfen chuqi
NEG feel this count what very extraordinary
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的 事情 （事後 想起來 她 才 覺得
de shiqing shihou xiang-qilai ta cai juede
LK thing afterwards think-IPF she PRT feel
這 是 應當 詫異 的 事， 不過
zhe shi yingdang chayi de shi buguo
this be MOD surprise LK thing but
當時 她 覺得 樣樣 事情 都 像
dangshi ta juede yang-yang shiqing dou xiang
then she feel kind-RED thing all like
很 平常 似的；）
hen pingchang side
very usual PRT
“Even seeing a pink-eyed white rabbit was not a big deal whatsoever; and even when
Alice heard that rabbit say to itself, “Oh mine! Oh mine! I will be late for sure,” she
did not consider this anything extraordinary. (Afterwards, as she recalled it, she
realized that she should have felt surprised at this, but at the moment she had
thought everything was like usual.)” (Chao)
A comparison of (2a) and (2b) shows how Carroll’s and Chao’s versions
viewpoint the scene in at least three different ways. In Carroll’s version,
the first demonstrative construction is a distal one, which refers anaphorically
to the event that Alice saw a rabbit with pink eyes. However,
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the practice of pronominalizing an event is not followed in Chao’s version,
so the distal viewpoint on that part of the literary scene, as Carroll
renders it, is not present in Chao’s version. The second difference lies
in how the narrator refers to the rabbit. In Chao’s version, the rabbit is
referred to as a distal one by means of the use of na, whereas the English
version does not specify the distance, using only a definite article the.
The third difference is again how the text pronominalizes an event. In
the English version, the event of Alice’s hearing the rabbit talk to itself is
pronominalized by a viewpoint-neutral pronoun it (underlined), as part
of a cleft construction. On the other hand, the same event is pronominalized
in Chao’s version with a proximal anaphoric demonstrative, which
serves the stylistic function of involving the reader by bringing the reader
closer to the scene.
(2c) 這 件 事 在 當時 看來 也
zhe jian shi zai dangshi kanlai ye
this CL thing LOC then seem PRT
沒 什麼 特別， 而且 在 聽到 兔子
mei sheme tebie erqie zai ting-dao tuzi
NEG what special and LOC hear-PFV rabbit
自言自語 地 說： 「天哪！ 天哪！ 我
ziyanziyu di shuo tianna tianna wo
talk to self LK say INTERJ INTERJ I
要 遲到 了！」 時， 愛麗絲 也 不
yao chidao le shi ailisi ye bu
MOD late CRS when Alice PRT NEG
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認為 有 何 不 尋常 （事後 回想起來，
renwei you he bu xunchang shihou huixiang-qilai
think have what NEG usual afterwards recall-IPF
她 覺得 自己 早 該 對 此
ta juede ziji zao gai dui ci
she feel self early MOD to this
感到 奇怪， 但 在 當時 一切 似乎
gan-dao qiguai dan zai dangshi yiqie sihu
feel-PFV strange but LOC then everything seem
都 那麼 的 自然）。
dou na-me de ziran
all that-so LK natural
“This thing did not look so special back then, and when hearing the rabbit say
to itself: “Oh mine! Oh mine! I will be late for sure!,” Alice did not find anything
unusual (afterwards, as she recalled, she felt that she should have felt strange
about this, but at the moment everything had seemed as natural as that).” (Chen)
Excerpt (2c) presents a radical case with three differences from (2a): First,
the event of Alice’s seeing a rabbit with pink eyes is viewpointed by means
of the use of a proximal demonstrative, unlike Chao’s viewpoint-neutral
representation and even contrary to Carroll’s distal viewpoint. In addition
to the contrary viewpoint in the beginning of this excerpt, in Chen’s version,
a distal demonstrative is used in the narrator’s comment in brackets
to prompt a distanced viewpoint, away from the narrated event (of Alice’s
seeing a rabbit, hearing it speak to itself, and so on). However, in Carroll’s
version the same event is pronominalized as a proximal demonstrative,
prompting a close-up take on it. The third difference, though quite subtle,
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lies in the grammatical nature of the demonstratives used. In Chen’s
version, the distal demonstrative is joined by an adverbializer me, the
combinatorial possibility of which is available only in Chinese, whereas
in Carroll’s version, the demonstrative occurs as a stand-alone pronoun
instead of as part of an adverb. We discuss how the subtle difference in the
grammatical profile of demonstratives makes a difference in construal in
Section 6.4.
(2d) 再 沒有 更 令 人 興奮 的
zai meiyou geng ling ren xingfen de
PRT NEG more make man excite LK
事 了， 尤其是 愛麗絲 親耳聽到 那
shi le youqishi ailisi qiner-ting-dao na
thing CRS especially Alice in person-hear-PFV that
隻 小白兔 喃喃自語： 「噢！ 天啊！ 我
zhi xiaobaitu nannanziyu ao tian-a wo
CL rabbit talk to self INTERJ INTERJ I
要 遲到 了！」 （就 在 她 聽
yao chidao le jiu zai ta ting
MOD late CRS PRT LOC she hear
懂 那 句 話 之後， 猛然 驚覺，
dong na ju hua zhihou mengran jingjue
understand that CL (sentence) word after suddenly realize
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自己 應該 要 懷疑 到底 是 發生
ziji yinggai yao huaiyi daodi shi fasheng
self MOD MOD wonder on earth be happen
什麼 事 的， 但 一切 都 發生得
sheme shi de dan yiqie dou fasheng-de
what thing LK but everything all happen-PFV
太 突然 了。）
tai turan le
too sudden CRS
“There is nothing more exciting, especially when Alice heard in person that
rabbit talk to itself: ‘Oh! Mine! I will be late for sure!’ (After she understood
that sentence, she realized she should have wondered what on earth had
happened, but everything had happened all of a sudden.)” (Wang)
A comparison of (2a) and (2d) shows a similar result: No neat correspondences
can be found between the texts. Two distal demonstrative
pronouns are used to viewpoint the literary scene, one marking the rabbit
[na zhi xiaobaitu], similarly to Chao’s text, and the other marking the sentence
uttered by the rabbit [na ju hua]. We observe that hua [word] is also
a shell noun that is created only in Wang’s version, which involves a noteworthy
use of the human cognitive capacity of reification [see also wanyi-er
in (1b)]. We return to this point in Section 6.4.
A comparison of (2a) with the three versions in Chinese allows us to
make three generalized observations. First, perfect correspondence cannot
be expected between the English and the Chinese versions; the strategies
of viewpoint management are relatively different in the two languages.
Second, a nominal referent viewpointed in a particular way in one language
can be presented in a viewpoint-neutral way in another (e.g., Carroll’s the
Rabbit and Chao’s na tuzi). Third, viewpoint representation can even be
opposite across the two languages (e.g., Carroll’s use of that and Chen’s zhe
43
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jian shi). To sum up, in what we see, the same literary scene has its various
aspects viewpointed in completely different ways in the two languages.
6.3.3. Viewpointing Preference Across Languages
In Section 6.2, we showed how English and Chinese viewpoint the same
literary scene in drastically different (and, perhaps to some, disillusioning)
ways, which might create an impression that the MultiParT approach
directs one’s attention only to the ugly reality of lack of cross-linguistic correspondence.
Quite the contrary, in this section we present the unparalleled
beauty of this methodology: MultiParT also helps us identify intralanguage
consistencies and how one language systematically differs from another.
Consider Excerpts (2a)–(2d) again. In (2a), Carroll presents the rabbit in
a viewpoint-neutral way using a definite article (the) to ground the nominal
referent, leaving the narrator’s distance to the rabbit unspecified. (2b)
faithfully preserves the viewpoint-neutral representation of the rabbit by
using tuzi as a bare noun. However, note that, on the other hand, two text
producers chose not to follow the practice but to use na to distally construe
the rabbit, creating a long distance between the narrator and the rabbit
that is not in the original.
If there were only one text producer who did this, it would still be possible
to attribute the variation to the translator’s idiolect. But now there
are two, which makes it difficult to claim the variation to be a mere chance.
Another significant set of examples is (3a)–(3d), which shows a high
intralanguage consistency among three translators.
(3a) Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end!
(3b) 掉 阿， 掉 阿， 掉 阿！ 這
diao a diao a diao a zhe
fall PRT fall PRT fall PRT this
一 跤 怎麼 一輩子 摔不完 了
yi jiao zeme yibeizi shuai-bu-wan le
one fall why whole life fall-NEG-PFV CRS
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嗎！
ma
PRT
“Fall, fall, fall! Why did this fall seem endless throughout the whole life!”
(Chao)
(3c) 下墜， 下墜， 下墜。 難道 這 一 跤
xiazhui xiazhui xiazhui nandao zhe yi jiao
fall fall fall PRT this one fall
永無盡頭！
yongwujintou
endless forever
“Fall, fall, fall. Was this fall without an end forever!” (Chen)
(3d) 往 下 掉， 往 下 掉， 往
wang xia diao wang xia diao wang
LOC down fall LOC down fall LOC
下 掉。 這 地道 難道 永遠 沒有
xia diao zhe didao nandao yongyuan meiyou
down fall this tunnel PRT forever NEG
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盡頭 嗎？
jintou ma
end PRT
“Fall downwards, fall downwards, fall downwards. Was this tunnel without
an end forever?” (Wang)
As is clear in (3a), the narrator’s take on Alice’s fall is viewpoint unspecified,
with the fall grounded only by the definite article the, whereas in
the three other versions, the narrator takes a close-up view of Alice’s
fall, indicated by the use of the proximal demonstrative zhe. Note that,
although Wang’s version linguistically elaborates the tunnel (in the second
half of the excerpt) instead of the fall, the constructional means
for the viewpointing of the construal is consistent with the other two
versions.
One might think, from a comparison of (3a)–(3d), that the Chinese
proximal demonstrative pronoun might be the equivalent of the English
definite article. But further examples show that it is not the case at all.
Excerpts (4a)–(4c) show just the opposite tendency of how the nominal
referent grounded in English with a definite article is actually systematically
grounded in Chinese with a distal demonstrative.
(4a) However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had
not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she
tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!
(4b) 可是 再 第二回 試 的 時候， 她
keshi zai dier-hui shi de shihou ta
but again second-time try LK when she
看見了 一個 上回 沒有 看見
kan-jian-le yi-ge shang-hui meiyou kan-jian
see-PFV-PFV one-CL last-
time
NEG see-PFV
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的 低 簾子， 簾子 後頭 有 一個
de di lianzi lianzi houtou you yi-ge
LK low curtain curtain behind have one-CL
小門， 只不過 一尺 多 高： 她 把
xiaomen zhibuguo yi-chi duo gao ta ba
small
door
only one-meter more high she PRT
那 金 鑰匙 放 在 鎖 裏
na jin yaoshi fang zai suo li
that golden key put LOC lock LOC
試試， 果然 真 配得上， 好個高興 呀！
shi-shi guoran zhen pei-de-shang haogegaoxing ya
try-RED indeed real match-PFV-PFV very happy PRT
“But when trying the second time again, she saw a low curtain that she had
not seen last time, after which there was a small door, only roughly one feet
in height: She put that golden key in the lock, and they matched, so happy!”
(Chao)
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(4c) 然而， 就 在 愛麗絲 再一次 試用 那
raner jiu zai ailisi zaiyici shi-yong na
however PRT LOC Alice again try-use that
支 鑰匙 時， 卻 發現 一 片
zhi yaoshi shi que faxian yi pian
CL key when but find one CL
先前 沒 留意到 的 窗簾， 窗簾 後面
xianqian mei liuyi-dao de chuanglian chuanglian houmian
previous NEG notice-PFV LK curtain curtain behind
是 一 扇 大約 五 英呎 高
shi yi shan dayue wu yinchi gao
LK one CL about five feet tall
的 小門。 她 試著 將 那 把
de xiaomen ta shi-zhe jiang na ba
LK small door she try-IPF PRT that CL
小 鑰匙 放進 小門 門鎖 中， 而
xiao yaoshi fang-jin xiaomen mensuo zhong er
small key put-in small door lock LOC and
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令 人 開心 的 是， 鑰匙 正
ling ren kaixin de shi yaoshi zheng
make man happy LK LK key PRT
吻合 那 扇 門！
wenhe na shan men
match that CL door
“However, as Alice was trying again with that key, she found a curtain that she had
not noticed, behind which was a small door of about five feet tall. She tried putting
that key into the small door’s lock, and what made (her) happy was the key matched
that door!” (Wang)
In English version (4a), the golden key, as a nominal referent, is grounded
by the definite article the in a viewpoint-neutral way. However, in both (4b)
and (4c), the same referent is presented from an obvious distance, elaborated
by the use of the distal demonstrative na. The Chinese versions share
a clear distance between the narrator and that specific part of the narrated
scene (i.e., the key).
A comparison between Set (3) and Set (4) shows a clear advantage of
MultiParT: Recall the fact that Chinese does not make systematic use of
definite articles like English does, so it was difficult to really say what
grounding and viewpointing solution a typical Chinese text producer
would come up with. However, from Sets (3) and (4) we see that some nominal
referents grounded with a definite article in English are systematically
viewpointed in a proximal way in Chinese and others systematically in a
distal way. Of course it is still far from clear under what circumstances a
nominal is marked proximally or distally, but we believe that the use of
multiple parallel texts involving a certain number of (representative) text
producers from the same language provides a starting point for making
valid intralanguage generalizations.3
What we can generalize from a comparison between the English and the
Chinese versions in Sets (2), (3), and (4) in terms of intralanguage consistency
is important. First, there is a viewpointing tendency shared by at
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least over half of the Chinese versions. Second, the viewpointing tendency
shared by most of the Chinese text producers is systematically different
from the way the English narrative is viewpointed. Third, the same grounding
element (the English definite article the) may find systematic correspondences
that convey opposite viewpoints in Chinese. We believe the
preceding findings constitute powerful testimonies to MultiParT as a useful
methodological tool for empirical cross-linguistic viewpoint research,
which we return to in Section 6.4.
6.4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In Section 6.3, we showed the overall differences in relevant viewpointing
constructions identified by means of the MultiParT approach, which we
believe point to fundamental differences at the discourse and the cognitive
levels between the two languages.
Our findings first show the text producers’ different strategies of facilitating
a flow of information by creating and tracking nominal referents
in a literary narrative in the respective languages. A comparison between
Excerpts (1a) and (1b) shows that the distribution of demonstratives interacts
with, and as a result is influenced by, the use of shell nouns in the narrator’s
language. Specifically, only in Chao’s version is a schematic entity
created for the possible event of making a daisy chain and a schematic label
(wanyi-er) assigned to that, and a proximal viewpointing construction is
used to mark that created nominal referent, with a close-up construal created
on that particular creation in the narrative as a consequence. Such discourse
operation is not seen in the English version. At the cognitive level,
such creation of a nominal referent in discourse reflects the fundamental
human capacity of reification and tracking relationships (Langacker, 2008).
What our data reveal at this level is that in the same usage event, different
text producers in different languages have completely different ways of utilizing
the same cognitive capacity in parallel usage events, which is reflected in
their actual use of language. This has an important implication: Although
the general human cognitive infrastructure may be universal, the cognitive
and conceptual operations in different languages simply have to follow the
linguistic conventions in the respective languages (Croft, 2001). Viewpoint
taking in language in general, and in literary narratives more specifically, is
naturally part of that (Lu and Verhagen, 2016).
The second important factor to consider in terms of viewpointing in literary
narratives is the influence of the grammatical profile of the viewpointing
construction. As we showed in Excerpts (2a) and (2c), the grammatical
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profiles of the viewpointing construction are different. In Carroll’s version,
the demonstrative constructions as viewpoint markers stand alone as pronouns,
whereas in Chen’s version, one of the viewpoint operators is joined
by an adverbializer (na-me). We argue that this subtle grammatical difference
has an important conceptual consequence in terms of profiling (in the
sense of Langacker, 2008) and the respective construals that the viewpoint
marker participates in. In particular, when a viewpoint is lexicalized in a
pronominalized event, the pronoun confers focal prominence on the entire
event as a thing. On the other hand, when a viewpoint coincides with an
adverbializing construction, the entire adverbial construction, as a relational
expression in Langacker’s (2008, 112–17) sense, profiles a relation. In
addition, the relation profiled is not only between the narrated event and
the ground but between only one out of the many attributes of the narrated
event and the ground, as the head of the adverbial is an adjective (ziran
[natural]). Similar to what we have claimed before, although the general
cognitive capacities of profiling and reification are universal, their instantiations
in literary narratives, as a matter of fact, vary radically across
languages.
The third important factor is how reference making is influenced by
the interplay between viewpointing and viewpoint-neutral constructions
in the respective languages. Excerpts (2a)–(2d) show that, although it is
possible (and preferable) for the English version to pronominalize the
event of Alice hearing the rabbit talk to itself and make reference to that
as part of the cleft construction, such practice is not at all possible in any
of the Chinese versions. The different constructional repertoire in the two
languages forces the Chinese versions to adopt different strategies, with
Excerpts (2b) and (2c) taking a proximal viewpoint on that same event and
(2d) a distal one. Therefore the split in translation strategies is actually a
natural result of lack of correspondence between the grammatical systems
in the individual languages: The possibility of embedding a pronominalized
event in a cleft construction is simply not available in the translators’
construct-i-con, which is “the totality of our knowledge of language … captured
by a network of constructions” (Goldberg, 2003).
We believe that the preceding points provide a powerful testimony for
the effectiveness of MultiParT as an empirical method in cognitive linguistic
and poetic research. Given its parallel nature, this methodology allows
us to compare a set of almost identical usage events under highly similar
circumstances, which turns up useful linguistic facts relevant to linguistic
theorizing that other methodological approaches simply cannot show.
For instance, our finding in Section 6.3.3 is in line with the observation
by Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993, 300) that both demonstratives
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seem to function like a definite article in Chinese, with the proximal form
being more frequent. However, MultiParT further allows one to identify
precisely under what circumstances the English definite article corresponds
to the proximal demonstrative in Chinese [such as Excerpts (3a)–(3d)] and
to the distal one [such as Excerpts (4a)–(4c)].
We claim that MultiParT is also highly innovative in the sense that
it provides a systematic way of comparing the overall distributions of
relevant viewpointing constructions, not only across languages but also
across different representative users within the same language, which
allows us to plausibly distinguish purely individual characteristics of a
translator’s usage from more systematic, community-wide properties
of the language involved. Now the language-internal systematicity also
leads us back to a reconsideration of the observation that we made in
Section 6.3.2. The lack of perfect correspondence between the languages
should be seen as an epiphenomenon of each language having its own
“grammar of viewpoint.”
Of course, the present study also has its own share of limitations. In
this chapter, we focus on parallel texts translated from English to Chinese
only, and we acknowledge that translations in the other direction should
also be considered for a methodological balance as in Wu (2004) and Lu
and Verhagen (2016). However, the potential of MultiParT is not in the
least undermined by the methodological constraint. If translated texts in
only one direction already allowed us to see such stark cross-linguistic differences
(in terms of frequency, distribution, etc.) between the languages,
we believe that a bidirectional MultiParT approach will definitely prove
even more fruitful. Finally, we believe that demonstratives as viewpointing
constructions should be further studied in relation to the use of other
viewpointing constructions, such as modal verbs and adverbs, iconicity,
and so forth, as Tabakowska (2014) has initiated. Further systematic crosslinguistic
research on viewpointing constructions is definitely a must, and
we expect to see more studies in this direction in the near future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The completion of this paper was jointly supported by a grant awarded
to the first author, “The Language of Death in Taiwan: Evidence from
Condolatory Idioms, Presidential Eulogies and the Self-introductions
of Undertakers” (RG002-N-15) and another grant awarded to the third
author, “Nominalization in Academic Discourse: A Pragmatic Account”
(NSC 100-2410-H-002-160-MY3). We thank an anonymous reviewer for
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useful comments, with the typical disclaimer that applies. Questions or
requests for reprints should be addressed to the first author at wllu@phil.
muni.cz.
NOTES
1. Demonstratives are important viewpoint tools that may coincide in narratives
with various others, such as personal pronouns, deictic verbs, modals, etc.
Interested readers are referred to Dancygier (2012), Lu and Verhagen (2016), and
Tabakowska (2014) for details.
2. The representativeness comes from the fact that most commercial publishers
very carefully select as their contracted translators speakers who are highly
proficient in both the source and the target language to ensure the quality of the
translation.
3. Of course this is not an exhaustive list here. Readers are referred to Chapters 4
and 5 of Wu (2004) for a detailed discussion on a comparison between English
and Chinese using parallel texts (with only one text producer from each language
though).
4. Mandarin Chinese has another (though less frequent) demonstrative
construction ci as a (slightly more written, in terms of genre) synonym of zhe.
We did not yet include ci in the scope of this chapter, but we believe this would
not at all undermine the general claim that we try to make here. Excerpt (2c)
contains this construction.
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Carroll, Lewis. 1939. Alisi Manyou Qijing Ji [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland].
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55
Publication 3
[3] Lu, Wei-lun. 2019. Time, tense and viewpoint shift across languages: A Multiple-Parallel-Text
approach to “tense shifting” in a tenseless language. Cognitive Linguistics 30(2), 377-397.
56
Wei-lun Lu*
Time, tense and viewpoint shift across
languages: A Multiple-Parallel-Text approach
to “tense shifting” in a tenseless
language
https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2018-0039
Received 30 March 2018; revised 19 October 2018; accepted 20 November 2018
Abstract: The paper discusses the role of tense and time from a cross-linguistic
perspective by comparing English (a tensed language) and Mandarin (a language
without formal tense marking). Multiple translations of the same literary
piece are used to test the correspondence between the tense, the perfective
aspect and temporal adverbials. In English, tense marking is found to work
with at least two language-specific stylistic means, clause interpolation and
inversion, to create a mixed narrative viewpoint. In Mandarin, neither the
perfective aspect nor temporal adverbials, i.e., constructions that invoke TIME,
are systematically used across the renditions, which shows the Mandarin system’s
overall indifference to TIME in managing viewpoint in discourse. The
Mandarin renditions, in addition to an overall indifference to TIME, feature
consistent and frequent use of reduplication as the system’s distinctive viewpoint
strategy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the cognitive consequence
of a language using an obligatory marking system to piggyback the
function of viewpointing narratives.
Keywords: linguistic relativity, Mandarin, tense, time, translation
1 Introduction
Time and tense in narratives is an issue that has remained at the center of
scholarly attention in cognitive narratology, poetics and stylistics. The past
tense, a specific grammatical category used to code the relation between the
time of speech and the time of the verbalized event, has been generally recognized
as the default tense of story-telling, whereas the present tense, which
expresses an action being performed either at the time of speech or habitually,
involves a shift in narrative viewpoint (Fleischman 1990; Fludernik 2012;
*Corresponding author: Wei-lun Lu, Language Centre and Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University,
Brno, Czech Republic, E-mail: wllu@med.muni.cz
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Verhagen this issue). Tense use affects the conceptualization of the plot in terms
of viewpoint; the past tense invokes a distal viewpoint, from which the narrator
reports the event and takes more responsibility for the narrated content, while
the present tense suggests a close-up view, reflecting a higher degree of immediacy
and a higher tendency for the reader to hold the character’s consciousness
responsible for the content.1
In particular, when the present tense is used in
narrating a past event (the so-called historical present), that introduces a consciousness
displaced from the narrated world into the ‘here-and-now’ of the
conceptualizers. In cognitive linguistic terms, use of the historical present
involves a shift in Base Space (Fauconnier 1997: 77), moving the conceptual
anchor point from the space of narration to a Story Space embedded in the
narration.2
However, the above contrast between the default past tense narration and
the historical present, and the consequent alternative construal of the same
story plot when a different tense is used, only make sense from the perspective
of a language which marks a temporal relation between the time of speech and
the time of the verbalized event by means of tense. However, there are languages
which do not mark such temporal relation, a typical example being
Mandarin (Li and Thompson 1981; Lin 2012; Shi and Huang 2016). In such
tenseless languages, other TIME-related constructional means are reported to
help communicate the temporal relation between the time of speech and the
verbalized event. For instance, in Mandarin, the temporal status of the verbalized
event can be expressed by temporal adverbials, or by the perfective aspect,
which encodes the completion of the verbalized event with respect to a certain
temporal reference point (Shi and Huang 2016: 54). Following that, a broader
theoretical question naturally arises: Do tenseless languages use TIME-related
constructions that help communicate the temporal relation between the time of
speech and the time of the narrated event, for the purpose of managing the
narrative viewpoint, in any way that could be considered [analogous or similar]
to the way in which tensed languages use tense marking to show narrative
viewpoint?
This leads to an even broader question that will be of theoretical linguistic
and narratological interest: to what extent does human language rely on the
1 The question of “who is responsible for the narrated content” has been an issue that receives
attention in cognitive linguistics (see, e.g., Sanders et al. 2009). However, cross-linguistic
research is still largely lacking in the field.
2 What is introduced here about the historical present is the standard view in literature.
However, there is certainly disagreement in the field. Interested readers are referred to, for
instance, Nijk (this issue) and Stukker (this issue) for dissenting views.
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concept of TIME (invoked by TIME-related constructions) to convey narrative
viewpoint, and how much similarity and variation is there in this respect
among different languages?
2 Methodology and scope
The above question is of a cross-linguistic nature and is a central question
of comparative stylistics – when we see a stylistic pattern in Language A
composed of a certain linguistic feature that is missing in Language B, how
is the same stylistic effect achieved in Language B? To properly address the
comparative nature of such an inquiry, one needs a research methodology
that can provide suitable contextualized data across languages, and that is
where the Multiple Parallel Text (MultiParT) approach comes in (Lu and
Verhagen 2016; Lu et al. 2018; Lu et al. submitted). MultiParT is a method
that has been used to study cross-linguistic stylistic differences, using
multiple translations from the same source into the same target language.
The rationale behind the initiative is that past research on stylistic tools in
language has been methodologically based on either introspection or use of
mono-lingual texts/corpora. However, as language production is usagebased
(Barlow and Kemmer 2000) and heavily influenced by all sorts of
context, there has been no way of studying the cross-linguistic aspect of
viewpoint by controlling for the same linguistic, physical and social context,
while keeping the language production contextualized. In view of this
problem, use of parallel texts (translations) constitutes an efficient methodological
opportunity for studying viewpoint tools across languages in a
contextualized way—if one sees the author and the translator(s) as equally
sensible text producers, then by keeping identical most other contextual
factors, including the linguistic, physical, and social context, production
mode and genre, one may empirically study the viewpointing options in a
passage of narrative where all text producers try to get across highly similar
(if not identical) messages. However, such use of multiple parallel texts
(or translations) in studying viewpoint has received only limited attention in
the field (but see Tabakowska 2014 for another earlier attempt in this
regard).
The languages chosen here for comparison are English and Mandarin—for
two reasons. English is a typical tensed language, where viewpoint phenomena
have been widely investigated. In comparison, Mandarin is a typical tenseless
language where some (though limited) work has been done on viewpoint. For
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instance, Hagenaar (1996: 295) points out that “in Chinese, verb tense cannot
serve to distinguish free indirect speech from direct speech as it sometimes can
in Indo-European languages.” The author goes on to suggest using personal
pronouns, adverbs, modal particles, and aspectual marking as possible identifiers
of free indirect speech in Mandarin. On a cross-linguistic level, Hagenaar’s
pointing to aspectual markers as viewpoint constructions in Mandarin narratives
echoes Li and Thompson’s (1981) observation that Mandarin Chinese does not
use verbal affixes to mark the temporal relation between the speech event and
the situation in question. Hagenaar’s observations are further substantiated by
scholarly observations that in many situations the Mandarin perfective aspect,
for example the use of 了 le and 过 guò, serves the semantic function of
expressing a past event or prior experience (Lin 2012; Liu 2014; Shi and Huang
2016: 54). Naturally, given the close connection between the past (in relation to
the speech event) and the perfective aspect in Mandarin, two hypotheses can be
proposed: First, in a tenseless language (Mandarin being a typical one), if TIME
is also an element crucial to narrative viewpoint management like it is in tensed
languages (English being typical), then when the narrative viewpoint is managed
by tense shifting in the English source text, the target text(s) will use the
perfective aspect (another specific grammatical category), or else lexical adverbial
constructions that invoke TIME, to suggest a similar viewpoint. Second,
since the functional connection between the past tense in English and the
perfective aspect in Mandarin is understood to be close, use of the perfective
aspect (or TIME-related lexical constructions) in Mandarin translations should be
largely (if not completely) consistent, given the fact that there is one common
source text.
To test the hypotheses, three literary passages written originally in
English by two different authors are examined in comparison to their
Mandarin translations. Two of the passages are by Charles Dickens (one
from Great Expectations, the other from David Copperfield), and the third
passage is from John Updike’s short story “A&P”. In each of these original
passages, the narrative viewpoint is managed mainly (though not exclusively)
by a shift in tense. Works by two different authors and from two
different national varieties of English were chosen to ensure methodological
rigor— to see whether the target translation phenomena occur in writings
exhibiting different varieties of the source language. Special attention is paid
to the viewpoint constructions in the corresponding Mandarin passages. The
Mandarin texts used were 5 different published translations of Great
Expectations, 9 of David Copperfield, and 2 of “A&P”.
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3 Patterns in the English texts: The interplay
of tense-shifting and other viewpointing
strategies
Below, I provide a detailed analysis of the three English excerpts. I will allot
more space to the ones produced by Dickens, as these two have many more
translations in Mandarin and are slightly richer in viewpoint strategies.
A close examination of the excerpts shows that although tense shifting is an
important viewpoint strategy in English narratives, it actually works in an
intricate way with other linguistic strategies to create the stylistic effect of
mixing narrative viewpoints.
The first passage is taken from Chapter 56 of Great Expectations, where there
is a shift from the historical present to the past tense, reflecting a smooth
viewpoint transition from a proximal (character-responsible) to a distal (narrator-responsible)
one.
(1) The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colours of the moment, down
to the drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in the rays
of April sun. Penned in the dock, as I again stood outside it at the corner
with his hand in mine, were the two-and-thirty men and women; some
defiant, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping, some
covering their faces, some staring gloomily about. There had been shrieks
from among the women convicts, but they had been stilled, a hush had
succeeded. (Dickens 1881: 494)
The excerpt starts out taking the Story Space as the Base Space, a move reflected
by the use of the historical present marker -s in starts, the stylistic effect of
which is strengthened by use of perceptual deixis (Stockwell 2002: 45).
Perceptual deixis refer to those elements that invoke an immediate perception
of a participant in the narrated scene, manifested here by the perceptual content
from in the vivid colours to the rays of April sun. The viewpoint structure in the
second sentence is mixed, in the sense that the vividness resulting from taking
the Story Space as the Base Space is continued via use of inversion (Bolinger
1977; Dorgeloh 1997; Chen 2003), which allows the narrator to embed himself in
the narrated universe and to adopt a character’s perspective, and also more
perceptual deixis—from some defiant to some staring gloomily about—which
offers the reader a less-mediated access to the perceptual content of the character
back in the Story Space. In addition, the sense of immediacy in the second
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sentence is substantiated by the existence of four present participles, invoking
an internal perspective (Langacker 2008: 120) on the event narrated. However,
the use of the past tense stood creates incoherence in the viewpoint configuration,
in that it triggers a distal narrative viewpoint. The combination of the past
tense and the other stylistic devices thus creates a mixed viewpoint. Continuing
the viewpoint transition starting with stood, the third sentence continues with
the past tense and reflects a typical distal viewpoint, attributing the responsibility
to the narrator as the subject of consciousness (Pander Maat and Sanders
2001; Sanders et al. 2012).
Note that the use of tense marking collaborates with two crucial structural
elements in creating the mixed viewpoint: inversion and interpolation. Inversion
is certainly important—the preposing of the preverbal constituent invokes a
proximal viewpoint by first presenting the perceptual content (penned in the
dock) as a continuation of the viewpoint in the first sentence. The continuation
of the proximal viewpoint would be undermined if the second sentence were not
inverted, as in (1b):
(1b) The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colours of the moment, down
to the drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in the rays
of April sun. The two-and-thirty men and women, as I again stood outside
it at the corner with his hand in mine, were penned in the dock; some
defiant, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping, some
covering their faces, some staring gloomily about. There had been shrieks
from among the women convicts, but they had been stilled, a hush had
succeeded. (constructed)
The other important structural element that works with tense shifting to create
the mixed viewpoint is the interpolation of the adverbial as-clause in the past
tense. The set-up of the viewpoint structure in (1) not only uses the second
sentence as a subtle transition from a proximal viewpoint to a distal one, but
also embeds a distal viewpoint within the sentence boundaries right in the
middle. The viewpoint structure becomes different in (1c), where the as-clause
is not interpolated:
(1c) The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colours of the moment, down
to the drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in the rays
of April sun. As I again stood outside it at the corner with his hand in
mine, penned in the dock were the two-and-thirty men and women; some
defiant, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping, some
covering their faces, some staring gloomily about. There had been shrieks
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from among the women convicts, but they had been stilled, a hush had
succeeded. (constructed)
From a comparison of (1) with its constructed counterparts, it is clear that the
viewpoint shift is achieved not only via a shift in tense, but also via the
collaboration of inversion and interpolation, both specific to English.
The second example is taken from Chapter 9 of David Copperfield, where the
narrative viewpoint shifts from a narrator-responsible one to a character-responsible
one. This passage is also hallmarked by the use of different tenses, but this
time moving from past to present.
(2) If the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it better. The very
air of the best parlour, when I went in at the door, the bright condition of
the fire, the shining of the wine in the decanters, the patterns of the
glasses and plates, the faint sweet smell of cake, the odour of Miss
Murdstone’s dress, and our black clothes. Mr. Chillip is in the room, and
comes to speak to me. (Dickens 1999: 114)
In this excerpt, there is a gradual shift in the narrative viewpoint, from a distal
take to a close-up one, with the use of tense invoking the global shift in
construal. The first sentence of (2) is in past tense, giving the narrator the
narrative responsibility (manifested by use of had and could). Immediately
following that is a group of noun phrases that show the reader what the
character sees in the room (again perceptual deixis), inviting the reader to
enter the character’s consciousness. However, a remnant of the narrator’s distant
viewpoint remains, signaled by the only use of past tense went in the clause
inserted among the full host of noun phrases. Note that the position of the whenclause
(which contains the only prompt for the narrator’s consciousness went)
has to be interpolated, in order to create a mixed viewpoint, as shown in (2). The
analysis here echoes Lu and Verhagen’s (2016) analysis of Alice in Wonderland,
which identifies clause interpolation as an important stylistic strategy of the
English language that helps create a smooth transition of narrative viewpoint.
The constructed (2b), following the canonical clause order in English, does not
have the same stylistic effect as (2).
(2b) If the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it better. When I
went in at the door, the very air of the best parlour, the bright condition of
the fire, the shining of the wine in the decanters, the patterns of the
glasses and plates, the faint sweet smell of cake, the odour of Miss
Murdstone’s dress, and our black clothes. (constructed)
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In addition to the position of the tensed when-clause, the viewpoint effect in (2)
is inextricable from the procedural establishment of an ad-hoc constructional
schema introduced by the author’s repetitive use of [N] – [of] – [N]. When the reader
encounters that particular sentence, the emphatic construction very, at the first
instance, gives a sense of immediacy (hinting at a character-responsible viewpoint),
but immediately following that, the narrative viewpoint switches back to a distal
one, invoked by the past tense. The narrator, however, goes on to heap on noun
phrases with the same structure, so that an ad-hoc schema is created and gradually
entrenched as the reader moves along. The analysis here is reminiscent of Lu’s
(2018) discussion of how the ad hoc schema [N] – [PREP] – [N] creates a persuasive
effect in Martin Luther King’s rhetorical masterpiece “I Have a Dream”. Though used
in different genres and different modes of communication, the cognitive effect of ad
hoc schema construction in discourse is expected to be similar.
It must, however, be noted that the analysis here does not amount to saying that
the [N] – [of] – [N] construction is one that represents the character’s viewpoint.
Rather, the structure simply serves as a bedrock of the mixing viewpoints. It does so
by hosting various perceptual deictic elements, ranging from THE AIR OF THE FIRST
PARLOUR to THE ODOUR OF MISS MURDSTONE’S DRESS, so that the viewpoint effect in
this passage can be fleshed out by the interruption of the chain of the character’s
sensory contents linguistically elaborated by the [N] – [of] – [N] structure. This kind
of viewpoint effect is undermined when part of the perceptual deixis is hosted by a
structure other than [N] – [of] – [N], as it is in (2c).
(2c) If the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it better. The best
parlour’s air, when I went in at the door, the bright condition of the fire, the
shining of the wine in the decanters, the patterns of the glasses and plates, the
faint sweet smell of cake, the odour of Miss Murdstone’s dress, and our black
clothes. Mr. Chillip is in the room, and comes to speak to me. (constructed)
Note that the ad-hoc pattern is not merely structural but also constructional,
since on a discourse-narrative level, the noun phrases all suggest a characterresponsible
viewpoint, which means that viewpoint-wise, a schematic commonality
can be sought also at the semantic-functional pole of the construction.
Therefore, the insertion of the when-clause that contains the past tense interrupts
not only the creation of the structural pattern at the phonological pole, but
also swings the narrative viewpoint at the semantic pole.3
3 The argument presented here is similar to Nikiforidou’s (2012) take on the Past + now construction
and Lu and Verhagen (2016) on combination of typography and conjunctions, bringing
constructional analysis “all the way up” to the discourse level.
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Examining a third passage, from John Updike’s short story “A&P”, reveals
how tense-shifting works in a different setting. Example (3) is taken from the
first sentence of the opening paragraph in the story:
(3) In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third
check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re
over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the
plaid green two-piece. (Updike 1996: 187)
Quite similar to (1) and (2), the tense shift from the present to the past in (3) is
the stylistic strategy that takes the main responsibility for invoking a shift from a
character-responsible viewpoint to a narrator-responsible one. The passage
starts with the present tense, providing access to the character’s consciousness,
with the character’s voice strengthened by the inversion of the adverb in to the
very front of the sentence. Compare (3) with the non-inverted (3b), where the
canonical word order triggers a more distal viewpoint.
(3b) These three girls walks in in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third
check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re
over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the
plaid green two-piece. (constructed)
The point of the discussion so far is that although shifting between tenses is a
key component in managing viewpoint in English narratives, in actual use, it
does not stand alone but collaborates with other linguistic strategies to achieve a
global mix of viewpoints. Such generalization is substantiated by an in-depth
analysis of works by two representative authors from different varieties of the
English language.
4 Lack of neat cross-linguistic correspondences
and the distinctive pattern of the Mandarin
renditions
A close examination of the Mandarin translations does not prove the hypothesis
stated above (that we expect to see corresponding TIME-related constructions
where tense shifting takes place in the original). Neither the perfective aspect
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nor TIME-related adverbials are properly4
and consistently used across the translations,
which means that the concept of TIME is not truly relevant throughout the
passages examined. Specifically, no Mandarin passage out of the total of 16
employs the perfective aspect in places where the past tense is used in English.
In addition, only 5 out of 16 contain a temporal adverbial that corresponds to the
tense into which the English switches (either past time or present time). These are
not high enough numbers to prove the validity of the hypothesis.
As we go deeper into the data, 2 out of 16 passages actually use the
perfective aspect, but only in places where the present tense is used in
English, as in the combination of zǒu-le-jìn-lái in (4).
(4) 三个 只 穿著 游泳衣 的 姑娘
sān-ge zhǐ chuān-zhe yóuyǒngyī de gūniáng
three-CL only wear-IMP swimsuit LINK lady
走了进来。 我 站在 三号 收银台 旁，
zǒu-le-jìn-lái wǒ zhàn-zài sān-hào shōuyíntái pang
walk-PFV-in-come I stand-LOC no. 3 cashier next to
背对著 门， 所以 等 他们 走到 放
bèiduì-zhe mén suǒyǐ děng tā-men zǒu-dào fàng
back-IMP door so until they walk-PFV lay
面包 的 柜台 时 才 看到。 首先
miànbāo de guìtái shí cái kàn-dào shǒuxiān
bread LK counter when PRT see-PFV first
引起 我 注意 的 是 那个 穿著
yǐnqǐ wǒ zhùyì de shì nà-ge chuān-zhe
raise I attention LK LK that-CL wear-IMP
绿色 方格 两截 游泳衣 的 姑娘。
lǜsè fānggé liǎngjié yóuyǒngyī de gūniáng
green plaid two piece swimsuit LK lady
‘Three ladies who only wear/wore swimsuit walk(ed) in. I stand/stood next
to cashier no.3, back towards the door, so until they walk(ed) to the
counter where the bread is/was laid, I see/saw (them). First what catch/
4 One temporal adverbial is found within the 9 translations of (1), but it is not a rendition that
faithfully reflects what happens in the source text. The translation uses a Space Builder of the
past time (当时 dāngshí ‘back then’) in a passage where the English original uses the present
tense. This shows that the translator is probably insensitive to the tense switch to the present
and sticks to the default past tense narration, using a past adverbial to provide access to the
character’s consciousness.
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caught my attention is/was the lady with green plaid two piece swimsuit.’
(Yang’s translation in 2015)
In (4), the perfective aspect 了 le is attached to the verbal process of 走 zǒu ‘walk’, to
encode the completion of the action with respect to a reference point (the girls’
entrance to the shop). In this instance, le is also part of the resultative construction
(in the sense of Shi and Huang 2016: 18), serving to introduce the state of the girls
(i.e., being in the shop) which results from the action of walking. In any case, the
perfective aspect in this particular example does not concern the temporal relation
between the time of speech and the time of the narrated event, nor does it concern
the shift of the narrative viewpoint. In both Mandarin renditions of (3), the perfective
aspect modifies the action of the girls (zǒu ‘walk’), which is elaborated in the
English text in the present tense, creating a different construal from the English one.
In addition to the lack of neat correspondence between TIME-related constructions
between the English and the Mandarin versions, none of the Mandarin translations
of (2) interpolates the rendition of the when-clause in between the stack of the
noun phrases. Almost all translations follow the canonical Mandarin clause order by
putting the when-clause sentence-initially. Excerpt (5) is a typical case.
(5) 我 一 走进 那间 最好 的 客厅，
wǒ yī zǒu-jìn nà-jiān zuì-hǎo de kètīng
I as soon as walk-enter that-CL best LK best parlor
屋 里 的 气氛 就 迎面
wū lǐ de qìfēn jiù yíng-miàn
house in LK atmosphere PRT towards-face
扑来： 旺旺 的 炉火， 瓶 中
pū-lái wàng-wàng de lúhuǒ píng zhōng
spring-come blazing-RED LK fire bottle in
闪闪 发光 的 葡萄酒， 杯盘
shǎn-shǎn fāguāng de pútao-jiǔ bēipán
shine-RED radiate LK wine dishes
的 式样， 糕饼 的 微微 甜 香，
de shìyàng gāobǐng de wéi-wéi tián xiāng
LK style cake LK faint-RED sweet aroma
默德斯通 小姐 衣服 上 的
mòdésītōng xiǎojiě yīfú shàng de
Murdstone Miss clothes on LK
气味， 以及 我们 穿 的 黑色
qìwèi yǐjí wǒ-mén chuān de hēisè
smell and we wear LK black
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丧服。 齐力普 先生 也 在 那里，
sāngfú qílìpǔ xiānsheng yě zài nàlǐ
mourning apparel Chillip Mr. also LOC there
并且 走过来 和 我 说话。
bìngqiě zǒu-guòlái hàn wǒ shuōhuà
and walk-come with I speak
‘As soon as I walk(ed) into that best parlor, atmosphere comes/came springing
towards my face: blazing fire, shining wine in bottle, style of dishes, and
slight sweet aroma of cakes, smell on Miss Murdstone’s clothes, and black
mourning apparel we wear/wore. Mr. Chillip is/was also there, and comes/
came walking to speak to me.’ (Wang and Wang’s translation in 2001)5
As can be seen in (5), the content in the protasis in the English original
(the character walking in at the door of the best parlor) is rendered at the very
beginning of the sentence, instead of being inserted in between the series of
sensory contents perceived by the character. Therefore, the mixing of narrative
viewpoints that we witnessed in (2) is not rendered in its Mandarin counterpart
due to the conventional sequence of the protasis and the apodosis in Mandarin.
So far, we have discussed the various viewpoint constructions that do not,
and cannot, get across from the English to the Mandarin versions. However, it is
also important to note that the Mandarin renditions do exhibit a clear pattern of
their own—13 out of the 16 passages employ reduplication to express a character-responsible
viewpoint. Among the 13 passages, the 9 translations of (2)
consistently utilize the strategy to show the vividness of the character’s sensory
experience. Readers are referred again to (5) for illustration. In (5), 3 tokens of
reduplications are used to increase the immediacy of the character’s reported
perceptual content (of how the fire burns fiercely, of how the wine gives out a
bright light, and of how the sweet smell of the cake is barely perceptible). In
Mandarin, mono-syllabic words and di-syllabic lexical constructions may be
reduplicated to increase the degree of liveliness and vividness of a scene, with
the resultant pattern AA for a mono-syllabic construction or AABB for a disyllabic
AB construction.6
5 In the free translation, I choose to provide both possible tenses, to reflect the tense-unspecified
nature of Mandarin and to show that the passage may be open to different tense
interpretations.
6 Reduplications in Mandarin are of two basic semantic types, increasing and diminishing
(Melloni and Basciano 2018). What is found in my data all belong to the former type, which
intensifies the property invoked by the base form. I believe that the ideophonicizing function of
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Beyond Excerpt (5), other typical examples identified in the 9 renditions of (2)
include 淡淡 dàn-dàn ‘weak-RED’ (based on 淡 dàn ‘weak’), 微微 wéi-wéi ‘faintRED’
(based on 微 wéi ‘faint’), 清清楚楚 qīngqīngchǔchǔ ‘clear-RED’ (based on 清楚
qīngchǔ ‘clear [in terms of vision or memory]’), among others. In addition, the
Mandarin renditions are highly consistent in using reduplication for a characterresponsible
viewpoint effect: among the 9 Mandarin renditions of (2), 3 versions use
3 tokens of reduplications, 2 versions 2, and 4 versions 1. Reduplication is also fairly
consistently used in the Mandarin renditions of (1), with 4 versions out of 5 using at
least 1 reduplication to express the vividness of the narration.7
In addition to the typical reduplication of AA and AABB listed in Melloni
and Basciano (2018), still another constructional pattern of reduplication is
identified in the parallel texts studied—the pattern ABAC, with B and C being
synonymous or at least semantically related. Examples include 各式各样 gè-shìgè-yang
‘every-type-RED-kind’ and 有声有色 yǒu-shēng-yǒu-sè ‘have-sound-REDcolor’.
This is a type of morphological means that has not been discussed in the
literature of viewpoint research.8
It is also worth noting that reduplication is a highly productive morphological
mechanism that may bear an ideophonicizing function (Liu 2012).
According to Liu, most Mandarin ideophones can be reduplicated, but on top
of that, general content words may also be reduplicated to become temporary
ideophones. I believe that Liu’s observation is relevant to the above various
reduplications identified in the Mandarin renditions. In addition to the tense
shifting, the English originals adopt perceptual deixis (expressions about the
perceptive participants in the scene) to construct a character-dominant viewpoint,
and when rendering the perceptual deixis, a Mandarin speaker may
naturally reduplicate not only the inherent ideophones but also selected content
words that are only peripheral in the domain of PERCEPTION, to provide the
reader with easy access to the character’s consciousness.9
reduplication (Liu 2012) cited later in this paper may overlap with the intensifying function of
reduplication.
7 Reduplication is not present in the translations of (3). I suspect that use of reduplication is
related to the extent of ideophonicity of the narrated content in the original. Examples (1) and
(2) both contain a richer description of the sensory content perceived by the character than (3).
8 ABAC is a pattern of reduplication that has received little attention even in the field of
Chinese Linguistics, let alone in viewpoint research. The pattern is mentioned only in passing in
Lai (2006: 491) and Lin (2015: 869), for instance.
9 One might wonder about the semantic-relatedness between 声 and 色 in 有声有色 yǒu-shēngyǒu-sè
‘have-sound-RED-color’. The semantic relation may not seem straightforward, but if one
considers the concepts (that is, SOUND and COLOR) against the domain of PERCEPTION and the
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To show that reduplication is indeed an important stylistic strategy in
Mandarin, compare the constructed (5b), which is a version of (5) without
reduplication. In (5b), the narrative viewpoint is not as strongly characterdominant
as that in (5), although the series of perceptual deictic elements still
allows the reader to access the character’s consciousness to an extent. In (5b),
the narration reads less vividly and lacks a sense of immediacy.
(5b) 我 一 走进 那间 最好 的 客厅，
wǒ yī zǒu-jìn nà-jiān zuì-hǎo de kètīng
I as soon as walk-enter that-CL best LK best parlor
屋 里 的 气氛 就 迎面
wū lǐ de qìfēn jiù yíng-miàn
house in LK atmosphere PRT towards-face
扑来： 旺盛 的 炉火， 瓶 中
pū-lái wàngshèng de lúhuǒ píng zhōng
spring-come blazing LK fire bottle in
闪耀 发光 的 葡萄酒， 杯盘
shǎnyào fāguāng de pútao-jiǔ bēipán
shine radiate LK wine dishes
的 式样， 糕饼 的 些微 甜 香，
de shìyàng gāobǐng de xiēwéi tián xiāng
LK style cake LK faint sweet aroma
默德斯通 小姐 衣服 上 的
mòdésītōng xiǎojiě yīfú shàng de
Murdstone Miss clothes on LK
气味， 以及 我们 穿 的 黑色
qìwèi yǐjí wǒ-mén chuān de hēisè
smell and we wear LK black
丧服。 齐力普 先生 也 在 那里，
sāngfú qílìpǔ xiānsheng yě zài nàlǐ
mourning apparel Chillip Mr. also LOC there
并且 走过来 和 我 说话。
bìngqiě zǒu-guòlái hàn wǒ shuōhuà
and walk-come with I speak
‘As soon as I walk(ed) into that best parlor, atmosphere comes/came springing
towards my face: fire that blazes/d, wine in bottle that shines/d, style of
dishes, and aroma of cakes that is/was weak, smell on Miss Murdstone’s
tight connection between reduplication and ideophones in Mandarin, it is not terribly surprising
that the two constructions are attracted to the ABAC pattern together.
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clothes, and black mourning apparel we wear/wore. Mr. Chillip is/was also
there, and comes/came walking to speak to me.’ (constructed)
In addition to reduplication, the MultiParT approach also helps one identify with
confidence another viewpoint strategy specific to the target language, which
introduces a different construal of the narrated content. In particular, a perceptual
deictic element, 在我（的）眼前 zài wǒ de yǎn qián ‘LOC my LK eye front,
(lit. in front of my eyes)’, is found to occur in all translations of (1) that invoke
the character’s consciousness. The construction is not in the English original at
all, and creates a different construal of the narrated scene throughout the
Mandarin renditions by introducing the presence of the narrator as an additional
conceptual content, as shown in Example (6).
(6) 现在， 所有 这一幕 又 栩栩如生
xiànzài suǒyǒu zhè-yī-mù yòu xǔ-xǔ-rú-shēng
now all this-one-scene again lively-RED-like-life
地 出现 在 我 眼前。 4月
dì chūxiàn zài wǒ yǎn-qián… sìyuè
LK appear LOC my eye-front April
温暖 的 阳光 伏 在 法庭 的
wēnnuǎn de yángguāng fú zài fǎtíng de
warm LK sunlight lie LOC count LK
窗户 上， 可 同时， 也 有 4月
chuānghù shàng kě tóngshí yě yǒu sìyuè
window LOC but meanwhile also have April
晶莹 的 雨点 打 在 上面。
jīngyíng de yǔdiǎn dǎ zài shàngmiàn
crystal LK rain drop hit LOC LOC
‘Now, all this scene appears/appeared in front of my eyes very lively.
Warm April sunlight lies/lay on the window of the court, but meanwhile,
there are/were crystal-transparent April raindrops hitting on (the window).’
(Xu’s translation in 2012)
In (6), as well as in the other translations of (1), the use of 在我（的）眼前 zài wǒ
de yǎn qián ‘LOC my LK eye front, (lit. in front of my eyes)’ performs the
cognitive stylistic function of putting the narrator onstage as an object of conceptualization
(Langacker 2008: 77), thus bringing more of the reader’s attention
to the narrator’s existence, pinning him down for the narrated content than
when the narrator remains linguistically implicit and thus offstage, as is the case
in the English original. Accordingly, due to the consistent use of perceptual
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deixis, all the Mandarin renditions of (1) invoke an objective construal of the
narrator, which is different from the English original, and as a consequence,
creates a more narrator-responsible viewpoint.
Overall, the Mandarin renditions consistently offer a more or less different
type of vividness from the English original, in two major respects: on the one
hand, the Mandarin renditions typically lack corresponding viewpoint strategies
identified in the English original, such as TIME-related constructions (be they the
perfective aspect or temporal adverbials) and clause interpolation. On the other
hand, Mandarin systematically imposes on the narrated scene its own stylistic
strategies, including reduplication and additional perceptual deixis. As a result,
the renditions take on different types of vividness, in the sense that they
intensify the ideophones (or even ideophonicize perception-related content)
and give the narrator an objective construal that is not present in the original.
5 Discussion and concluding remarks
From this analysis, it is clear that in the English language the viewpoint
strategies that work with tense shifting include at least ad hoc schema construction,
clause interpolation and inversion, the latter two of which are not present
in the Mandarin renditions of all the English passages and are language-specific.
Tense shifting works with the three strategies in a sophisticated way to create a
language-specific stylistic effect of mixing viewpoints. But in addition to not
having tense marking, Mandarin also lacks clause interpolation and inversion in
its standard10
constructional toolkit for viewpointing narratives. Instead of using
the perfective aspect or TIME-related expressions as hypothesized, the investigated
passages use reduplication and perception-related lexical constructions,
the former being specific to Mandarin, and the latter changing the subjectivity of
the narration when introduced into the renditions. Use of parallel texts allows us
to identify an additional constructional pattern in Mandarin, ABAC, used for
introducing a character-dominant narrative effect—a viewpointing tool which
has not yet been discussed in the literature.
Another theoretically relevant point discovered through comparison of these
two typologically different languages concerns whether and how they use obligatory
grammatical strategies to viewpoint discourse. On the one hand, English uses
tense marking, which is an obligatory system, to piggyback the cognitive-stylistic
10 It is important to note that some translators simply follow the clause order in the source
language without creating the viewpoint effect (Lu and Verhagen 2016).
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function of viewpoint management, meaning that the language makes an obligatory
distinction between narrative viewpoints across sentences, given the grammatical
fact that each sentence in English contains at least one tensed verb or
auxiliary. On the other hand, Mandarin resorts to optional constructional means
such as reduplication and perceptual lexical constructions for a similar stylistic
purpose. Mandarin’s use of non-obligatory strategies for viewpointing narratives
means that its users are not required to make a strict and clear viewpoint distinction
in each sentence, although such non-obligatory viewpoint strategies do
appear (but only frequently) for the purpose of viewpoint management.
At the cognitive level, the grammar-driven viewpoint operation is also very
different between the languages—in English, the switching between mental
spaces is always explicit (given the obligatory dichotomous distinction between
past/non-past in English) and has to be marked sentence by sentence. But the
Mandarin system does not require its speakers to make a dichotomous distinction
between mental spaces, and it is absolutely fine for a Mandarin sentence to
go without any single viewpoint strategy, leaving the space distinction unspecified
and based on context, as suggested by Hagenaar (1996). Following such a
line of thinking, the present study is theoretically relevant not only to viewpoint
research but also to the issue of linguistic relativity. A language that has an
obligatory tense marking system and uses that to manage viewpoint in narratives
(English being a typical example) requires its speakers to make clear
distinctions between viewpoints, and so in such languages we can talk about
mixing of different viewpoints. In contrast, speakers of a language that does not
use an obligatory constructional means to manage viewpoint (Mandarin being
typical) are not required to make such clear distinctions, so if a stretch of
discourse does not invoke one single clear viewpoint, it is usually underspecified
rather than mixed. Of course, empirical research in this direction is needed
to confirm this implication.
The analysis also provides solid evidence for the usefulness of the MultiParT
approach in cross-linguistic viewpoint research. First, it pinpoints the utter lack
of the perfective aspect and the random use of TIME-related expressions across
all the Mandarin renditions of (1) and (2), and even identifies a consistent
mismatch between the perfective aspect and the present tense in (3) and both
its renditions, which shows exactly why our hypothesis, following what has
been reported in previous literature, was incorrect. Second, MultiParT helps
identify contextualized language-specific viewpoint strategies, such as the perception-based
lexical construction, in all renditions of (1) and reduplication in
all renditions of (2), which allows us to make a confident enough generalization
of what viewpoint construction to expect in a certain language in a particular
context. Thirdly, MultiParT also allows one to identify the lack of optional,
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though possible, viewpoint strategies in a certain language in a particular
context, such as the complete lack of clause interpolation across all Mandarin
renditions of (1) and (2).
Finally, it must be noted that the present study is based on works by
only two representative authors, each from a major national variety of
English, thus allowing for an investigation only of those two particular
author’s style, so that recurrent stylistic strategies (such as inversion, the
interpolation of adverbial clauses and the stacking of lexical constructions
with structural similarity) can be identified as relevant. Further research on
works by more representative authors who wrote in English should be done
in order to identify a wider variety of stylistic means that corroborates with
tense shifting in the English language. However, I believe the confined scope
does not undermine the generalizability of the present research but rather
gives it an analytical depth—if one does not see a connection in the target
language between TIME and viewpoint hypothesized in the sets of renditions
of works by the authors from different varieties of English, then it is obvious
that TIME is not what speakers of that particular target language care about
when expressing viewpoint. The fact that the recurrent viewpoint strategies
in the two authors’ style do not appear at all in any rendition in another
language, and in fact are replaced by other means specific to the target
language, proves exactly that viewpoint management is radically (in the
sense of Croft 2001 and Verhagen 2012) language-specific.
Acknowledgements: The completion of this paper was partially sponsored by
“The influence of socio-cultural factors and writing system on perception and
cognition of complex visual stimuli” (GC19-09265J) granted by the Czech Science
Foundation. I would like to thank Joseph Lennon for editing and proofreading
the manuscript and the reviewers for valuable comments. All remaining errors
are my responsibility.
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Publication 4
[4] Lu, Wei-lun. 2020. Viewpoint and subjective construal across languages: English inversion,
associated strategies and their Chinese renditions in multiple parallel texts. Cognitive Linguistic
Studies 7(2), 333-355.
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Narrative viewpoint and subjective
construal across languages
English inversion, associated strategies and their
Chinese renditions in multiple parallel texts
Wei-lun Lu
Masaryk University
The present study explores the viewpointing function of word order inversion
and associated stylistic strategies across languages, comparing EnglishChinese
multiple parallel texts as illustration. In particular, I investigate
whether the cognitive strategy of inverting the word order to create a subjective
construal is similar in both languages, to what extent, and if the
languages differ, what systematic contingency plans there are. To answer the
question, I examined selected excerpts with inversion written in English
and their multiple translations in Mandarin Chinese, to see how the subjective
construals in the English originals are rendered. I find that in addition
to inversion, the English samples exhibit a zoom-in effect through use of
punctuation, the participial clause, and an ad hoc schema of [some] – [X]
with the middle three instantiations sharing an identical phonological
schema. The identical phonological schema and the shared narrative viewpoint
makes the three instantiations iconic. In comparison, the Chinese
renditions employ the presentative construction and a focus particle to
approximate the character-based viewpoint, but the zoom-in effect is not
present in any of the Chinese versions. Another important difference is the
generally longer iconic part in the Chinese versions, due to the productivity
of four-character templates at the phonological pole in Mandarin Chinese.
Keywords: constructional schema, iconicity, phonological pole, subjective
construal, translation
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00060.lu
Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:2 (2020), pp. 334–356. issn 2213-8722 | e‑issn 2213-8730
© John Benjamins Publishing Company 80
1. Stylistics: Cognitive, constructional and across languages
As a burgeoning field in cognitive scientific research, cognitive literary research
has been expanding its scope and methods (cf. Brône 2009; Gavins & Steen 2003;
Semino & Culpeper 2002; Stockwell 2002; Tsur 1992). Currently, we have seen
different analytical frameworks of Cognitive Linguistics being extensively applied
to the study of the poetic effect of literary texts. Classic examples include Lakoff
& Turner (1989), which is a pioneer application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory
(Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Kövecses 2010), and Harrison, Nuttall, Stockwell & Yuan
eds. (2014), as a collection of classic applications of Cognitive Grammar
(Langacker 1987, 2008). In this field, studies comparing the poetic or stylistic
effects across languages also abound.
In cognitive stylistics, or even Cognitive Linguistics in general, cross-linguistic
research is done mainly via comparing different representative texts (e.g., Boulin
2017; Crespo-Fernández 2013) or via comparing results from monolingual corpora
of different languages (e.g., most articles in Boas ed. 2010). Such approaches are
useful in the sense that they ensure the representativeness, or the cultural significance
of the language samples investigated, and are able to generate patterns of
language use in the respective languages at issue. But such approaches also have
their limitations – there are various factors that cannot be controlled for, including
the content that is communicated, the relationship between the text producer
and the reader, etc. In light of such methodological constraints, use of Multiple
Parallel Text (henceforth MultiParT, as in Knotková & Lu 2020; Lu & Verhagen
2016; Lu, Verhagen & Su 2018; Lu 2019; Lu, Shurma & Kemmer 2020) came along
as a possibility that allows researchers to generate intra-linguistic generalizations
over high-quality language productions that are influential in the target linguistic
community. MultiParT advocates use of multiple translations of a literary world
masterpiece, which constitutes an effective method in comparative stylistics in
investigating how languages converge or differ at the constructional level when
users try creating highly similar construals. Such approach can be seen as an extension
of constructional stylistics (Geeraerts 2016:402) into a cross-linguistic dimen-
sion.
The stylistic phenomenon investigated in the present paper is inversion,
defined as “the subject occurs in postposed position while some other dependent
of the verb is preposed” (Huddleston & Pullum 2002:1385). Inversion is a frequent
strategy of information structuring in English narratives, which inverts the canonical
SVO word order, and through so doing, achieves a stylistic effect (Chen 2003;
Dorgeloh 1997). The structural variation certainly has its cognitive consequences,
which I will return to in the next section.
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 335
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In a similar vein, the manipulation of word order is also a structural strategy in
Mandarin Chinese that serves to express a different meaning from an uninverted
counterpart (Li & Thompson 1981:19–26). Similar to English, Chinese has various
structural strategies that serve the purpose of information packaging (Shyu 2016).
However, the fact that the English and the Chinese systems both employ the
manipulation of word order to package information in discourse may not necessarily
mean that the two systems utilize word order to the same stylistic end in
the same usage event (cf. the discussion on the use of demonstratives in Lu et al.
2018, that on the language of space in Knotková & Lu 2020 and that on lexical
blending in Lu et al. 2020). Following such a potential doubt, a broad research
issue that we may envisage is: Given the surface resemblance between the English
and the Chinese systems (i.e. the fact that both languages use word order for a stylistic
purpose), how much parallelism do we actually find when users from the two
systems verbalize the same conceptual content? To what extent do the two systems
overlap, and if they are not completely parallel, in what specific way(s) do they
diverge from each other?
2. The use of inversion, vantage point and subjective construal
Inversion has been identified as a tool for viewpoint management in English
narratives. It has been proposed that in English (as a rigid word order language),
the sentential subject position tends to be occupied by elements of higher cognitive
salience. Such cognitively topical elements are used to orient the theme of
the discourse at issue and to tell the reader/addressee what to follow (Dorgeloh
1997; Chen 2003). A deviation from the canonical word order of the sentence
(subject-first, henceforth CWO) is an indicator of newsworthiness (Givón 1985;
Li & Thompson 1976). With such newsworthiness, inversion has been analyzed
as a viewpoint operating construction (Dorgeloh 1997:105; Stein 1995:136), which
manages the focus of the sentence and bears the stylistic effect of moving the
camera, if we use a visual metaphor (Dorgeloh 1997:110–111). Such visual
metaphor goes that an inverted sentence creates a sense of displaced immediacy
(Chafe 1992, 1994) or a camera angle (Kuno 1987:203) by adopting a viewpoint of
an entity in the narrative. Consider (1a) and (1b), taken from Dorgeloh (1997:102).
(1) a. The tree is in front of the house.
b. In front of the house is a tree.
According to Dorgeloh, the version with the inverted word order triggers a viewpoint
from which the entire scene is viewed, which is the fronted element. In this
sense, in comparison with its CWO counterpart, (1b) triggers a “camera angle”
336 Wei-lun Lu
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from the position of the house as the fronted element, and define the location of
the tree to the reader with the house as the vantage point (Langacker 2008:75–76)
as a cognitive anchor.
There are certainly more structural types of inversion other than the one
presented in (1b). Another pair of representative examples is (2a) and its counterpart
of the CWO, which is presented as (2b).
(2) a. “I remember it vividly,” he said, “I’m in the restroom one day, leaning over
washing my hands, and the door slams open. In comes a raving maniac,
Jerry West. He’s stamping his feet, his face is red, smoke coming out of his
ears and nose, screaming and yelling, “I can’t take it anymore.”
(taken from Chen 2003:77, emphasis original)
b. “I remember it vividly,” he said, “I’m in the restroom one day, leaning over
washing my hands, and the door slams open. Jerry West comes in, a raving
maniac. He’s stamping his feet, his face is red, smoke coming out of his ears
(constructed)and nose, screaming and yelling, “I can’t take it anymore.”
In the CWO variant (2b), the primary entity in the motion event, Jerry West, is
linguistically encoded as the subject of the sentence and receives unambiguously
maximal attention from the reader, whereas the trajectory of the motion, introduced
later in the sentence, receives comparatively little attention. However, in
(2a), the construal is different in terms of the degree of attention that the motion
trajectory receives. The fact that the trajectory is introduced before the trajector
lets the reader have to wait for the trajector and, by such doing, lends more attention
to the motion itself, thus creating a sense of suspense. It is in this sense that
inversion is used as a stylistic strategy that increases the dynamism of a motion
event in narratives (Chen 2003:240–242).
In addition to creating a sense of suspense, the function of inversion has been
argued to be based on Langacker’s (1990) distinction between Optimal Viewing
Arrangement and Egocentric Viewing Arrangement (Dorgeloh 1997). In Dorgeloh’s
line of analysis, a CWO sentence like Jerry West comes in in (2b) presents the narrated
universe in a purely objective manner. If we use a theater metaphor by Langacker,
when using a CWO sentence like (2b), the narrator attends a theatrical play
merely as the pure subject of conceptualization and remains entirely offstage, devoting
his full attention to the onstage area. The language that he uses directs the
reader’s attention to the narrated scene in exactly the same way. In other words, in
such subjective construal, where the narrator only plays the role of the subject of
conceptualization of the scene, the narrator is not involved in the narrated content
and is thus distant from the discourse universe. In contrast, an inverted word order
sentence such as In comes a raving manic in (2a) represents a case of Egocentric
Viewing Arrangement, where the narrator is no longer entirely offstage attending
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 337
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the theatrical play in a passive manner but is involved in the discourse universe
in some way. According to Dorgeloh, the use of inversion presents a camera angle
from within the world of narration, showing the narrator’s empathy to the narrated
world and thus creating a sense of displaced immediacy. In comparison to Optimal
Viewing Arrangement instantiated by (2b), the construal of the narrated scene is
less subjective and more objective, as the narrator no longer merely participates in
the theatrical play in a passive manner – his consciousness constitutes a part of the
object of conceptualization in the onstage region. Therefore, Dorgeloh argues that
an inverted sentence provides a construal of the narrator’s consciousness that may
look to an extent subjective, but the construal of the narrator’s consciousness is
still more objective than that of a CWO sentence, as in a CWO sentence, the narrator
does not place his consciousness onstage as an object of conceptualization. In
English narratives, the camera angle created through the use of an inversion, from
which a shot of the event is taken, is the cognitive anchor point within the world of
narration that may remain implicit (i.e., may not be verbalized).
In this vein, I argue that an analysis of inversion may be integrated into the
current discussion of narrative viewpoint in Cognitive Linguistics (e.g., Dancygier
2012), which has received increasing attention in recent years (e.g., Dancygier,
Lu & Verhagen eds. 2016; Dancygier & Vandelanotte eds. 2017; van Krieken,
Sanders & Sweetser eds. 2019). Literature has reported various viewpoint means
that may be used to invoke a narrative viewpoint, including personal pronouns,
demonstratives, tense marking, among numerous others. In typical story-telling,
the narrator and the reader (or the hearer in an oral narrative) usually start
from the base space (Fauconnier 1997:73), the here-and-now of the narration as
a conceptual anchor of the development of the story. As the narration departs
from the base space into the narrative space (Dancygier 2012:36), a conceptual
packet that develops and unfolds for the purpose of the construction of a story,
various linguistic means are employed to connect and to demarcate the various
relations between the mental spaces, helping the reader to construe the narrated
content. When the narrated content is reported from the point of view of the base
space, linguistic features such as distal demonstratives, past tense markers, etc.,
are often seen, whereas when the content is reported from within the narrative
space, present tense markers, proximal demonstrative markers, etc., are usually
used. In such viewpoint terms, an inverted word order has been reported to be a
literary device that triggers a viewpoint from within the narrative space (Dorgeloh
1997; Fludernik 1993) and takes the reader away from the base space. A narrative
viewpoint from the base space means that the narrator maintains a cognitive
distance from the narrative space and that his participation in the narrative
space is construed only in a maximally subjective way (with himself being as
a pure subject of conceptualization). On the other hand, the use of inversion
338 Wei-lun Lu
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signals a viewpoint embedded in the narrative space, which introduces an onstage
point of view, taking the readers away from the default offstage viewpoint of the
base space, and that means that the narrator gets to participate in the narrative
space in an objective way (more as an object of conceptualization), losing his full
status of a pure conceptualizing subject and with his consciousness contributing
more to creating and guiding the reader’s understanding of the scene. In sum,
the use of an inverted word order in English narratives encodes the narrator’s
empathy to the cognitive anchor in the narrative space and creates a more objective
construal (or a less subjective construal) of himself as the story-teller with his
viewpoint embedded in the discourse world. In such a situation, the construal of
the narrated content is accordingly more subjective.
Given the explanation of English inversion based on (2a) and (2b) and the
theoretical background introduced above, a specific stylistic question of cognitive
interest comes up regarding the cross-linguistic comparison of the demarcation
of narrative viewpoint: In a case where two languages may both operate on the
structuring of information via the manipulation of sentential word order in narratives,
to what extent do the languages converge and diverge? At the cognitive level,
when Language A employs the structural strategy of word order inversion to create
a more subjective construal of the narrated scene, what happens when the scene is
narrated by users of Language B when they try to get across an identical, or at least
a highly similar viewpoint effect? More specifically, when trying to create a similarly
more subjective construal by embedding the narrative viewpoint in the story,
do users of Language B use the linguistic tool at hand (which is the manipulation
of word order), like users of Language A do?
To answer the above query, I look at excerpts from a literary world masterpiece
with the original written in English and the multiple published translations in
Mandarin Chinese. The original passages sampled are taken from Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens. Dicken’s writing is chosen because of his distinctive
narrative technique, which involves constant switches of time and the narrative
voice (Marlow 1994). Two examples in the original work are selected for scrutiny,
along with their renditions in Mandarin Chinese. However, the selection of the
two English excerpts is not random but serves two methodological purposes. First,
inversion comes in many structural types, but I chose to focus on the type with
the BE verb to clearly define the scope of my research (i.e., the loc BE type, which
has been argued to be the prototypical inversion in Chen 2003:56). In addition,
in order to give a deep analysis of the symbiosis of inversion with other stylistic
strategies, the two English passages chosen share a structural similarity, where
inversion is not the only viewpoint strategy but collaborates with the other stylistic
strategies including the use of a semicolon and a participial phrase to formulate
the narrator’s afterthought immediately following that, to create a certain stylistic
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 339
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effect. Such selection will allow us to see the variation and stability across the
different verbalizations of the same scene: First of all, such practice will allow us
to obtain an initial understanding of the stylistic strategies that may co-occur with
such structural composites across different contexts in English, and to understand
how they work. Secondly, such method will allow us to see whether the Chinese
translators largely agree on a strategy, be it structural or lexical, for rendering the
viewpoint effect invoked by the stylistic composites in English, and in addition to
that, to what extent the published Chinese versions are consistent.1
From a typological perspective, Mandarin Chinese is a language with characteristics
of both SVO and SOV languages. Similar to English, the subject in a
Chinese sentence usually occurs before the verb and the object.2
Like many other
languages of the world, Mandarin Chinese also utilizes the inversion of word
order as a strategy of information structuring.3
However, what has been unclear
is how comparable the functions of that strategy is to the inversion of word order
in English, and, from a usage-based (Barlow & Kemmer eds. 2000) perspective,
whether the Chinese strategies do occur in a similar context where English inversion
is also used. Given the methodology above and our understanding of the
grammar of Mandarin Chinese, the research question may be refined as follows:
for a literary excerpt written in English that involves the inversion of word order
to create a subjective construal, what happens in its multiple Chinese renditions?
Do the multiple Chinese renditions similarly manipulate the word order for the
purpose of creating a subjective construal? If the answer to the previous question
is “no”, then what other viewpoint strategies are employed from the constructional
toolkit of Mandarin Chinese? Following these questions, to what extent are the
different Chinese renditions consistent?
We proceed first to the analysis of the selected English excerpts in the following
section.
1. A methodological issue to note is that MultiParT is meant as an effective means to compare
human communication systems, with most contextual factors (especially the conceptual
content expressed) controlled for. Given the purpose of the present paper being a general
comparison of viewpoint strategies across human languages, it is methodologically suitable to
compare passages from Charles Dicken’s novel (19th century English) and their contemporary
renditions in Chinese. Another instance of use of MultiParT is a comparison of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and its contemporary Czech
renditions in Knotková & Lu (2020). Interested readers are referred to Section 2 of that paper
for a detailed methodological explanation of MultiParT.
2. A detailed discussion of the basic word order in Mandarin Chinese can be found in Li &
Thompson (1981:19–27). It should be noted that the notion of “subject” is difficult to define in
Chinese grammar, which is also mentioned by the same authors.
3. Interested readers are referred to Shyu (2016) for an overview of the strategies.
340 Wei-lun Lu
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3. Inversion and its associated subjective construal in English
The first excerpt to be scrutinized is taken from Chapter 56 of Great Expectations,
where the narrator uses inversion (with the relevant part underlined) to present
the narrated scene set in a court of law to provide the narrator’s close-up take on
a character waiting for the trial.
(3) But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could
scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and
women put before the Judge to receive that sentence together. Foremost among
the two-and-thirty, was he; seated, that he might get breath enough to keep life
(Dickens 2010:358)in him.
The inversion takes place at the beginning of the underlined sentence, which is
a token of full inversion (or more specifically AdvP-inversion) that, according
to Dorgeloh (1997:44, following Bolinger 1977:93 and Drubig 1988:91), bears
a presentative function of bringing a piece of information into our immediate
consciousness and of creating a focus in the addressee’s perceptual field. In (3), the
function of inversion in the narration is to direct the reader’s attention to what is
placed at the initial position of the sentence, foremost among the two-and-thirty.
The fact that the character is at the most prominent position among the thirty-two
people can be evidenced by a comparison between (3) and its constructed CWO
counterpart (3a).
(3a) But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could
scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and
women put before the Judge to receive that sentence together. He was foremost
among the two-and-thirty; seated, that he might get breath enough to keep life in
(constructed)him.
It is noteworthy that the stylistic effect of focusing in (3) collaborates with the rest
of the sentence to create a coherent scenario – in this passage, inversion is used
to emphasize the cognitively salient position of the character among the others,
and the focus semantically fits well with the narrator’s afterthought, which elaborates
on the character’s posture being seated. The two strategies jointly communicate
the measures taken by the court of law in order to keep life in the character.
In comparison to (3), the constructed passage (3a) does not have such semantic
and stylistic coherence between the afterthought formulated as seated, and the
semantic content in the first half of the CWO sentence.
Another point that is worth mentioning is the gradual zoom-in effect in (3).
By using inversion, the narrator directs the attention of the reader to the most
cognitively salient position among the thirty-two people, as the cognitive ground,
and after that introduces the character as the figure (Chen 2003). According to
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 341
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Chen, the ground serves as a cognitive anchor already introduced in previous
discourse, thus familiar to the reader, against which the figure is construed. This
provides a zoom-in effect, which further continues in the narrator’s introduction
of the afterthought, going in to the very detail of the character’s posture. In (3), the
use of inversion and the participial phrase to formulate the afterthought constitutes
a sequence of takes of a camera that gradually zooms in on the figure.
In addition, the grammatical strategy that is used to elaborate on the posture
of the character is also closely related to the viewpoint effect in (3). Note that the
posture is expressed with a participle with the grammatical subject of the posture
left implicit. Such a subjectless grammatical strategy of clause linking makes that
piece of information not only structurally but also semantically dependent on the
previous finite clause, iconically making the participle seated a continuation of the
previous clause in terms of narrative viewpoint. The fact that the writer leaves out
the syntactic subject (in the meantime the agent of the posture) of seated makes
the reader more immersed in the narrative discourse. The stylistic effect of leaving
out the subject/agent of this clause is a point that will be more significant in the
discussion of the Chinese renditions.
Therefore, inversion collaborates with the participle seated to create a more
subjective construal of the object of conceptualization, reducing the subjectobject
asymmetry. As discussed previously, use of inversion provides a camera
angle from within the discourse world, thus reducing the distance between the
narrator (as the subject of conceptualization along with the reader) and the
narrated scene (as the object of conceptualization). The use of the participle to
code the narrator’s afterthought makes the narration sound more personal and
thus strengthens the free-indirect style of the narration. When afterthought is
added to the inverted sentence as another narrative technique, the involvement of
the narrator in the narrated scene becomes deeper, similarly making the narrator
lose the full status of the subject of conceptualization. A comparison between (3)
with (3b) and (3c), where the posture of the character is either expressed differently,
or is not expressed at all, makes the point clear.
(3b) But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could
scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and
women put before the Judge to receive that sentence together. Foremost among
the two-and-thirty and seated, was he; that he might get breath enough to keep
(constructed)life in him.
(3c) But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could
scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and
women put before the Judge to receive that sentence together. Foremost among
the two-and-thirty, was he; that he might get breath enough to keep life in him.
(constructed)
342 Wei-lun Lu
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From the above comparison of (3) with its constructed counterparts (3a)–(3c), we
see that the use of inversion collaborates with the use of a participle to verbalize
the afterthought in the narration, which coherently creates a smooth zoom-in
effect and reduces the subject-object asymmetry. The narrative viewpoint is thus
more character-dominant (embedded in the discourse world). As the narration
progresses, the stylistic composite in the sentence serves the function of turning
the construal of the narrated scene less objective (or more subjective) in terms of
the viewing arrangement.
The second example from the English original work is taken from immediately
after in the same chapter, which continues:
(4) The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colours of the moment, down to the
drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in the rays of April
sun. Penned in the dock, as I again stood outside it at the corner with his hand in
mine, were the two-and-thirty men and women; some defiant, some stricken
with terror, some sobbing and weeping, some covering their faces, some staring
gloomily about. There had been shrieks from among the women convicts, but
(Dickens 2010:358)they had been stilled, a hush had succeeded.
As has been mentioned in the previous section, the two English excerpts chosen
share a structural similarity. In particular, Example (4) is similar to (3) in the
sense that the underlined clause with a full inversion (or more specifically, a VPinversion
based on the classification in Dorgeloh 1997) is concluded by a semicolon,
immediately after which comes a detailed description of a character, as in
(3), or individual characters within a group in the narrated scene, as in (4).
The anatomy of the narrative viewpoint in (4) is to an extent similar to that
in (3). The full inversion led by the preposed constituent penned in the dock
gives the scene a close-up take from within the narrated scene that focuses on
the characters in the dock. The clause ends with a semicolon, with a narrator’s
afterthought immediately following, further zooming in on the characters as the
postposed element in the scene and providing details about the characters. The
entire sentence (from penned… to about) conveys a zoom-in stylistic effect that is
similar to what we saw in (3).4
However, despite the shared overall narrative viewpoint triggered by similar
stylistic structures, (4) is still very different from (3) for at least two main reasons.
Firstly, the character-dominant viewpoint in (4) is interrupted by a clause that is
4. The viewpoint effect created by the inverted sentence in (3) may be seen as a continuation
of the viewpoint in its previous sentence, which is in the present tense. Interested readers
are referred to a discussion on the role played by tense marking in the same passage in Lu
(2019:381–383).
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 343
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inserted between the preposed participle phrase penned in the dock and the rest
of the sentence. The interpolated adverbial clause led by as switches the narrative
viewpoint to the narrator-dominant one, triggered by the use of stood in
the past tense (for a similar discussion, see Lu 2019:382–383). The second difference
lies in the ad hoc constructional schema that the writer uses to formulate
the afterthought of the narrator in an iconic way.5
Specifically, the formulation
starts with a vivid depiction of the criminals using the phrase some defiant.
After that, the same quantifier some is used repetitively, followed by three other
different perceptual deictic expressions, forming a partially-specified constructional
schema of [some] – [X]. Here, I argue that the writer’s use of the next three
pieces of perceptual contents, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping,
and some covering their faces, should be discussed at three different levels. First
of all, in terms of the narrative viewpoint at the discourse level, the three units
are all strongly associated with a character-based viewpoint, reflecting the perceptual
input of the (narrator-as-)character as the subject of consciousness. At the
syntactic level, the three pieces of information all come in the form of two content
words linked by a function word. Thirdly, the syntactic level is closely related to
the phonological level, as the identical lexico-grammatical composition gives the
three pieces of narrated content the same phonetic stress. In addition to that, the
numbers of syllables in the three units of [X] are largely identical, sharing the
schema [#σσ# #σ# #σσ#] at the phonological pole. Thus, a detailed constructional
analysis reveals a strong sense of iconic coherence throughout the five perceptual
deictic phrases that start with some, in the sense not only that all the five phrases
share a character-based viewpoint but also that the middle three share an identical
grammatical, stress and syllabic structure.6
5. The idea of use of temporary schemas in language has been extensively discussed in the field
of language acquisition (e.g. Tomasello 2005). An application of such notion to cognitive stylistics
can be seen in Lu (2018:49–53, 2019:384) and Lu et al. (2020).
6. Two other examples of similar constructional analysis that place an emphasis on the phonological
pole of a passage are Lu’s (2018) analysis of a network of schemas in Martin Luther King’s
signature speech and Lu’s (2019:383) viewpoint analysis of [N] – [of] – [N] schema.
344 Wei-lun Lu
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4. The Chinese renditions of the character-dominant viewpoint
and the loss of the zoom-in effect
A scrutiny of the five Chinese renditions of (3) shows that the Chinese renditions
consistently use the presentative sentence (Li & Thompson 1981:509–519) with the
copula verb 是 shì, to create a similar stylistic effect, which is implemented in
all the 5 versions. The use of the presentative construction allows the narrator to
introduce a location (the first among the thirty-two) as the topic of the sentence.7
A typical example is given as (5).
(5) 三十二
sānshíèr
thirty-two
个
ge
cl
人
rén
men
当中
dāngzhōng
among
的
de
lk
头一个
tóu-yí-ge
first
就
jiù
jiu
是
shì
lk
他；
tā
he
为的是
wèideshì
in order to
让
ràng
let
他
tā
he
保住
bǎo-zhù
keep-pfv
这
zhè
this
一口气，
yì-kǒu-qì
breath
活著
huó-zhe
live-ipfv
听候
tīnghòu
hear
判决。
pànjué
judgement
“But for in my memory, that kind of unforgettable scene emerge back then,
even as I write till this point, I also can/could barely believe, back then I see/
saw thirty two men and women brought before the judge to listen to the
sentence of death. The first among the thirty two is/was he; in order to let him
keep this breath, living to hear the judgement.”
(Zhu and Ye’s translation in 2006)
The CWO sentence without the presentative construction is constructed as (5a). A
comparison between (5a) and (5) shows how the presentative construction helps
create a viewpoint effect similar to that of the English inversion.
(5a) 他
tā
he
就
jiù
jiu
是
shì
lk
三十二
sānshíèr
thirty-two
个
ge
cl
人
rén
men
当中
dāngzhōng
among
的
de
lk
头一个；
tóu-yí-ge
first
为的是
wèideshì
in order to
让
ràng
let
他
tā
he
保住
bǎo-zhù
keep-pfv
这
zhè
this
一口气，
yì-kǒu-qì
breath
活著
huó-zhe
live-ipfv
听候
tīnghòu
listen
判决。
pànjué
judgement
“He is/was the first among the thirty two; in order to let him keep this breath,
living to listen to the judgement.”
(constructed based on Zhu & Ye’s translation in 2006)
7. I choose to call the presentative sentence a construction. According to Li & Thompson’s (1981)
analysis, the sentence structure does come with a meaning at the discourse level, so I believe
that should be considered a construction in the cognitive linguistic sense.
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 345
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In addition to the use of the presentative construction, the Chinese versions
systematically implement a pragmatic particle, 就 jiù, to approximate the viewpoint
effect in English by placing a focus on the character 他 tā ‘him’. In literature,
the particle has been analyzed as one that conveys an emphatic focus (Biq 1988;
Lai 1999). The stylistic composite of the presentative construction and the focus
particle creates a zoom-in effect similar to that in English that starts with the
entire group of 32 people, and closes up on the character within the entire group.
From the consistency across the 5 versions, it is obvious that the focus particle
is a Chinese-specific strategy that co-occurs with the presentative construction to
produce a character-dominant viewpoint effect, at least in the context of (3).
However, it should be noted that despite a similarity in the overarching zoomin
camera angle, there are still important local differences between the Chinese
renditions and Example (3).
Most important of all, the afterthought in the global zoom-in effect in (3)
is not reproduced in all the Chinese renditions. As discussed in the previous
section, the English original utilizes, in addition to inversion, the addition of the
narrator’s voice from the back-then of the story as a continuation of the characterdominant
viewpoint, with an important grammatical note that the viewpoint
effect in English is rendered through seated, a participial clause that has an
implicit clausal subject. The addition of the participial clause embeds the narrative
camera in the discourse universe and thus creates a less objective construal
of the scene narrated. In comparison, in the Chinese versions, the posture of the
character is verbalized with the following crucial differences from the English
version. First of all, the subject of the clause with the depiction of the posture
is made explicit in four renditions out of the five (the remaining one does not
verbalize the posture of the character at all). A typical example is (6).
(6) 三十二
sān-shí-èr
thirty-two
人
rén
person
之
zhī
lk
中
zhōng
middle
的
de
lk
第一个
dì-yī-ge
first
就
jiù
jiu
是
shì
lk
马格韦契，
mǎgéwěiqì
Magwitch
他
tā
he
坐
zuò
sit
在
zài
loc
那里，
nà-lǐ
there
是
shì
lk
为了…
wèi-le
in order (to)
“First among the thirty-two is/was Magwitch, he sit/sat there, that…”
(Luo’s translation in 2001)
The consistency shows that the general Chinese narrative convention somehow
prefers to mention the subject of that particular clause in a context like (3), which
makes it difficult for the translators to create a less objective construal of the scene
(i.e. with the narrator’s consciousness taking part of it) by means of rendering the
clause subjectless.
346 Wei-lun Lu
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The second important difference between the Chinese versions and the
English one is the use of distal deixis nà-lǐ ‘there’ to ground the location of the
character, which creates a distance between the narrator and the scene, and as a
result, increases the asymmetry between the subject and the object of conceptualization.
Such narrative practice takes place in three out of four renditions.8
Note
especially that the English original does not contain a distal deixis and it is the
majority of the Chinese translators’ systematic invention.9
What such invention
does is that it coheres with the explication of the subject of the posture clause
and consolidates the objective construal of the depiction of the posture (with the
narrator distant from the scene as a pure subject of conceptualization).10
Based on the above discussion, it is clear that all the Chinese renditions of
(3) attempt to approximate the viewpoint effect in the English original by implementing
the presentative construction and the focus particle jiù (both of which
occurring in five versions out of five), which jointly create a character-dominant
narrative viewpoint that induces the reader to construe the story with deep involvement
as part of the object of conceptualization. However, the following Chinese
formulations of the character’s posture vary greatly (and almost completely
systematically) from the English text in two significant ways. The character is linguistically
elaborated in the depiction of the posture, and the location of the character
is also grounded through the use of a distal demonstrative. The two coherent
stylistic strategies make the zoom-in effect in the English text difficult to preserve.
As for the setup of narrative viewpoint in the Chinese renditions of (4),
remember that in Section 3, it was already reported that the character-dominant
8. The use of punctuation is also very different between the Chinese versions and the English
one. Only one Chinese version uses a semicolon as the English one does. For a discussion of use
of punctuation in rendering style in English-Chinese translation, interested readers are referred
to Lu & Verhagen (2016). The very different use of punctuation between the languages could be
explained by the grammatical fact that Mandarin Chinese abounds in paratactic sentences (流
水句 liúshuǐ jù). Interested readers are referred to Lü (1979) for a discussion of Chinese paratactic
sentences. The use of paratactic sentences is what I will return to in the discussion of the
Chinese renditions of (4).
I believe that the use of punctuations (semicolons, for instance) and its influence on the
narrative viewpoint is certainly a topic worth looking into, but this matter cannot be pursued in
the present paper given the length limit. Interested readers are referred to Lukl (this issue) for a
related, but more in-depth, discussion of use of punctuation in stylistics.
9. The fact that the Chinese renditions systematically invent a distal demonstrative is relevant
to the findings of Lu et al. (2018), which discovers that Chinese translations tend to have more
frequent demonstratives as viewpoint operators in English-Chinese parallel texts.
10. The specification of the character’s name mǎgéwěiqì ‘Magwitch’ in (4) is also a distancing
strategy that consolidates the narrator-dominant viewpoint, which however does not occur
across the renditions and is only the invention of this one particular translator.
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 347
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viewpoint in (4) is interrupted by the insertion of the subordinate as-clause. In
other words, in (4), the past-tensed subordinate clause that reflects the narrator’s
distant voice is sandwiched within the superordinate clause of a proximal narrative
viewpoint. By contrast, in four out of the five Chinese renditions, the clause
order is completely different, where the part that contains the narrator’s voice
predominantly leads the entire passage. A typical example is (7).
(7) 我
wǒ
I
站
zhàn
stand
在
zài
loc
被告席
bèigào-xí
dock
旁边，
pangbiān
next to
仅
jǐn
only
一
yī
one
栅栏
zhàlán
fence
之
zhī
lk
隔，
gé
distance
我
wǒ
I
从
cóng
loc
一
yī
one
个
ge
cl
角
jiǎo
corner
上
shàng
loc
抓住
zhuā-zhù
catch-pfv
他
tā
he
从
cóng
loc
栅栏
zhàlán
fence
中
zhōng
loc
伸过来
shēn-guòlái
reach-come
的
de
lk
手。
shǒu
hand
站
zhàn
stand
在
zài
loc
栅栏
zhàlán
fence
里
lǐ
loc
的
de
lk
是
shì
lk
三十二
sān-shí-èr
thirty-two
位
wèi
cl
男
nán
male
女
nǚ
female
犯人，
fànrén
prisoner
“I stand/stood next to the dock, only the distance of one fence, I catch/caught
his hand reaching over from the fence from a corner. Standing in the fence is/
(Luo’s translation in 2001)was thirty-two male and female prisoners…”
The first important observation to make about (7) is that the Chinese renditions
predominantly choose not to preserve the clause order in English by putting the
depiction of the criminals (the proximal, character-dominant viewpoint) later in
the text. The content verbalized in the inserted subordinate clause in English (that
is, the part that conveys the narrator’s distant viewpoint) is placed at the beginning
of the passage. By so doing, the four Chinese renditions create a simple transition
from a narrator-dominant viewpoint to a character-dominant one, starting
the passage with the narrator’s self-reflection of his own posture and finishing
with a close-up take on the individual prisoners. Such presentation of narrative
viewpoint is very different from the English one, which has the narrator’s viewpoint
sandwiched in between the character-dominant viewpoint invoked by the
inverted superordinate clause.
Another important difference between the Chinese versions and the English
one is the degree of iconicity in the rendition of (4). Recall that the English
text exhibits a strong sense of iconicity in the part that depicts the group of the
thirty-two criminals, based on the correspondence between different levels of
language – all the five phrases share a character-dominant viewpoint and a structural
schema of [some] – [X], with the middle three especially sharing an identical
grammatical, stress and syllabic composition. I find that the iconicity between
narrative viewpoint and linguistic structure similarly exists in the Chinese
348 Wei-lun Lu
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versions, but that, by contrast, the Chinese versions systematically exhibit a higher
degree of iconicity.
In particular, what sticks out from the Chinese passages is the almost perfect
consistency in the length of the perceptual deictic expressions in terms of characters.
The Chinese counterpart of the English some is yǒu-de ‘some’, and the depictions
after that come predominantly in the length of four characters. Excerpt (8)
is typical.
(8) 有的
yǒu-de
some
怒目而视，
nùmù-ér-shì
angry-lk-look
有的
yǒu-de
some
魂飞魄散，
húnfēipòsàn
terrified
有的
yǒu-de
some
呜咽啜泣，
wūyān-chuòqì
snivel-weep
有的
yǒu-de
some
捂住了脸，
wǔ-zhù-le-liǎn
cover-pfv-pfv-face
也
yě
also
有的
yǒu-de
some
垂头丧气，
chuítóu-sàngqì
head drooping
茫然四顾。
mángrán-sìgù
stare off-look around
“Some star(ing) in anger, some terrify/terrified, some snivel(ling) and
weep(ing), some cover(ing) faces, also some droop (their) head, staring off
(Wang’s translation in 1998)around.”
Excerpt (8) exhibits a relatively high degree of iconicity, showing correspondence
between the narrative viewpoint and the phonological structure. Throughout
(8), all the perceptual deictic expressions take the form of four characters. Such
systematicity constitutes a neat example of iconicity across all the five expressions
at the levels of the narrative viewpoint (a character-dominant one) and the
number of characters.
Furthermore, if we compare the Chinese versions with the English one, the
Chinese ones are more consistent in the phonological structure of the perceptual
deictic expressions, and, as a result, more iconic in this sense. Remember that in
the English version, only three perceptual deictic expressions (out of five) share
the phonological schema of [#σσ# #σ# #σσ#]. On the other hand, there are three
Chinese versions that have five perceptual deictic expressions that come in four
characters, which makes the iconic part longer than their English counterpart by
two phrases. In addition, there are two versions that have four perceptual deictic
expressions that are in four characters, also having the iconic part longer than the
English version by one phrase. In sum, the Chinese renditions consistently have
a higher degree of correspondence between the semantic pole and the phonological
pole as a direct result of the consistency in form (number of characters) in the
perceptual deixis.11
11. Four character phrases are a productive phonological form in Mandarin Chinese. A
constructionist discussion of the phenomenon can be found in Su (2002).
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 349
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As a summary of the analysis, as we get back to the research question, on the
one hand, we do see that the Chinese renditions consistently utilize the presentative
construction and the focus particle jiù to approximate the viewpoint effect
triggered by the inversion of word order and the accompanying strategy in the
English passage. However, on the other hand, the Chinese renditions systematically
differ from the English original in terms of the agent of a posture and the use
of a distal demonstrative, which jointly implement a construal of the scene more
objective than that of the English passage. In addition, the Chinese depictions of
the group of suspects make consistent use of expressions in four characters, which
in general creates a more tidy correspondence between the phonological form and
the narrative viewpoint than does the English passage. The difference between the
form-meaning correspondence of the narration thus constitutes a nuanced stylistic
difference between the representations in the two languages at the level of
iconicity.
5. Subjective construal and linguistic manifestations of viewpoint
across languages
With a scrutiny of the two excerpts in English, we see that inversion (the loc
BE type) collaborates with other linguistic tools in the English language, such as
punctuation and the participial clause, to allow the writer to create a characterdominant
viewpoint effect and a zoom-in effect that immediately follows. The
stylistic composite invokes a cognitive anchor within the discourse world, from
which the narrated scene is reported and a more subjective construal of the scene
is achieved (with the narrator being less subjective). A similar stylistic effect is
found to be achievable in all the Chinese renditions of the same parts through the
use of the presentative construction and a focus particle. However, it is important
to note that the Chinese versions show a distinctive tendency to ground the character
with a distal demonstrative and to verbalize the subject of the posture clause,
thus distancing the scene from the narrator/reader and creating the asymmetry
between the subject-object distinction, making the construal constructed through
the Chinese language toolkit lose the focusing viewpoint effect.
Another finding that is worth discussing is the use of an ad hoc constructional
schema in the English original and its renditions in Mandarin Chinese. Remember
that in (4), what follows the inverted sentence is a series of perceptual
deictic expressions that reflect a character’s view, which share a partially-filled
schema of [some] – [X], with the three instantiations of [X] in the middle sharing
an identical phonological structure of [#σσ# #σ# #σσ#]. Given the fact that the
three phrases share the same character-responsible viewpoint and the same
350 Wei-lun Lu
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phonological structure, this particular stretch is highly iconic. However, when we
look at the Chinese renditions, the iconic part of the depiction (that is, the part
that contains a shared formal similarity and a shared functional similarity) is
longer. The general difference between the Chinese versions and the English one
happens as a result of the conventionality of four-character expressions as a structural
template in Mandarin Chinese, which makes it easier for proficient users of
that language to create phrases with the same number of characters.
Following from the above findings, the study has important methodological
and theoretical implications: First of all, MultiParT can make a methodological
contribution in comparing stylistic effects across languages, as it allows us to
compare verbalizations of a similar conceptual content and to compare how
construals of the same content are, and even may have to, differ across languages.
Secondly, MultiParT is useful for making a confident intra-linguistic generalization
over a number of target texts, which allows us to identify language-specific
characteristics. The above two points lay a methodologically solid basis for further
discussion at the theoretical level (readers are referred to Lu & Verhagen 2016; Lu
et al. 2018; Lu 2019; Lu et al. 2020, for a similar view). However, so far, studies
utilizing the MultiParT approach have been based on translations from English
to Chinese. In the future, translations going in the opposite direction (i.e. using
translations from Chinese to English) may be used in order for us to compare the
two languages in a balanced way.
At the theoretical analytical level, the present study demonstrates how
different human communication systems, each equipped with a distinctive organization
of the construct-i-con, encodes similar narrated contents in irreducibly
different ways (Verhagen 2012, which is in turn based on Croft 2001). The various
translators are bilinguals highly proficient in both the source and the target
language, but the utter fact that the multiple renditions not only systematically
miss but also consistently add reveals the incommensurability of the two systems.
The translators may do well in rendering a similar global stylistic or poetic effect,
but upon scrutiny, their verbalizations are always only approximations of the style
of the original work, as the construals of the parallel usage events are simply
different as we have seen. Cognitive Linguistics provides an ideal analytic framework
for the comparison.
In addition, the study shows the importance of the phonological pole in the
stylistic analysis of narrative viewpoint. In the majority of studies of narrative
viewpoint, much more attention has been paid to the construal operation of
mental space configuration invoked by individual grammatical constructions
(classics being Verhagen 2005 and Dancygier 2012), with much less attention
paid to the phonological pole of grammatical constructions. However, as we have
seen in the comparative analysis of the perceptual deictic expressions in (4) and
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 351
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their Chinese counterparts, the identical syllabic schema of [#σσ# #σ# #σσ#]
and the Chinese conventional preference of the four-character template have a
direct influence on the length of the iconic part of the narrative in the respective
languages. Here, an important methodological note is that the role of the phonological
pole may not be very obvious when one conducts only a mono-lingual
analysis of an author’s literary style. However, the sanctioning or conducive role
of phonological schemas becomes available for scrutiny when the conceptual
content produced is controlled for and aligned through the use of parallel texts
as research material, especially when it comes to the stylistic analysis of literary
works.12
In sum, the present paper firstly showcases how different languages have at
their disposal different constructional means for creating a subjective construal
of very similar contents that contain a character-responsible narrative viewpoint.
With different repertoires of constructional means and different narrative preferences
in different languages, the resultant construals constructed through the use
of different languages are bound to vary. My second point to make is a humble
call for more attention to the phonological level of individual languages, as it
is the form that couples with the meaning (which is the fundamental belief in
construction grammar) to make the transmission and appreciation of literary
works possible.
Funding
The completion of writing of this paper was partially support by the project “The influence
of socio-cultural factors and writing system on perception and cognition of complex visual
stimuli” (GC19–09265J).
Acknowledgements
I thank Michael Barlow and Jiří Lukl for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. All
remaining errors are mine.
12. Interested readers are referred to Nathan (2008:54–56) for an idea of how a phonological
analysis of CG may relate to literary analysis.
352 Wei-lun Lu
© 2020. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved 98
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Dickens, C. (2010). Great expectations. Mineola; New York: Dover Publications.
Dickens, C. (1990). Yuǎndà qiánchéng 远大前程 [Great expectations, Wáng Kēyī 王科一
Trans.]. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House 上海译文出版社.
Dickens, C. (2001). Yuǎndà qiánchéng 远大前程 [Great expectations, Hú Zégang 胡泽刚
Trans.]. Haikou: Nánfang Publishing 南方出版社.
Dickens, C. (2001). Yuǎndà qiánchéng 远大前程 [Great expectations, Luó Zhìyě 罗志野
Trans.]. Nanjing: Yilin Press 译林出版社.
Dickens, C. (2004). Yuǎndà qiánchéng 远大前程 [Great expectations, Yè Zūn 叶尊 Trans.].
Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House 人民文学出版社.
Dickens, C. (2012). Yuǎndà qiánchéng 远大前程 [Great expectations, Xú Pàn 徐畔 Trans.].
Harbin: North China Literature and Art Publishing House 北方文艺出版社.
Appendix. List of abbreviations used in the glosses
cl classifier
ipfv imperfective
lk linker
loc locative
pfv perfective
Narrative viewpoint and subjective construal across languages 355
© 2020. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Address for correspondence
Wei-lun Lu
Masaryk University
Kamenice 5–A15
625 00 Brno-Bohunice
Czech Republic
wllu@med.muni.cz
356 Wei-lun Lu
© 2020. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved 102
Publication 5
[5] Lu, Wei-lun. 2017. Socio-cultural factors in analyzing the pragmeme of accommodation: A case
study of the official online eulogy request system in Taiwan. The pragmeme of accommodation
and intercultural pragmatics: The case of interaction around the event of death, ed. by Vahid
Parvaresh and Alessandro Capone, 111-127. Zurich: Springer.
103
Vahid Parvaresh  •  Alessandro Capone
Editors
The Pragmeme of
Accommodation: The Case
of Interaction around the
Event of Death
104
111© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
V. Parvaresh, A. Capone (eds.), The Pragmeme of Accommodation: The Case of
Interaction around the Event of Death, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy
& Psychology 13, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_7
Socio-cultural Factors in Analyzing
the Pragmeme of Accommodation: A Case
Study of the Official Online Eulogy Request
System in Taiwan
Wei-lun Lu
Abstract  The paper reports an empirical study of the official online eulogy request
system developed in Taiwan. Through a qualitative analysis of the request system,
four extra-linguistic factors are identified as being crucial when analyzing the pragmeme
of accommodation, including the affiliation and the job title of the mourner,
the occupation of the deceased, the religion of the deceased, and the Taiwanese
cultural practice of adopting an English nickname. The cultural meanings of the
four variables are also discussed. It is argued that the Chinese concept of miànzi
‘face’ is a main force that not only historically led to the establishment of the request
system but also fundamentally shaped the setup of the system. In addition, two linguistic
factors are also found to be of relevance, including mode of communication
(written) and length of expression (four characters).
Keywords  Death • Eulogy • Face • Idiom • Occupation • Religion • Situation-­
bound utterances (SBU)
1  From Pragmatics to Culture and Cognition: Language Use
in Context
Recent years have witnessed a growing trend in cognitive-pragmatic research of
language to take into account the various contextual factors in which actual language
use is embedded. In particular, the socio-cultural interactional view on pragmatics
(e.g. Verschueren 1999; Mey 2001) considers pragmatics as “a general
cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to
their usage in forms of behavior” (Verschueren 1999:7). Following this quotation of
Verschueren’s, at least three dimensions of human verbal interaction are
W.-l. Lu (*)
Center for Chinese Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University,
Joštova 220/13, 60200 Brno, Czech Republic
e-mail: wllu@phil.muni.cz
105
112
important—first, pragmatics definitely has a cultural dimension. Second, usage is of
central prominence, as no language is ever used out of context. Third, language use
should be observed in the greater context of human behavior. The three points above
form the underlying assumptions of the present paper.
First, from a cultural perspective, pragmatics pays particular attention to extra-­
linguistic factors that define pragmatic acts and make speech acts effective (Mey
2006). Following this premise, the present case study highlights the role of the
socio-cultural factor in a pragmatic analysis of the interaction around death. In this
analysis, it is shown how the socio-cultural context of Taiwan makes the Taiwanese
pragmatic acts surrounding death distinct from those reported in previous literature
(e.g. Capone 2010b; Shurma and Lu 2016).
From the second point of view, focusing on language usage is one of the central
commitments, not only of pragmatics, but also of cognitive linguistics (Barlow and
Kemmer ed. 2000; Langacker 1987). In the cognitive linguistics tradition, it is fundamentally
believed that the way people think and reason should be observed by
how they actually operate in the real world context and that language description
should not be without a proper description of its context. The following quote does
justice to this usage-based commitment of language.
Usage always involves specific speakers/writers, hearers/readers, and a specific time, in
specific contexts; and since these influence production and understanding, facts of production
and understanding do not in themselves relate immediately and unambiguously to the
abstract models invoked by the words. (Verhagen 2000:270)
As clearly expressed by Verhagen, cognitive linguistics assigns central prominence
to the role played by the speaker and the hearer (or language users in general).
In addition, the meaning and understanding of words and phrases (in my specific
case, eulogistic expressions) are highly context-dependent and do not relate unambiguously
to the abstract models invoked by words.
The third premise of the current paper is the embedding of linguistic phenomena
in human behavior, especially in pragmatic acts. Humans do things with words in
the real world context (Austin 1962), and such situated speech acts are referred to
as pragmemes in literature (Capone 2005, 2010a; Mey 2006). Pragmemes are
speech acts in a socio-cultural context, typically with a goal (Capone 2010b). A
central pursuit of pragmeme research is the extent that extra-linguistic factors may
contribute to meaning construction in communication (Kecskes 2010), which is
exactly what will be highlighted in the current paper. In particular, I present the
pragmemes that deal with death in contemporary Taiwan as a contrast to Capone’s
(2010b) case study of the Italian Catholic context. In particular, this analysis
addresses the relevance of socio-cultural factors such as religion and occupation.
Another important theoretical issue discussed in this paper is a possible synergy
of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics in the study of pragmeme. As shown above,
cognitive linguistics places no less stress on usage than pragmatics, so these two
fields of linguistics are highly compatible. Although the usage-based tradition has
focused on the interaction between frequency and the emergence of grammar (e.g.
Bybee 2006; Goldberg 2005), with the role of socio-cultural context left under-­
W.-l. Lu
106
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investigated, the two fields do not exclude each other. Therefore, as long as more
attention is paid to the actual linguistic/textual analysis, a synergy of both these
fields of linguistics will be proven to be useful in the research of pragmemes.
2  Literature Review and Background of Research
Death is an unpleasant experience that one has to face sooner or later in life, so it is
highly relevant to human life and existence. Death presents a personal crisis and,
sometimes, it is not only devastating at a personal level but also at a national level
or at the community level of the deceased. If the person who passes is an important
figure in a certain field, e.g., a politician, as in Lu’s (submitted) analysis, the loss
may well cause an actual problem and grief to the entire community. Therefore,
actions must be taken to counterbalance the negative psychological effect brought
about by the event of death. To this end, verbal means is the most commonly used
action, although research into the interaction around death is still scarce.
The only exception to this is the research of Capone (2010b), who conducted a
pioneering study into the Italian Catholic rituals of giving solace to the family. The
data include interviews, recordings and notes taken from the observation of mourning
events. The paper serves as an important anchor in the field and, therefore,
deserves a detailed review. In this paper, the author observes that positive and comforting
words are always spoken at a funeral and argues that, in the ritual context, a
praise should not only be interpreted as kind words but that the reason behind people
saying comforting words at a funeral is to help the family of the deceased deal
with this difficult period in their lives. In this sense, words lose their semantic content
and significance and the slots for speech on such occasions bleach words (and
phrases) of their ordinary meanings. The author also claims that conversations held
at a funeral serves the societal function of creating reconciliation between people,
where social intentionality is involved.
Capone (2010b) may serve as a useful guide for studying pragmemes of the
interaction around death, as it presents important facts about Catholic funerals in the
southern European context and provides meaningful observations. However, as will
be presented below, the data in the Taiwanese context, due to a couple of interesting
cultural differences from Capone’s sample, clearly demonstrates the different ways
in which people verbalize, conceptualize and socialize around an event of death.
Furthermore, I will also discuss the cultural meaning of the data in the East Asian
context.
Shurma and Lu (2016) addresses the issue of death in English and Ukrainian
cultures and report that, although the text producers of the two cultures verbalize
death of the same literary scene in somewhat similar ways, the actual linguistic
behaviors and conceptualizations in both cultures are still radically conventionalized
and differ in an irreducible way. However, the data used in that paper are taken
solely from literature and, therefore, are still far removed from real-life interactions.
Therefore, an investigation into what occurs in the event of death in the real world
is necessary.
Socio-cultural Factors in Analyzing the Pragmeme of Accommodation: A Case Study…
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I turn below to a brief introduction setting the context of the current research.
Taiwanese culture is, in a way, similar to Han Chinese culture. In terms of its
population composition, the majority of the Taiwanese population is Han Chinese,
with a few minority Austronesian ethnic groups that altogether account for approximately
2% of the entire population. The official language of Taiwan is Mandarin
Chinese, although the variety spoken in Taiwan is different from the Continental
variety in terms of vocabulary and phonetics. Therefore, given the composition of
the population and the lingua franca used throughout the society, Taiwanese culture
can be regarded as being Han Chinese, at least for the purpose of the present study.
Buddhist and Daoist beliefs are important elements in Taiwanese culture,
although Christianity has been recently introduced. In practice, Buddhism and
Daoism do not exclude each other and very often coexist in a family. Interested
readers are referred to Chiu (1988) for historical and demographic details. Lu (forthcoming)
contains a detailed discussion of how Buddhist and Christian mourners use
different sets of eulogistic idioms that reflect the different conceptualizations of
death of the cultural sub-groups.
3  The Official Online Eulogy Request System in Taiwan:
Extra-Linguistic Factors
In Taiwan, eulogistic expressions are always an indispensable part of any traditional
funeral. Such expressions are unique in at least the following three ways. First, they
are fixed in length – always four characters. Second, the expressions are always
presented not in the spoken but in the written mode – expressions have to be written
on a cloth banner and hung around the funeral hall throughout the ceremony. Third,
the cloth banner cannot be recycled (as it bears the name of the deceased) and is
incinerated with the body after the ceremony.1
However, to reduce carbon emissions
generated from the incineration of these cloth banners (consider how many people
pass every year and the number of banners which have to be destroyed), from 2012,
the Taiwanese government implemented an online eulogy request service, with
which a mourner may request a eulogistic expression and have that displayed on an
electronic screen in the public funeral hall where the gathering is to take place.2
The request system has several extra-linguistic dimensions that are highly
unusual, which clearly reflects the cultural factors that are in play in the pragmeme
of accommodation in Taiwan and which will be introduced in detail in the following
section.
1
 Complicated rules exist governing the delivery of expressions, according to the age and sex of the
deceased, but that is outside the scope of this paper.
2
 In Taiwan, funerals are of two types—private and public. Private funerals are attended only by
blood relatives of the deceased. Public funerals may be attended by anyone connected to the
deceased. It is the eulogistic idioms that are delivered at public funerals that are studied in the current
paper.
W.-l. Lu
108
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3.1  The Affiliation and Job Title of the Mourner
From the design of the request system and the layout of the eulogy, I observe that
the mourner’s affiliation and job title play an important role in the pragmeme of
accommodation in Taiwan.
To request a eulogy, one has to first register with the system. In Personal Settings,
various pieces of information are required, including the mourner’s user name,
password, real name, contact phone number and email address. However, what is
rather unusual is that the mourner may enter his affiliation and job title with the
intention of displaying these at the gathering. The screen grab for the registration
page is shown in Fig. 1. Spaces to fill in the mourner’s affiliation and job title are
indicated in the bold circle (服務單位 fúwù dānwèi ‘where one works’ and 顯示頭
銜 xiǎnshì tóuxián ‘the title that appears’).
Provided the mourner fills in his affiliation and job title, this information will be
shown on the final product (the eulogy requested), as the screen grab in Fig. 2 illustrates.
The affiliation and job title are in the lower-left hand corner of the bold circle
(臺北市殯葬管理處 táiběi shì bìnzàng guǎnlǐ chǔ ‘Taipei City Mortuary Office’
and 服務人員 fúwù rényuán ‘Serving Officer’), and the four-character idiom
requested is displayed in the center of the screen.
Fig. 1  The registration page and spaces to fill in the mourner’s affiliation and job title (With kind
permission from the Taipei City Government)
Socio-cultural Factors in Analyzing the Pragmeme of Accommodation: A Case Study…
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Now a very interesting question is this: why should the mourner’s affiliation and
job title matter in the pragmeme of accommodation? This question will be answered
in Sect. 4.
3.2  Choice of Funeral Details and Confirmation
of Information About the Deceased
After the mourner registers with the system, a eulogy request can then be made. The
mourner has to sequentially choose the date (日期 rìqí) and venue of the funeral
gathering (使用禮廳 shǐyòng lǐtīng) and finally the full name of the deceased (亡者
姓名 wángzhě xìngmíng) from three different pull-down menus, as illustrated in
Fig. 3. The system will contain information concerning which funeral hall hosts
whose funeral and, therefore, the mourner only has to (and is only allowed to)
choose from the available options.
When the mourner finishes selecting the funeral details, he will proceed to a page
where he may confirm the basic information about the deceased, including the full
name (亡者姓名 wángzhě xìngmíng), sex (性別 xìngbié) and age (年齡 niánlíng).
This page is illustrated in Fig. 4, where the name, sex and age are highlighted by the
bold circle.
Fig. 2  The affiliation and the job title of the mourner (With kind permission from the Taipei City
Government)
W.-l. Lu
110
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At this stage of the system, another interesting question arises: why would a
mourner have to confirm the information about the deceased, such as his sex and
age, especially after he has already chosen the full name of the deceased? Is the full
name of the deceased not sufficient for identifying the funeral to which the eulogy
is to be sent? This question points to an interesting cultural factor that shapes the
design of the Taiwanese eulogy request system, and to which I will return in Sect. 4.
3.3  Religion and Occupation of the Deceased
After the mourner confirms the information about the deceased, he may then proceed
to the selection of a eulogistic expression from the repertoire contained in the
online database. However, it should be noted that the choice cannot be random.
Factors exist which determine what eulogistic expressions are available for certain
people, such as the religion and occupation of the deceased. Therefore, the mourner
has to choose from a pull-down menu that enquires about the religion and occupation
of the deceased. The mourner decides what is to be the focus of the expression
that is to be delivered (either the religion or the occupation of the deceased), and that
Fig. 3  Choosing the date and venue of the gathering and name of the deceased (With kind permission
from the Taipei City Government)
Socio-cultural Factors in Analyzing the Pragmeme of Accommodation: A Case Study…
111
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will be reflected in the repertoire from which he is allowed to choose. Figure 5 demonstrates
how the system works – if the mourner decides to focus on the religion of
the deceased, the options available are Buddhist (佛教 fójiào), Catholic (天主教
tiānzhǔjiào) and Protestant (基督教 jīdūjiào), all bold-circled. However, if the
mourner chooses to highlight the occupation of the deceased, instead of the religion,
eight options are available (in the rounded rectangle below), including lawyer (法界
fǎ jiè), politician (政界 zhèng jiè), soldier and police (軍警烈士 jūnjǐng lièshì),
teacher (師長 shīzhǎng), business (商界 shāng jiè), media (媒體 méitǐ), scholar (學
者 xuézhě) and medicine (醫界 yī jiè).3
I would, therefore, argue that religion and occupation are also of high cultural
significance in the pragmeme of accommodation in the Taiwanese context, and this
will be discussed immediately in Sect. 4.
3
 As can be seen in the system, the Taiwanese culture assigns different eulogistic idioms for different
occupations. Interested readers are referred, for instance, to Lu (submitted) for an analysis of
eulogistic idioms for politicians in Taiwan.
Fig. 4  Confirming the name, sex and age of the deceased (With kind permission from the Taipei
City Government)
W.-l. Lu
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4  Socio-cultural Factors at Play in the Pragmeme
of Accommodation in Taiwan
Based on the design of the online eulogy request system, I argue that the following
socio-cultural variables are important in the pragmatic practice of delivering eulogistic
expressions in Taiwan: the occupation of both the mourner and the deceased,
the religion of the deceased, and whether the deceased was known in his social circles
by his real name.
First of all, it has been observed that the system places an emphasis on a person’s
affiliation and job title, which I argue should be considered from the perspective of
the highly capitalistic nature of Taiwanese society. As one of the Asian Tigers,
Taiwanese society stresses the importance of a free market, economic growth and
competitiveness, where career success has become a central pursuit in a person’s
life. Therefore, it is no surprise that when a person dies, people close to him talk
about his great career success as a means of praising him – after the mourner chooses
the deceased’s occupation from the menu, the system generates a variety of idioms
of rather positive (though void of actual content) description and judgement. Of
course, the descriptions all conform to the particular occupation that was chosen,
but they might not reflect what actually happened in real life. Even if this was the
case, no one would bother to correct the description. This phenomenon corresponds
to Capone’s (2010b) observation that people are always obliged to say pleasant
things at a funeral and that words do lose their real semantic content at certain slots
in a ritual. However, what is very different when analyzing the pragmatic acts of
Fig. 5  Choosing the religion and occupation from the menu (With kind permission from the
Taipei City Government)
Socio-cultural Factors in Analyzing the Pragmeme of Accommodation: A Case Study…
113
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accommodation in Taiwan is the role of the capitalistic nature of the Taiwanese
culture and people’s (over-)emphasis on career success, even when they interact
around an event of death.
Second, the mourner’s affiliation and job title is as important as that of the
deceased – this is not only influenced by the role of capitalism, but I also claim that
the Chinese concept of mianzi ‘face’ (Ho 1976; Yu 2003) is of equal importance in
explaining why the mourner’s affiliation and job title are usually displayed on the
electronic banner. Taiwanese society, being a largely Han Chinese culture, operates
to a large extent on mianzi, a social recognition of one’s status. Striving to gain
mianzi by living up to (and even by exceeding) society’s expectations and standards
is one of the main driving forces in Taiwanese life. From the mourner’s perspective,
he will only want to place his affiliation and job title next to his real name on a
eulogy if he considers his own career achievement to be sufficiently significant to be
mentioned in public. Therefore, the mourner being affiliated with a well-known
organization and having an impressive title in the eulogy amounts to a free means of
self-advertising, thereby gaining himself mianzi. On the other hand, if the mourner
does not think that adding his affiliation and job title will help with his mianzi, he
would be better off omitting the two optional cells in the Personal Settings. From
the perspective of the deceased’s family, they gain mainzi if successful career people
or people of high socio-political visibility attend their family’s funeral – “Look!
Our daddy knew the mayor and he cares about our loss!” An interesting feature of
the system is that if one logs onto the system and is registered as a family member
of the deceased, this person is free to decline and to sequence the eulogies already
requested, and to adjust the duration of each eulogy’s appearance on the screen.
This allows the family to prioritize certain eulogies and their mourners, as they
deem “appropriate”. Therefore, when a mourner presents his career success in the
eulogy, this can be used by the bereaved family to showcase the deceased’s personal
or business network for the sake of their mianzi.
Therefore, if one’s affiliation and job title is mentioned in the pragmeme of
accommodation in Taiwan, this information has to be sufficiently impressive for
both the mourner’s own and the family’s mianzi. This information only exists for the
living  – after all, at one’s own funeral, a mourner’s career will not have much
significance.
Our discussion of mianzi in the pragmeme of accommodation in Taiwan also
leads us back to the reason for which the government saw a need to establish electronic
banners at public funeral halls. As has been discussed, mianzi regulates the
communication around death events in Taiwan, and also leads to the overuse of
cloth banners at funerals – from the family’s point of view, the more banners the
dead receives, the more mianzi they gain, because it means (or appears) that more
people are commiserating with the loss and grief of the family. Therefore, even
when the presenter of the banner is not actually considered relevant, the family
welcomes the “nice” act of accommodation for the sake of their own mianzi. Many
families even request banners from people of high social or political profile as a
means of contributing to their family’s mianzi, even when no one in the family actually
knows that person. From my personal experience, after my grandmother-in-law
passed, my father-in-law held discussions with the family as to whether to request a
W.-l. Lu
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written eulogy from the president of the country. He did not know the president
personally, only some individuals who worked for the regional office of the president’s
political party. Political figures, usually their secretaries, normally have no
reason to decline such requests, as such caring acts of accommodation may well
favor their next election, and the cost of a simple cloth banner is rather insignificant.
As a result, the Taiwanese people’s craving for mianzi proliferated the use of cloth
banners in the pragmeme of accommodation. As a consequence of this and for environmental
reasons, it finally led to the government’s decision to set up an online
request system and the use of electronic banners in public funeral halls.
It should be noted that the Taiwanese people’s thirst for mianzi in the pragmeme
of accommodation is evidenced by another interesting feature of the request sys-
tem – it is explicitly stated in the Guidelines that “The Office re-states that it is
against the law to use another’s name to apply without consent.” This statement is
given in the rounded rectangle in Fig. 6.
This statement is positioned at the start of the Guidelines, which indicates its
importance and implies the likelihood of frequent violations. It should also be noted
that the message is re-stated, which again points to the same conclusion. Following
on from this, a question immediately arises: why would one use another person’s
name to present a eulogy to a family?
Again, I believe that this is due to the Taiwanese cultural obsession with mianzi.
As has been previously discussed, Taiwanese people are passionate about having
Fig. 6  The statement made by the Taipei City Government situated above the Guidelines (With
kind permission from the Taipei City Government)
Socio-cultural Factors in Analyzing the Pragmeme of Accommodation: A Case Study…
115
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banners from celebrities at their family’s funeral, to demonstrate the extensive social
network of the family. However, in actual fact, not every family knows enough high-­
profile people to produce eulogistic banners to boast the power and visibility of the
family. Therefore, for the sake of mianzi, those families that do not have sufficient
high-profile contacts naturally need to come up with their own solution to this problem.
After all, generating a fake account costs nothing and is only a few clicks of the
mouse away.
Here we can see that, in the pragmeme of accommodation, social intentionality
is indeed involved like Capone (2010b) argues. However, in the Taiwanese context,
social intentionality takes on a very different form – in the Italian context, through
attending a funeral and thereby talking about the deceased, enemies and people
transform by showing themselves repented, whereas in the Taiwanese context, all
parties involved, family and mourners alike, seek mianzi, trying to win social recognition
of their own status.
In addition to occupation, the religion of the deceased is another important variable
in deciding the mourner’s choice of the eulogistic idiom. Religion matters,
because the Chinese eulogistic idiom contains a wide variety of cultural symbols
that reflect a certain religious worldview (Lu forthcoming). Therefore, if a mourner
mistakenly presents a eulogistic expression that does not conform to the religion of
the deceased and his family, this may cause great offense. Consider the two
expressions.
(1) 安 息 主 懷
ān xí zhǔ huái
peace rest Lord arms
“(May the deceased be) resting peacefully in the Lord’s arms.”
(2) 花 開 見 佛
huā kāi jiàn fó
flower bloom see Buddha
“(May the deceased be) able to see the Buddha and the blooming of flowers.”
Example (1) relates to the Protestant faith, with example (2) being from the Buddhist
religion, and they both obviously involve very different cultural symbols. As Lu
(forthcoming) and Lu and Chiang (2007) argue, Buddhist metaphors exhibit a pattern
which is different from Christian ones. Example (2) includes Buddha and
flower, which do not exist in Chinese Christian eulogistic expressions, and so the
two groups of religion-specific eulogistic idioms are relatively easy to distinguish
and should not be confused.
I would argue that the fact that the request system includes religious options is a
reflection of Taiwan’s multi-religious society, and this is a particularly sensitive factor
to consider in the pragmeme of accommodation in Taiwan. In the event of
requesting a eulogy online, the mourner needs to personally know the deceased in
order to make the correct choice, and not risk antagonizing the family. An investigation
of the request system has turned up useful details with a significant cultural
meaning for the conscious choice that a presenter of a eulogy needs to make.
W.-l. Lu
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In addition to occupation and religion, another relevant question is that of why
the mourner has to double-check the information about the deceased after he has
chosen the name from the menu. I contend that this results from Taiwanese people’s
cultural obsession with owning a Western nickname and using that name in social
circles, also for the sake of mianzi. In Taiwan, it is common practice to use an
English nickname that is not on official documents. The historical reason behind
Taiwanese people’s adoption of English nicknames may be to generate a (false)
impression of one’s own higher socio-economic status (Krastner 2012) and the
highly positive feeling that the English language carries with it.4
The following
hypothetical scenario may sound hilarious but it is realistic – if an Andy in your
circle of acquaintances passes away and you are unsure what his real Chinese name
is (which is not at all uncommon), what would you do when you request a eulogy
for him? The scenario is perfectly imaginable, as he had introduced himself as
Andy, he had been called Andy during the time you knew him and he was referred
to as Andy on his business card (from my own experience, I personally know a
handful of Andys and a couple of Erics). Under these circumstances, double-­
checking the information about the deceased becomes of paramount importance, as
one would want the requested eulogy to go to the correct family (both for his own
and for their mianzi), although it would be beneficial if a different family mistakenly
receives an extra eulogy (as that would, of course, help with their mianzi). Therefore,
the cultural fact that Taiwanese people tend to use an English nickname, which I
believe is a cultural-linguistic strategy for impression management, constitutes
another unique variable in analyzing how people interact around an event of death
in contemporary Taiwan, as this cultural practice has been shown to influence the
design of the eulogy request system.5
5  Mode, Length and Situation-Boundness of Eulogistic
Expressions in Taiwan
In the previous sections, I have introduced the basics of the online eulogy request
system in Taiwan and have discussed the cultural meaning of the design of the system,
to show how the pragmeme of accommodation is essentially culturally embedded.
Now I turn attention to the linguistic aspect of the pragmatic act.
First of all, a principal characteristic of eulogistic expressions is that they are
always presented in written form. In the past, the eulogy was always written on a
cloth banner, and today, the current trend is for the use of electronic banners.
Therefore, despite the change in the medium used for message conveyance, the
mode of communication has, in general, remained in the written form.
4
 For a further discussion of Taiwanese people’s obsession with the English language, see Linkov
and Lu (2017).
5
 Of course, I do not exclude the remote possibility of two deceased people having exactly the same
family and given name, but that would be a rare situation.
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Using this generalization, I would argue that the mode of communication is
another important cultural variable to consider in analyzing the pragmeme of
accommodation. In comparison, the data discussed in Capone (2010b) involve
Catholic priests’ sermons, so the mode of communication analyzed in this situation
is purely spoken. I believe that the impact of the written nature of the subject of my
investigation has significant social and historical consequences – it was the purely
written nature of the eulogy, in conjunction with the proliferation of the use of cloth
banners and the government’s initiative for environmental protection, that triggered
the advent of the eulogy request system. Had the idioms been conveyed in the spoken
form, there would have been no environmental requirement to invent the electronic
system. Therefore, the mode of communication in the Taiwanese pragmatic
act of delivering a eulogistic idiom at the funeral should be considered an integral
factor to the evolution of the pragmeme.
In addition, my data show that length of verbal expression is also a variable that
needs to be taken into account when studying the pragmeme of accommodation. As
I have shown in excerpts (1) and (2), the length of Chinese eulogistic idioms is fixed
and is always four characters in length. This finding is another distinctive characteristic
of the pragmeme of accommodation in Taiwan that is not found in other
cultures.
In connection to the idiomaticity of eulogistic expressions in Taiwan, I believe
that Kecskes’s (2000, 2010) discussion of situation-boundness of certain utterances
is highly relevant here. According to Kecskes (2010:2891), situation-bound utterances
are “highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences
are tied to standardized communicative situations”, which can be defined and
can only make sense in particular contexts. I would argue that such an observation
also holds true, for various reasons, for the written eulogistic expressions at
Taiwanese funerals. First, eulogistic expressions at Taiwanese funerals are conventional
written realizations of a pragmeme, traditionally with the purpose of consoling
the mourners and the family. Second, the eulogies are prefabricated rather than
freely composed. There is simply no room for change and nor is there a slot (for the
name of the deceased or for any related information) to be completed. Third, some
eulogistic idioms are highly semantically opaque, with some components no longer
used in contemporary Mandarin Chinese. In this light, the eulogistic idioms are not
semantically compositional, and as a consequence, relatively pragmatically loaded.
However, I further claim that eulogistic expressions at Taiwanese funerals are
situation-­bound in two distinctive ways – to begin with, it would appear to me that
Kecskes’s discussion of situation-bound utterances is, in general, based on pragmatic
routines in conversational turns between interlocutors, so the mode of communication
of the data discussed by Kecskes is also spoken in nature. However, as I
have shown, eulogistic idioms in Taiwan are always written and, hence, are very
different in terms of the mode of communication. They are also situation-bound, but
in a very specific way that has not been discussed in previous literature. My data
also reveal the specifics of how a situation-bound utterance is bound to occupation
and religion as two concrete extra-linguistic factors – the design of the system demonstrates
how a person’s actual selection of eulogistic idioms is contingent on the
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occupation and religion of the deceased. Therefore, in the pragmeme of accommodation
in Taiwan, a situation-bound utterance that does not conform to the selected
occupation or religion of the deceased will simply not appear on the mourner’s
computer screen and, therefore, cannot possibly be delivered.
Finally, from a usage-based point of view, investigating Taiwanese eulogistic
idioms is also meaningful in cognitive linguistic terms. Following on from
Verhagen’s quote, cognitive linguistics places a strong emphasis on the role played
by the speaker and hearer in a usage event, and this is clearly what my data have
demonstrated – the presenter of the eulogy has to be extremely careful in many
ways, taking into account various contextual factors when actually using the eulogistic
expression. If not handled carefully, the same (religious) expression may
develop a completely different pragmatic meaning than that intended and may end
up creating great offense.6
A mourner also needs to carefully plan what is cognitively
significant, or what to profile in Langacker’s (1987) term, by choosing appropriately
from the pull-down menu (of religion and occupation), so he can
simultaneously meet the family’s and his own need of mianzi, in a manner deemed
appropriate by both parties. In addition, the system allows the deceased’s family to
decline a requested eulogy and to sequence eulogies, demonstrating the importance
of the role played by the message recipient in verbal communication surrounding an
event of death. In this situation, perhaps, Verhagen’s (2005) notion of intersubjectivity
can also be relevant in analyzing eulogistic idioms at Taiwanese funerals, but due
to constraints on the length of the current study, this issue will have to be left to a
separate paper.
6  Conclusion
The current study showcases the layout of the official online eulogy request system
in Taiwan and discusses the cultural meaning behind the design of this system. Four
main aspects of the system were raised and discussed as crucial factors in analyzing
the pragmeme of accommodation in Taiwan: the occupation of the deceased, the
affiliation and job title of the mourner, the religion of the deceased, and the option
for the mourner to confirm the basic information about the deceased after the name
has been chosen. I claim that the current paper has a pragmatic, anthropological
linguistic relevance, as social intentionality is indeed involved, as claimed by
Capone (2010b), but I would further argue that this is the case in a highly culturespecific
way, as most of the aspects of the system are concerned with the Chinese
concept of mianzi ‘face’, the obsession with gaining social recognition of one’s
status. I believe that a further investigation of the pragmeme of accommodation may
also contribute to other aspects of general linguistic theorizing, such as cognitive
linguistics and genre analysis, because the introduction of a pragmeme in real-life
6
 On a similar note, Lu (2016) offers a usage-based account of how the physical context may influence
the interpretation of a lexical construction.
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cultural settings can be seen as an important expansion of usage-based linguistics,
giving extra-linguistic factors due attention, such as the occupation and religion of
language users. I have also shown how the mode of communication (written/spoken)
and length of expression are relevant to the situation-bound nature of the eulogistic
idiom.
On a diachronic level, the current paper also has much to contribute. The verbal
interaction surrounding the event of death is certainly worthy of further study, and
my investigation into this relatively new request system shows that, in today’s
world, where career success and internationalization are vitally important, the pragmeme
of accommodating death has taken on a completely new look. This has, therefore,
been reflected in the design of the online eulogy- request system. In the modern
internet era, sending a eulogy (which is a means of free advertising to some) can be
done via a fake account in just a few clicks of the mouse and, as a result, some
status-­seeking people risk breaking the law by using a high-profile person’s name to
present a eulogy at their family’s funeral. This all clearly shows that the pragmeme
of accommodation is fast-evolving in the socio-cultural context, which makes a
future diachronic investigation interesting and absolutely necessary.
On another level, I believe that the current study also makes a useful contribution
to the field of Sinology and Taiwan Studies – I hope to have successfully showcased
how the pragmeme of accommodating death in Taiwan, a largely Han Chinese culture,
differs from most other parts of the world and is interesting in its own way. I
hope to have proved that this societal phenomena is definitely worth further investigation
and, as a result, I would expect to see more research being conducted into this
area.
Last (but not least), it should be noted that this paper is only a partial introduction
to the basic layout of the eulogy request system and, due to constraints on the length
of the current study, it is impossible to analyze the full span of eulogistic expressions,
cultural symbols and conceptualizations contained therein. The remaining
issues will have to be left for future research (such as Lu, forthcoming, submitted)
that may include a typology of the eulogies in the system, the idiomaticity, frequency,
and cultural symbols of the idioms, and the various possible conceptualizations
invoked by the idioms.
Acknowledgements  The completion of this paper was supported by the research grant “The
Language of Death in Taiwan: Evidence from Condolatory Idioms, Presidential Eulogies and the
Self-introductions of Undertakers” (RG002-N-15) awarded by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for
Scholarly Exchange. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for useful suggestions, with the typical
disclaimer that applies. I also thank the Taipei City Government for their kind permission to
publish snapshots of the system for academic purposes.
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PROOF
1 Chapter 3
2 Cultural Conceptualisations of DEATH
3 in Taiwanese Buddhist and Christian
4 Eulogistic Idioms
5 Wei-lun Lu
6 3.1 Introduction: Why and How the Language of Death
7 Matters
8 Death is a central issue that all human beings in all cultures have to deal with, as
9 sooner or later one perishes, and in the course of one’s life, relatives and friends
10 pass away. In such devastating situations, it is natural that people need to provide
11 solace to each other, which has put the issue of death at the centre of attention in
12 religious, philosophical and psychological research for centuries. However, the
13 issue has been relatively underexplored from the perspective of linguistics, with
14 only very few exceptions (Capone 2010; Lu 2017; Shurma and Lu 2016). In view
15 of the need for further research, the present chapter intends to present findings based
16 on what people actually do with language around an event of death and a Cultural
17 Linguistic analysis of the findings.
18 Capone’s (2010) study is a pioneer linguistic inquiry into the language of death,
19 which investigates the role of social intentionality in ritual contexts, using Catholic
20 sermons given in southern Italy as data. In that paper, the author argues that in
21 mourning events, order is paramount, and that rituals serve as powerful transfor-
22 mative devices that repair interpersonal relations between the mourner and the
23 family of the deceased. At a funeral, the function of a priest is to vocalise the
24 family’s feelings and to try to present the deceased to the mourners from God’s
25 point of view. The paper discusses the interaction of religion with verbal exchanges
26 at a funeral, and this content may serve as a useful starting point for studying the
27 language of death. However, a limitation of Capone’s research is that it was con-
28 ducted in a European context, and the data gathered was solely from a Catholic
29 source. Another issue lies in the scope of the paper. It is certainly valuable research,
W. Lu (&)
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
e-mail: wllu@phil.muni.cz
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
F. Sharifian (ed.), Advances in Cultural Linguistics, Cultural Linguistics,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_3
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30 but given its pragmatics-oriented nature, important analytical tools in Cultural
31 Linguistics (Sharifian 2011, 2017) such as cultural metaphor and distributed cog-
32 nition are certainly not its focus. Another linguistic investigation by Shurma and Lu
33 (2016) into the Shakespearean language of death, discusses how the language of
34 death is translated from one language to another (English to Ukrainian). The
35 cross-linguistic mismatch of conceptualisation in translation is the main issue of the
36 paper, however, so once again, rather limited attention is given to the notions of
37 cultural metaphor and distributed cognition.
38 In the above two studies, a look at the interplay of metaphors that takes place
39 when people discuss death in a cultural community is missing. A Cultural
40 Linguistic analysis is needed to address this aspect. In addition, I believe that a
41 study of the metaphors of death in an Asian context will help deepen our under-
42 standing of how people from different cultures (especially one that is distant from
43 southern Italy) conceptualise death and use cultural conceptualisations as a con-
44 ceptual tool to construct their worldview of certain types of cultural events.
45 To this end, the present chapter analyses data from the contemporary East Asian
46 culture of Taiwan, taking a Cultural Linguistic perspective. The data comes from
47 the language of funerals in Taiwan, which constitute a distinctive cultural event
48 category. At a Taiwanese funeral, eulogistic idioms are an integral part of the
49 ceremony with idioms written and displayed on white cloth banners on the walls of
50 the funeral hall where the ceremony takes place. The idioms are highly conven-
51 tionalised and allow no creativity, as they always appear in the form of
52 four-character idioms, which indicate how deeply rooted they are in local cultural
53 conceptualisations. The practice is so frequent and culturally significant that the
54 Taipei City Government has set up an official online system for requesting eulo-
55 gistic idioms, to be shown on electronic banners at public funeral halls. In the
56 system, various parameters may affect how people use the idioms, including the
57 occupation of the deceased, as discussed in Lu (submitted), or the religion of the
58 deceased, addressed in detail in the present chapter. Interested readers are referred
59 to Lu (2017) for a detailed description of the eulogy request system and the social
60 context of its use.
61 The design of the eulogy request system further provides a convenient platform
62 for examining the interaction between religion, language and cultural thinking.
63 When one requests a eulogy, the system asks the mourner to select the religious
64 belief of the deceased, and accordingly turns up appropriate idioms for selection.
65 There are two main categories in the system: Buddhist and Christian.1
This chapter
1
In the system, there are actually three options available, including Buddhist, Catholic and
Protestant. However, all the seven idioms in the Catholic category also appear in the Protestant
category (eight idioms), so because of the almost complete overlap and for the convenience of
presentation, I have amalgamated the two categories into the category of Christian. Another
practical reason for this amalgamation is the relatively small population of the two religious groups
in Taiwan, as Catholic and Protestant believers account for only 5% of the Taiwanese population
altogether (Chiu 1988).
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66 discusses the eulogistic idioms within these two categories and the cultural con-
67 ceptualisations that underlie the use of their idioms.
68 3.2 Background and Review: Language and Culture
69 of Contemporary Taiwan and Previous Studies
70 of Chinese Cultural Conceptualisations
71 Taiwan is a multi-ethnic society that consists of various sub-cultural groups,
72 including the Han Chinese people, which are in the majority, and a number of
73 Austronesian tribes. Given the predominance of the Han Chinese in Taiwan and the
74 shared historical heritage, Taiwanese culture is generally believed to be relatively
75 close to that of the Chinese. The official language used in Taiwan is also Mandarin
76 Chinese, although the Taiwanese variety is significantly different from the mainland
77 Chinese variety in terms of its pronunciation and lexical choice.
78 Given the common use of Mandarin Chinese and the cultural heritage shared
79 between Taiwan and mainland China, it is important to review relevant Chinese
80 cultural linguistic studies in general, to see the status of research into the language
81 of death in Chinese.
82 Yu’s (1998, 2009) pioneer series of studies address Chinese language and cul-
83 ture from a cultural-cognitive linguistic perspective. In the two monographs, the
84 author discusses various cultural symbols based on the Contemporary Theory of
85 Metaphor (Kövecses 2005, 2006; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1990, 1993,
86 1994), including the use of body organs in Chinese idioms, elements of Chinese
87 medicine and relevant cultural models, etc. Yu (this volume) discusses how the
88 Chinese language conceptualises the concept of LIFE. However, Yu does not address
89 the way the Chinese people see death and further religious elements in the Chinese
90 language are not the concern of Yu’s various studies. From an alternate viewpoint,
91 Lu and Chiang (2007) in their study approach the Chinese language using the
92 Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, especially as related to the religious domain.
93 The authors analyse The Heart Sutra, a major Buddhist canon, and uncover a list of
94 metaphorical conceptualisations that predominate Buddhist discourse in Chinese.
95 Once again, the issue of life and death is not a concern of their paper either.
96 In sum, a Cultural Linguistics discussion about how the Chinese language
97 conceptualises death and how religion interacts with cultural conceptualisations to
98 shape the Chinese people’s worldview is still lacking. This chapter offers a pre-
99 liminary attempt to meet this need.
(Footnote 1 continued)
Daoism is another major religion of Taiwan, but in actual practice, Daoism and Buddhism are
not at all mutually exclusive and even reported to overlap significantly (Chiu 1988). I believe that
is why Daoist is not listed as a separate entry in the eulogy request system.
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100 3.3 Findings
101 In this section, a selection of idioms from the Buddhist and the Christian category
102 and the cultural conceptual metaphors that are generalised from the entire set of
103 idioms are presented. In the eulogy request system, 59 eulogistic expressions for
104 Buddhists and eight for Christians are identified. Each category can be captured by
105 a highly distinct set of metaphors, or proposition schemas in Quinn’s (1987) term,
106 which reflect the view of life and death of the two sub-groups (Taiwanese Buddhist
107 and Taiwanese Christian). I present the groups of cultural metaphors below.
108 3.3.1 Cultural Conceptualisations of Death in Taiwanese
109 Buddhist Eulogistic Idioms
110 The system contains 59 Buddhist eulogistic idioms. At least six major cultural
111 metaphors can be generalised from the idioms, including DEATH IS REBIRTH, DEATH IS
112 A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH, REBIRTH IS WEST, LIFE IS A CIRCLE, A PERSON IS A LOTUS,
113 HEAVEN IS (A POND/SEA) FULL OF LOTUSES.
114 3.3.1.1 DEATH IS REBIRTH
115 The first major cultural metaphor is DEATH IS REBIRTH, which is instantiated by five
116 idioms. This cultural conceptualisation involves the underlying cultural concept of
117 REINCARNATION. According to that, life and death form a never-ending cycle, where
118 death in one life is not only the end of that particular life but also the beginning of
119 the next. Typical examples from the repertoire are seen in (1)–(3).
121
122 (1) 往 生 淨 土123
wǎng shēng jìng tǔ
124 towards life pure land
125 “(This person has gone) towards life in the pure land”.
126128
129 (2) 往 生 極 樂130
wǎng shēng jí lè
131 towards life extreme happy
132 “(This person has gone) towards life in the bliss”.
133
134
135 In (1) and (2), there is a compound wǎngshēng, formed by putting together wǎng
136 ‘towards’ and shēng ‘life’, which is used in contemporary Taiwanese Mandarin as a
137 euphemism for ‘die’. According to Buddhist belief, after one dies, the soul goes to
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138 heaven, or the pure land or the bliss in (1) and (2), where the soul is ready for
139 rebirth. The compound wǎngshēng is a linguistic manifestation of the cultural
140 conceptualisation of DEATH IS REBIRTH in the Taiwanese Buddhist mind, which
141 underpins the use of various eulogistic idioms.
142 The existence of the conceptualisation of DEATH IS REBIRTH is further supported by
143 the existence of another idiom about reincarnation in (3).
145
146 (3) 乘 願 再 來147
chéng yuàn zài lái
148 ride wish again come
149 “(This person will) come again with (great) wishes (of helping the
150 world)”.
151
152
153 In (3), we see that when a person dies, it is believed that they may come to this
154 world again if they have a great desire to help the world. This matches the Buddhist
155 belief of existence being a never-ending cycle of life, death and rebirth.
156 3.3.1.2 DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH
157 Note that the MOTION schema is common to and linguistically elaborated in both
158 (1) and (2) by wǎng ‘towards’ and in (3) by the motion verb lái ‘come’. Therefore,
159 if one takes into account the motion schema in the above examples, the concep-
160 tualisation of DEATH IS REBIRTH can have a lower-level instantiation specified as
161 DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH. Based on these expressions, it is evident that
162 in the Taiwanese Buddhist mind, not only does LIFE IS A JOURNEY hold true (cf.
163 Kövecses 2010: 50; Lakoff 1994: 62–63; Yu 1998: 17–19), but what is significant
164 in Taiwanese Buddhist culture is that DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS LIFE. I will come
165 back to this issue in the Discussion.
166 3.3.1.3 DEATH/REBIRTH IS WEST
167 The third cultural conceptualisation identified in the data is DEATH/REBIRTH IS WEST,
168 which is a culture-specific orientational metaphor. Examples (4) and (5) illustrate
169 this conceptualisation.
171
172 (4) 化 滿 西 歸173
huà mǎn xī guī
174 die complete west return
175 “(This person) has died; (his life is) complete (and he has) returned
176 to the west”.
177
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179
180 (5) 如來 西 望181
rúlái xī wàng
182 Tathagata west look
183 “Tathagata/Buddha is looking westward (to bless the
184 deceased)”.
185
186
187 It is clear from the examples that in Taiwanese Buddhist culture, DEATH or
188 REBIRTH is closely associated with WEST, which is a typical Buddhist belief.
189 Therefore, after one’s current life reaches the end point, the soul returns to heaven
190 in the west, as shown in (4), and the Buddha looks westward to bless this person’s
191 soul, as in (5).
192 3.3.1.4 LIFE IS A CIRCLE
193 Another conceptualisation identified in the data is LIFE IS A CIRCLE. Relevant
194 examples include (6)–(8).
196
197 (6) 功 德 圓 滿198
gōng dé yuán mǎn
199 feat virtue circle full
200 “(This person led a) full (life like a) circle, having had various
201 achievements”.
202204
205 (7) 福 慧 圓 滿206
fú huì yuán mǎn
207 blessing wisdom circle full
208 “(This person led a) full (life like a circle, as he enjoyed all) blessings
209 (and had all) wisdoms”.
210212
213 (8) 圓 滿 菩提214
yuán mǎn pútí
215 circle full bodhi/wisdom
216 “(This person led a) full (life like a) circle, (as he had) the
217 wisdom”.
218
219
220 From (6)–(8), one sees that CIRCLE is an important cultural symbol in Taiwanese
221 Buddhist culture, as it occurs with all sorts of positive attributes to describe a
222 human in the eulogistic idioms, including achievements, virtue, blessing and wis-
223 dom. Note also that yuánmǎn is a compound in Mandarin, meaning
224 ‘perfect/perfection’. The common cultural meaning of CIRCLE in Taiwanese culture
225 and in all the Mandarin speaking, pan-Chinese cultures again testifies to the shared
226 socio-cultural substrate between these cultures.
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227 In addition, understanding life in terms of a circle is certainly analogous to DEATH
228 IS REBIRTH. When one draws a circle, the end is the beginning. The adjacent nature
229 of the beginning and the end provides the conceptual analogical basis for life and
230 death forming a never-ending cycle. Therefore, the Taiwanese Buddhist use of
231 CIRCLE as a cultural symbol is in a highly schematic sense connected to the cultural
232 conceptualisation of DEATH IS REBIRTH.
233 3.3.1.5 A PERSON IS A LOTUS
234 The fifth conceptualisation that one may extrapolate from the eulogistic idioms is A
235 PERSON IS A LOTUS. Example (9) is an illustration.
237
238 (9) 蓮 華 化 生239
lián huá huà shēng
240 lotus flower become life
241 “(This person) turned into being (from a) lotus”.
242
243
244 In (9), a person is conceptualised as a lotus, which embodies the positive
245 qualities of the lotus plant. In Chinese culture, the lotus symbolises a person of
246 noble character. The lotus, according to Mr. Zhōu Liánxī, a famous scholar of the
247 Song Dynasty, has its roots in the mud at the bottom of a pond, but the flower
248 emerges from the water, untouched by the slime (Zhang 1968). This idea, along
249 with Mr. Zhou’s writing, has been extensively disseminated in Chinese culture in
250 various ways, including use of the lotus symbol in eulogistic idioms that we see
251 here. In Buddhism, the lotus is similarly conceptualised as a symbol for purity and
252 holiness (Ward 1952). According to the Chinese cultural reasoning that involves
253 LOTUS, when a person is born into the world, the mind is contaminated by worldly
254 things so that the soul cannot attain a state of pure wisdom. By comparing a person
255 to a lotus, their life can be seen as spotless like the lotus flower that radiates purity,
256 untouched by the filthy world.2
Examples (10) and (11) are further evidence, of the
257 same cultural metaphor at work, though there are different tropes of speech that
258 highlight the positive connotation in both examples.
260
261 (10) 高 登 蓮 品262
gāo dēng lián pǐn
263 high climb lotus class
264 “This person has climbed to the top class of lotus”.
265
2
PURITY is another important cultural concept in Buddhism. For details, see Lu and Chiang (2007:
344).
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267
268 (11) 九 品 蓮 花269
jiǔ pǐn lián huā
270 nine class lotus flower
271 “This person was a lotus of top quality”.
272
273
274 In (10), an orientational metaphor of GOOD IS UP is at work along with the
275 conceptualisation of A PERSON IS A LOTUS, thus accentuating the positive connotation
276 invoked by the lotus symbol. The orientational metaphor is linguistically elaborated
277 by the characters gāo ‘high’ and dēng ‘climb’. In (11), another cultural symbol
278 comes into play, which is the number ‘9’, a favourable prophetic sign in Chinese
279 culture.3
With these textual prompts (Lu 2008), one may be assured that the con-
280 ceptualisation of A PERSON IS A LOTUS is loaded with positive evaluations in
281 Taiwanese Buddhist eulogistic idioms.
282 3.3.1.6 HEAVEN IS (A POND/SEA) FULL OF LOTUSES
283 A sixth conceptualisation relevant to A PERSON IS A LOTUS is HEAVEN IS (A POND/SEA)
284 FULL OF LOTUSES. An example of this conceptualisation is seen in (12).
286
287 (12) 蓮 池 海 會288
lián chí hǎi huì
289 lotus pond sea gathering
290 “(The heaven is a) pond of lotuses, (a huge) gathering like the
291 sea”.
292
293
294 Not only is (12) an example based on the A PERSON IS A LOTUS conceptualisation,
295 but it further involves the conceptualisation of HEAVEN IS A POND FULL OF LOTUSES.
296 The reasoning is straightforward. A person’s soul goes to heaven after they die, so if
297 a person is a lotus, it follows that according to Ahrens’ (2010) mapping principle,
298 because many people die, lotuses that represent their souls all go to heaven, so
299 heaven is like a pond that hosts a collection of lotuses. These (of course, good)
300 people’s souls meet in heaven in the way that lotuses gather together in a pond.
301 Therefore, A PERSON IS A LOTUS, HEAVEN IS A POND FULL OF LOTUSES is a consequential
302 conceptualisation. But note that the concept SEA is also involved here, which
303 slightly complicates the story. According to the Taiwanese Buddhist line of
3
For the culture-specificity of orientational metaphors even as basic as GOOD IS UP, see the discussion
in Lu (2016: 572–573, submitted).
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304 thinking, the number of souls is so great that one might lose count, which is akin to
305 measuring the volume of water in the sea, hence the use of the character hǎi ‘sea’.4
306 Below are the eulogistic idioms for the other sub-cultural group considered,
307 which is Taiwanese Christians. These present a completely different worldview of
308 what death is like.
309 3.3.2 Cultural Conceptualisations of Death in Taiwanese
310 Christian Eulogistic Idioms
311 In the eulogy request system, there are eight idioms for Christians.5
Three con-
312 ceptualisations have been generalised from these idioms, including DEATH IS REST,
313 HEAVEN IS AN ETERNAL HOME and DEATH IS A RETURN JOURNEY.6
314 3.3.2.1 DEATH IS REST
315 The first major conceptualisation identified is DEATH IS REST, instantiated by (13) and
316 (14).7
318
319 (13) 安 息 主 懷320
ān xí zhǔ huái
321 peace rest Lord bosom
322 “(This person is now) resting in the Lord’s bosom”.
323325
326 (14) 息 勞 歸 主327
xí láo guī zhǔ
328 rest toil return Lord
329 “(This person has) put down (his) hard work (and has) returned
330 to the Lord”.
331
332
4
In Mandarin Chinese, using SEA to mean an extremely large number is frequent. There are
lexicalised expressions such as rén-shān-rén-hǎi ‘man-mountain-man-sea’, meaning a lot of
people, huā-hǎi ‘flower-sea’, meaning a sea of flowers, among numerous others.
5
I believe that the results presented here should be compatible with Christian metaphors presented
elsewhere (e.g. Charteris-Black 2004; Kövecses 2011), although the metaphorical conceptualisations
presented therein have not been mentioned due to the difference in research method and
genre.
6
DEATH IS REST has been mentioned in the context of poetic language analysis (Kövecses 2010: 50)
but no detailed account was given there.
7
DEATH IS REST is a major conceptualisation in the Christian category but much less so in the
Buddhist category, which will be elaborated further in the Discussion.
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333 In (13), death is conceptualised as peaceful rest, evidenced by the use of ān
334 ‘peace’ and xí ‘rest’. In (14), a further observation can be made that in contrast to
335 death as peaceful rest, life is conceptualised as labourious effort, evidenced by the
336 use of láo ‘toil’. Therefore, the conceptualisation can be further developed in full as
337 LIFE IS LABOUR; DEATH IS REST.
338 In addition to (13) and (14), the metaphor also has a slightly different instanti-
339 ation, as in (15).
341
342 (15) 主 內 安 睡343
zhǔ nèi ān shuì
344 Lord in peace sleep
345 “(This person is now) sleeping in the Lord peacefully”.
346
347
348 In (15), the metaphorical keyword is shuì, which does not directly invoke REST
349 but a closely related concept of SLEEP. Therefore, this idiom can be analysed as a
350 slight variation on the other two in the REST category.
351 3.3.2.2 HEAVEN IS AN ETERNAL HOME
352 The second conceptualisation that can be generalised from the Christian eulogistic
353 idioms is HEAVEN IS AN ETERNAL HOME, illustrated by (16) and (17).
355
356 (16) 永 住 天 家357
yǒng zhù tiān jiā
358 forever live heaven home
359 “(This person is now) living in (his) home in heaven”.
360362
363 (17) 樂園 安 家364
lèyuán ān jiā
365 paradise settle home
366 “(This person has now) settled (his) home in the
367 paradise”.
368
369
370 In these two examples, we see that the concept of ETERNAL is invoked by the use
371 of yǒng ‘forever’ in (16) and of ān ‘settle’ in (17).8
If one settles in their home
372 somewhere, one stays there for a long time, even if it is not forever, it is at least
373 related to the concept of ETERNAL. We also see that the character jiā ‘home’ appears
8
The word ān is polysemous—when used as an adjective, it means ‘peaceful’, but when used as a
verb, it has the meaning of ‘to settle’.
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374 in both idioms, so that it unequivocally invokes the concept of HOME in both the
375 instances.
376 3.3.2.3 DEATH IS A RETURN JOURNEY
377 The third Taiwanese Christian conceptualisation identified in the database is DEATH
378 IS A RETURN JOURNEY, illustrated by (14) and (18).
380
381 (18) 榮 歸 天 家382
róng guī tiān jiā
383 glory return heaven home
384 “(This person has) returned to his home in heaven with glory”.
385
386
387 In both the examples, the keyword is guī ‘return’. We see that in (14), the
388 destination of the return journey is the Lord, and that in (18) it is the person’s home
389 in heaven, which is deeply rooted in Christian belief. But in either case, and without
390 doubt, DEATH is conceptualised as a return journey in the Taiwanese Christian
391 culture given the supporting linguistic evidence.
392 3.4 Discussion
393 In this section, the theoretical and methodological significance of the findings are
394 considered. Section 3.4.1 introduces the co-occurrence of conceptualisations in the
395 idioms, and in Sect. 3.4.2 the conceptualisations shared by the sub-cultures, i.e.
396 DEATH IS REST and DEATH IS A JOURNEY, are discussed. In Sect. 3.4.2, the cultural
397 conceptualisation of DEATH IS A JOURNEY, which has not been found in any previous
398 studies, is also discussed.
399 3.4.1 Co-occurrence of Metaphors in the Eulogistic Idioms
400 First of all, it can be seen that more than one conceptualisation may co-exist in one
401 single idiom in both the idioms for Buddhists and Christians.
402 Examples (19)–(21) are illustrations from the Buddhist category.
404
405 (19) 往 生 西 方406
wǎng shēng xī fāng
407 towards life west side
408 “(This person has) gone for (another) life in the west”.
409
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411
412 (20) 往 生 蓮 邦413
wǎng shēng lián bāng
414 towards life lotus country
415 “(This person has) gone for (another) life in the lotus country”.
416418
419 (21) 駕 返 蓮 邦420
jià fǎn lián bāng
421 ride return lotus country
422 “(This person has) gone back to the lotus country on a vehicle”.
423
424
425 The co-existence of multiple conceptualisations can be seen in all these examples.
426 In (19), there are DEATH IS REBIRTH and DEATH IS WEST, linguistically elaborated by
427 wǎngshēng ‘towards life’ and xī ‘west’. In (20), the co-occurring conceptualisations
428 are DEATH IS REBIRTH and HEAVEN IS FULL OF LOTUSES. The metaphors found in (21) are
429 LIFE IS A RETURN JOURNEY and HEAVEN IS FULL OF LOTUSES. However, note that (21) is
430 slightly difficult to categorise, as it involves a verb of transportation jià ‘to ride on (a
431 traffic vehicle, such as a car, plane or an animal)’ so that might involve still another
432 sub-conceptualisation that has not been discussed above. In particular, the vehicle
433 for transportation of the deceased is left unspecified, or left outside of the conceptual
434 profile, in Langacker’s (1987) words, and will have to be investigated further via a
435 large-scale analysis of the entire database. In any case, the co-existence of multiple
436 conceptualisations in one single eulogistic idiom is evident in the three examples.
437 The same observation of conceptualisation co-occurrence also holds for the
438 Christian category, which can be illustrated by (18). In (18), we see not only DEATH
439 IS A RETURN JOURNEY but also HEAVEN IS HOME, instantiated respectively by guī
440 ‘return’ and by jiā ‘home’.
441 From the above discussion and findings, it is evident there is a relationship
442 between multiple couplings of cultural conceptualisations and linguistic forms and
443 also that multiple cultural conceptualisations may exist in one single eulogistic
444 idiom, which is valid for language use by both sub-cultural groups in Taiwanese
445 society.9
446 3.4.2 Shared Conceptualisations: DEATH IS REST and DEATH IS
447 A JOURNEY
448 Another theoretically relevant finding is that two conceptualisations are shared by
449 the Taiwanese Buddhist and the Taiwanese Christian community, which arguably
450 testifies to the distributed nature of cultural cognition.
9
For a similar discussion of the multiple coupling between linguistic form and concept, see Lu’s
(2015: 175–176) discussion of Chinese lexical semantics.
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451 The first conceptualisation that exists in both sub-groups is DEATH IS REST. In
452 addition to what we saw in the Christian group, Example (22) is an instantiation
453 from the Buddhist category.
455
456 (22) 歇 即 菩提457
xiē jí pútí
458 rest be bodhi/wisdom
459 “Rest is the ultimate wisdom”.
460
461
462 Taking (22) along with (13)–(15) into consideration allows one to generalise
463 across both the sub-groups and to claim that DEATH IS REST is a conceptualisation that
464 exists across the entire cultural community of Taiwan. However, the fact that this
465 conceptualisation has only one instantiation (out of the total 59) in the Buddhist
466 category, as opposed to three in the Christian community (out of eight), indicates
467 that this particular cultural conceptualisation is apparently more cohesive in the
468 Christian community than in the Buddhist community in the Taiwanese context. On
469 the other hand, although DEATH IS REST is not a prevalent way of viewing death in the
470 Taiwanese Buddhist community, the conceptualisation still exists in at least part of
471 the community, evidenced by the existence of idiom (22). Here, we witness indi-
472 vidual variation as a factor that explains the distribution of the idioms—although
473 DEATH IS REST is not a frequent way of verbalising and conceptualising death by the
474 Taiwanese Buddhist community, the conceptualisation does exist in a sub-group
475 and is still used by a small number of people within it.10
476 The second conceptualisation that is shared by both the sub-groups is DEATH IS A
477 JOURNEY. The conceptualisation is evidenced in various examples, including (1)–(4)
478 and (19)–(21) in the Buddhist category and (14) and (18) in the Christian category.
479 Given the high type frequency of the conceptualisation in both groups (6/59 and
480 2/8), DEATH IS A JOURNEY can be considered a widespread cultural conceptualisation
481 across both the religious groups in Taiwan.
482 However, what is theoretically interesting is how death has been discussed in
483 cognitive linguistics. In the field, it has been extensively reported and agreed upon
484 that LIFE IS A JOURNEY, where DEATH is conceptualised as THE END OF THE JOURNEY
485 (Kövecses 2010: 50; Lakoff 1994: 62–63; Yu 1998: 17–19). The discrepancy
486 between the findings in previous literature and this study’s findings is due to the
487 difference in the type of data used. The observations made in the previous literature
488 are based on intuition, and can be seen as highly general cultural conceptualisations
489 that a language user abstracts from the full repertoire of the usage events (in the
490 sense of Langacker 1987) that one has encountered over the course of their life.
491 A direct consequence is that for the purpose of intuition-based research, the user (or
492 the researcher) is able to come up with only the schema that is instantiated in most
10
Interested readers are referred to Sharifian (2011: 4–8) and Frank (2015: 501–502) for a detailed
account of the distributed nature of cultural cognition.
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493 types of cultural events. In contrast, if one takes eulogistic idioms as a specialised
494 genre, the use of which is highly restricted to a cultural event category (i.e.
495 funerals), then that provides a very different result, with empirical evidence to
496 substantiate how metaphorical conceptualisations work within a certain culture and
497 its sub-groups, especially in a specific type of cultural event.11
498 Therefore, given the empirical nature of the data present in the eulogy request
499 system and the vast difference between the conceptualisations found from that data
500 and what was deduced in previous intuition-based studies, the use of the eulogy
501 request system constitutes a great research opportunity for investigating how people
502 in a certain culture (and its sub-cultures) verbalise and conceptualise death.
503 Therefore, I believe Cultural Linguistics (and general cultural linguistics)
504 research may benefit from using specialised databases (in this case, the eulogy
505 request system) for various reasons. First, as has already been shown, the results
506 gained from analysing authentic language data are very different from those based
507 on intuition only, and authentic language data certainly provides more contextu-
508 alised, accurate and useful insights into the cultural issues being investigated. This
509 methodological issue has been extensively discussed in corpus linguistics and other
510 fields (for a similar proposal, see Lucy 1992 or Jensen, this volume). Second, using
511 a specialised database can be fruitful, as this allows the actual dynamics between
512 sub-cultures within the entire cultural group to be identified. In the case of this
513 study, the design of the specialised database provided easily available eulogistic
514 idioms used exclusively by certain sub-groups of a cultural community, so the
515 cohesiveness within each group and the extent to which the cultural conceptuali-
516 sations of the two groups overlapped could be measured.
517 3.5 Concluding Remarks
518 In this chapter, a selection of eulogistic idioms has been presented from two dif-
519 ferent cultural sub-groups in Taiwan using the official online eulogy request system
520 as a specialised database. The comprehensiveness of the database and its special
521 design allows the dynamic interaction between religion and language use to be
522 identified and sheds light on how cultural conceptualisations are at work and shape
523 the worldview in each of the groups.
524 Six conceptualisations are reflected in the Buddhist idioms in Mandarin Chinese,
525 including DEATH IS REBIRTH, DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH, REBIRTH IS WEST,
526 LIFE IS A CIRCLE, A PERSON IS A LOTUS, HEAVEN IS (A POND/SEA) FULL OF LOTUSES. There
527 are three conceptualisations generalised from the Christian idioms, including DEATH
528 IS REST, HEAVEN IS AN ETERNAL HOME and DEATH IS A RETURN JOURNEY. Within these
529 findings, the co-occurrence of conceptualisations in one single eulogistic idiom are
530 identified and the conceptualisation of DEATH IS A JOURNEY was identified as an
11
Shurma and Lu (2016: 20) have a similar finding using authentic data from literary language.
62 W. Lu
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531 interesting deviation of use of the JOURNEY metaphor that has escaped the attention
532 of most scholars. The use of specialised databases as a contextualised research
533 resource for certain cultural issues in Cultural Linguistics (or general cultural lin-
534 guistics) is suggested.
535 It is hoped that this chapter demonstrates how Cultural Linguistics can shed light
536 on the ways in which religion, as a cultural factor, contributes to variations in
537 people’s use of metaphors when verbalising and conceptualising death in a
538 multi-religious society, in an East Asian (Taiwanese) context. Also it is hoped that
539 through a study such as this one, more about the nature of human beings can be
540 revealed by observing their language use, when talking about the end of life, when
541 what is at stake is a world which is relatively unknown.
542 Acknowledgments The completion of this paper was supported by the research grant “The
543 Language of Death in Taiwan: Evidence from Condolatory Idioms, Presidential Eulogies and the
544 Self-introductions of Undertakers” (RG002-N-15), awarded by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for
545 Scholarly Exchange. I thank Farzad Sharifian and Susanna Carter for valuable comments, with the
546 typical disclaimer that applies.
547 References
548 Ahrens, K. (2010). Mapping principles for conceptual metaphors. In G. Low, Z. Todd, A.
549 Deignan, & L. Cameron (Eds.), Researching and applying metaphor in the real world
550 (pp. 185–208). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
551 Capone, A. (2010). On pragmemes again. Dealing with death. La Linguistique, 46, 3–21.
552 Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Hampshire, New
553 York: Palgrave Macmillan.
554 Chiu, H. (1988). Taiwan diqu minzhong de zongjiao xinyang yu zongjiao taidu (The religious
555 belief and attitude in Taiwan). In K. Yang & H. Chiu (Eds.), Bianqian Zhong De Taiwan
556 Shehui (The changing Taiwanese society) (pp. 239–276). Taipei: Academia Sinica.
557 Frank, R. M. (2015). A future agenda for research on language and culture. In F. Sharifian (Ed.),
558 The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 493–512). London: Routledge.
559 Holland, D., & Quinn, N. (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge:
560 Cambridge University Press.
561 Jensen, E. J. (This volume). Corpora and cultural cognition: How corpus-linguistic methodology
562 can contribute to cultural linguistics.
563 Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge: Cambridge
564 University Press.
565 Kövecses, Z. (2006). Language, mind and culture: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford
566 University Press.
567 Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University
568 Press.
569 Kövecses, Z. (2011). The biblical story retold: A cognitive linguistic analysis. In M. Brdar, S. Th.
570 Gries & M. Ž. Fuchs (Ed.), Cognitive linguistics: Convergence and expansion (pp. 325–354).
571 Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
572 Lakoff, G. (1990). The invariance hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on image schemas?
573 Cognitive Linguistics, 1, 39–74.
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574 Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and
575 thought (pp. 202–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
576 Lakoff, G. (1994). What is a conceptual system? In W. F. Overton & D. S. Palermo (Ed.), The
577 nature and ontogenesis of meaning, (pp. 41–90). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
578 Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
579 Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar (Vol. 1). Stanford: Stanford
580 University Press.
581 Lu, L. W., & Chiang, W. (2007). Emptiness we live by: Metaphors and paradoxes in Buddhism’s
582 heart sutra. Metaphor and Symbol, 22, 331–55.
583 Lu, L. W. (2008). From textual prompts to cognitive models: A context-oriented perspective on
584 metaphor interpretation in Taiwanese presidential speeches. Language and Linguistics, 9(2),
585 341–358.
586 Lu, W. (2015). Conceptual autonymy and dependence in Chinese lexical semantic analysis: The
587 role of image-schema, conceptual domains and co-text in [V]–[SHANG]. Chinese Language
588 and Discourse, 6(2), 162–182.
589 Lu, W. (2016). Polysemy and the semantic-pragmatic interface: The case of up in a context-based
590 model. Intercultural Pragmatics, 13(4), 563–589.
591 Lu, W. (Submitted). Chinese eulogistic idioms as signs of life: A cognitive linguistic analysis of
592 idioms for politicians. In Signs of life: Changes and continuity in language, thought and
593 identity. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
594 Lu, W. (2017). Socio-cultural factors in analysing the pragmeme of accommodation: A case study
595 of the official online eulogy request system in Taiwan. In A. Capone, & V. Parvaresh (Eds.),
596 The pragmeme of accommodation and intercultural pragmatics: The case of interaction
597 around the event of death. New York: Springer.
598 Lucy, J. A. (1992). Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity
599 hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
600 Quinn, N. (1987). Convergent evidence for a cultural model of American marriage. In D. Holland
601 & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thought (pp. 173–192). Cambridge:
602 Cambridge University Press.
603 Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language: Theoretical framework and
604 applications. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
605 Sharifian, F. (2017). Cultural Linguistics. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
606 Shurma, S., & Lu, W. (2016). A cognitive poetic analysis of LIFE and DEATH in English and
607 Ukrainian: A multiple-parallel-text approach to Hamlet’s soliloquy. Theatralia, 19(2), 9–28.
608 Ward, W. E. (1952). The lotus symbol: Its meaning in Buddhist art and philosophy. Journal of
609 Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 11(2), 135–146.
610 Yu, N. (1998). The contemporary theory of metaphor: A perspective from Chinese. Amsterdam,
611 Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
612 Yu, N. (2009). The Chinese HEART in a cognitive perspective: Culture, body, and language.
613 Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
614 Yu, N. (This volume). Life as opera: A metaphor as cultural conceptualisation in Chinese.
615 Zhang, B. (Ed.). (1968). Zhou Lianxi Xiansheng Quanji (Full Collection of Zhou Lianxi). Taipei:
616 Yiwen Publishing.
617 Database Consulted
618 Taipei Mortuary Services Office. (2014). Electronic eulogy request platform. http://w9.mso.taipei.
619 gov.tw/TPFScroll/login.aspx. Accessed April 30, 2016
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Publication 7
[7] Lu, Wei-lun. 2020. Cultural “signs of life” in politics: A case study of eulogistic idioms for
Taiwanese politicians. Signs of life: Changes and continuity in language, thought and identity, ed.
by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian, 139-154. Amsterdam; Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
141
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Chapter 7
Cultural “Signs of life” in politics
A case study of eulogistic idioms for
Taiwanese politicians
Wei-lun Lu
Masaryk University
This chapter presents a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of Mandarin eulogistic
idioms used for politicians as a sub-genre of political communication. The entire
collection of idioms is taken from the online eulogy request system in Taiwan
and contains 16 idioms. In the analysis of the idioms, it is shown that in addition
to conceptual metaphor and metonymy, Cognitive Grammar is another useful
theoretical construct in analysing political eulogies. The analysis, in addition,
explicates how various cultural conceptualizations and allusions are involved
as a basis for understanding the eulogistic expressions. At the social level, a
comparison between the Taiwanese political eulogies and data from Western
cultures shows that the social role played by the deceased and the mourner is
another important sign of life in Taiwanese culture.
Keywords: metaphor, metonymy, profile, textile metaphor
Introduction
Applications of Cognitive Linguistics in the language of politics
Inrecentyears,CognitiveLinguisticshasgatheredastrongmomentumandhasbeen
applied to a wide array of fields to study how language relates to human thinking,
understanding, and action. In the language of politics, Cognitive Linguistics comes
in the form of metaphor and metonymy as two of its main theoretical constructs
(Charteris-Black 2005; Chilton 2004; Hart and Lukeš 2007; Lakoff 1996; Musolff
2006, among numerous others). The above studies all made nice contributions by
focusing on use of metaphor and metonymy in certain cultural contexts, but it
is important to note that another major theory, Cognitive Grammar (Langacker
1987, 2008), has been less employed in studying the interaction between language,
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142	 Wei-lun Lu
culture, and politics. Therefore, the potential usefulness of Cognitive Grammar in
analyzing the language of politics has been relatively under-explored. In light of
the issue, the present chapter will try to integrate Cognitive Grammar as part of
the analytical toolkit in political communication and will argue that such practice
may allow us a better conceptual understanding of political communication.1
Another issue that will be addressed in the present chapter is that despite
the achievements thus far, the aforementioned studies use either political figures’
public speeches, governmental announcements or published commentaries on
political affairs as research material, so a take based on use of still another different
data type is wanting for a more comprehensive understanding of human thinking
in the political domain.
In view of the need for a diversified data type, the present chapter adopts
as research material eulogistic idioms2 stored in an official online database and
presented at political figures’ public funerals, in order to investigate how political
thinking is reflected in the actual language use in a certain socio-cultural context.
The data come from the official online eulogy request system set up by the Taipei
City Government, which contains 16 eulogistic idioms for political figures. The
eulogies are presented at public funerals, which means that any person, even only
loosely connected to the deceased (a distant colleague or even a fan), may walk into
the funeral without invitation. In addition, any person may request a eulogistic
idiom for the deceased politician, to be displayed on the electronic banner in the
funeral hall. Therefore, at a social level, the 16 eulogistic idioms are to be understood
as the repertoire of verbal means via which the public talk about, remember,
and conceptualize those figures of national importance after their passing.3
In Chinese political linguistics, attention has been paid to political figures’
public talks (Kuo 2003; Lu 2008; Lu and Ahrens 2008; Wei 2003) and official documents
released by the government (Chiang and Chiu 2007), published political
commentaries (Chiang and Duann 2007; Lin and Chiang 2015). None that I am
aware of is based on political figures’ eulogies as research material, so there is a
need to include the different sub-genre for a more comprehensive understanding
of Chinese political communication.
1.  An exception is Lu’s (2018) study on Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetorical masterpiece, I Have a
Dream, which addresses the usefulness of constructional schema (Langacker 2008) in analyzing
repetition as King’s signature rhetorical device.
2.  The definition of idiom in this chapter largely follows the standard definition in Cognitive
Linguistics but is more specific. In addition to being fixed expressions whose meanings are not
completely compositional (Langacker 1987, 2008), the idioms studied in this paper has a fixed
phonological template that contains four Chinese characters.
3.  For a more detailed description of the eulogy request system, see Lu (2017b).
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	 Chapter 7.  Cultural “Signs of life” in politics	 143
Previous studies on life and death in Cognitive Linguistics
The issue of life and death is central to human affairs. No one escapes death, as
that one day will certainly come upon all humans. Consequently, in the private
domain, both a person’s close family and their distant relatives must deal with the
death; in the public domain, the person’s colleagues and, for important cases, the
community where the person was influential suffers the death.
Given the centrality of the issue, in Cognitive Linguistics, there has been a
series of studies on how different cultures conceptualize life and death, including
life is arrival/a journey; death is departure/the end point of the
journey (Coulson and Pascual 2006; Lakoff and Johnson 2003; Lakoff and
Turner 1989; Kövecses 2002); life is an opera/show in Chinese (Yu and Jia
2016; Yu 2017). However, the works concern only how life is conceptualized in
general language, rather than that in a specific genre. An exception is Lu (2017c)
on different religious groups in Taiwan, which addresses the conceptualization
of life and death in eulogies by the two sub-cultural groups in Taiwan, including
death is rebirth, death is a journey towards rebirth and life is a circle
for Taiwanese Buddhists and death is rest, death is a return journey for
Taiwanese Christians. But given the narrow scope of Lu (2017c), the way how language
and politics interact in terms of cultural conceptualization is not addressed,
so there is indeed a need for deeper research in the field.
Using eulogies for politicians as research material constitutes another important
niche of the present chapter. From a usage-based point of view (Barlow and
Kemmer 2000), eulogies for political figures constitute a highly specialized genre
in the language of politics, which allows a study of that genre to offer a unique take
on the actual usage of language and language-mediated meaning construction in
genre-specific usage events (Langacker 2008: 17). Studying a specialized genre has
an important advantage. Lu (2017c), for instance, discusses how studying the use
of idioms of a sub-cultural (religious) group reveals cultural thinking that would
not be available when one uses a general corpus or only introspection.4 Therefore,
I expect studying politicians’ eulogies, which is a highly specialized genre, to be
methodologically fruitful and may yield useful insights, compared to the previous
studies based on intuition of use of general corpora.
4.  A similar view can be seen in Faber (2012), which highlights the importance of contextualized
knowledge structures in understanding terminology as highly specialized genres.
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144	 Wei-lun Lu
Findings
As mentioned in the introductory section, the data come from the official online
eulogy request system in Taiwan. When one requests a eulogistic idiom, the system
enquires about the occupation of the deceased and then turns up corresponding
idioms given the mourner’s choice.5 16 idioms show up at the choice of “political
figures”. This section presents a linguistic analysis of such idioms.
Out of the full collection of the 16 idioms, I identify 4 idioms that contain
國 guó ‘country’ and 3 idioms that contain 民 mín ‘people’, which shows how the
politician is chiefly remembered by the public – The country and its people miss
this person so much that the mourner feels an urge to linguistically present those
elements in the eulogy, although not every single citizen of the country may have
a personal tie with the deceased.
In addition to those 7, the other 9 idioms still indirectly invoke the concept of
country6 or people, although the elements are not linguistically elaborated. A
selection of the idioms and how they invoke the concepts of country and people
will be addressed in the following sub-section. Then, the next subsection presents
some culture-specific metaphors, including allusions to Chinese7 historical figures
or events and use of the concept of textile as a Chinese political metaphor.
Metaphorical idioms with country or people in scope
In this section, I introduce idioms that directly or indirectly invoke the concept
country or people in its scope (Langacker 2008: 62) in the domain of politics.
Metaphorical idioms with country or people in profile
In this subsection, I discuss idioms that have country or people in their conceptual
profile (Langacker 2008: 66), i.e. with country or people linguistically
elaborated and put onstage (Langacker 2008: 63), receiving the conceptualizer’s
full attention. There are two special metaphors that are noteworthy.
5.  The system was set up and maintained by Taipei Mortuary Service Office (http://‍w9.mso.
taipei.gov.tw/TPFScroll/login.aspx). Interested readers are referred to Lu (2017b) for a detailed
introduction to the system.
6.  I follow the general Cognitive Linguistic convention where small caps are used for concepts.
7.  A brief account of the connection between the Taiwanese and the Chinese culture is given in
Lu (2017b, 2017c). Following that, in the present research context, the two terms are used largely
interchangeably.
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	 Chapter 7.  Cultural “Signs of life” in politics	 145
First, the domain of war is invoked, with the politician remembered as “the
country’s shield and stronghold”, as in (1).
	
(1)
	
國
guó
country
之
zhī
link
干
gān
shield
城
chéng
city
		 ‘(This person was) the country’s shield and stronghold.’
The expression is no longer active in modern Chinese, but the character 干 gān
can still be found in lexical constructions in the domain of war, such as 大動干戈
dà dòng gāngē ‘to wage a war’, 化干戈為玉帛 huà gāngē wèi yùbó ‘to lay down the
weapon and make peace’, etc. Such expressions sound archaic, but they keep the
etymology from ancient Chinese, which is important in understanding the use of
eulogistic expressions as a sub-type of political communication.8
Another metaphor employed in the idioms is a body metaphor, where the
politician is construed as “people’s throat and tongue”, as in (2).
	
(2)
	
為
wèi
link
民
mín
people
喉
hóu
throat
舌
shé
tongue
		 ‘(This person) spoke for the people.’
In (2), the politician is described as the “throat and tongue” for his people, meaning
that he aired people’s complaints to the government openly and conscientiously,
always speaking for the people. throat and tongue are frequent source concepts
of cultural conceptualization in the world’s languages. For instance, throat is
associated with intuitive apprehension in Thaayorre (Gaby 2008: 33–34); tongue
is associated with language in general in English and Malay (Charteris-Black
2003: 296–302) and with the content of what one says in contrast to one’s true
feelings in Persian (Sharifian 2008: 255–256).
However, for two reasons, Example (2) deserves attention. First, the packaging
of throat and tongue into one lexical construction, as seen in (2), has not
been reported in the literature, and the strict sequence of hóu before shé, given the
idiomatic nature of the entire eulogistic expression, is something that makes (2)
special. Second, the idiom is used in a highly specialized context (in the domain of
politics) and the concepts invoked in that domain are also very specific (the way
in which one speaks: open and conscientious). Therefore, (2) reflects a Chinesespecific
cultural conceptualization that involves both tongue and throat and
constitutes a domain-specific figurative language use.
8.  For how etymology reflects the cognitive and cultural basis of lexical semantics, see Sweetser
(1990).
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146	 Wei-lun Lu
Next, I discuss idioms with country or people in the periphery of the onstage
region, still receiving a certain degree of attention.
Metaphorical idioms with country or people in the base
In this subsection, I analyze the idioms that have country or people only in
the conceptual base (Langacker 2008: 66), meaning that country or people
still lies in the entire knowledge structure invoked, but is not linguistically
encoded in the idioms.
	
(3)
	
勛
xūn
victory
猷
yóu
way
共
gòng
together
仰
yǎng
look up
		 ‘(This person’s) victory and way (of living), (people) all look up to.’
In (3), the achievement of the deceased (his victory and way of living) is construed
in terms of a physical object at a height. The idiom, therefore, invokes an ontological
metaphor achievements are objects and an orientational metaphor good is
up. However, I suspect that the upward orientation may have multiple motivations,
part of that being cultural, which are based on two cultural metaphors heaven is
full of lotuses (for souls) and death is a return journey to heaven (Lu
2017c) – when a person dies, his/her soul (again ontologically conceptualized)
returns up to heaven.
The agent of the viewing in (3) is the people of the entire country, all looking
up to the achievements of the politician. Although the agent is left unspecified, it
still figures in the conceptual base, receiving attention to a certain degree.
Example  (4) is a similar case that involves an ontological metaphor and a
journey metaphor.
	
(4)
	
遺
yí
leave
愛
ài
love
人間
rénjiān
world
		 ‘(This person) has left love to the world.’
In this example, the politician has left love to the world after his death. Based on
the same reasoning in (3) above and in Lu (2017c), if death is a return journey from
the earthly world to heaven, love is also conceptualized in an ontological way as a
physical object that can be left behind after one’s departure. In addition to death is
a return journey to heaven, the idiom also involves love is an object.
At the linguistic level, the recipient of the politician’s love is the world, but
certainly his people and his country are conceptually part of that. Therefore,
people and country are not directly invoked but remain within the maximal
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	 Chapter 7.  Cultural “Signs of life” in politics	 147
scope (Langacker 2008: 63) of attention, i.e. the conceptual background, as they
are related to world.
Another idiom that indirectly invokes people or country is (5), for which I
argue metonymy is the underlying cognitive mechanism.
	
(5)
	
萬
wàn
ten thousand
姓
xìng
surname
謳
ǒu
sing
思
sī
miss
		 ‘Ten thousand surnames sing for and miss (this person).’
In (5), the politician is sung for and missed by ten thousand surnames, meaning
that he is missed by all people of the country. The meaning extension is based
on two conceptual metonymies: a clan name for all members of the clan
and a high number for countlessness. Note that the latter metonymy is
culture-specific, as its linguistic manifestation is 萬 wàn ‘ten thousand’, which
is not a measuring unit commonly used in most Indo-European languages. The
metonymy also has various linguistic instantiations in modern Chinese, such as
萬物 wàn wù ‘(lit.) ten thousand creatures’, meaning “all creatures”, 萬歲 wàn suì
‘(lit.) ten thousand years old’, referring to the emperor, who “lives forever”, etc. The
example, therefore, contains a typical Chinese cultural conceptualization that is
essential to conceptualizing a politician’s passing.
What is in the immediate scope of attention (Langacker 2008: 63), i.e. the foregrounded
conceptual information, is surname, through which people and country
are metonymically invoked, so they remain in the conceptual background,
still receiving some attention though not as much as surname.
Metaphorical idioms with allusions
In this section, I introduce idioms that are based on allusions. Example (6) contains
a special plant that is reminiscent of a historical figure.
	
(6)
	
甘棠
gāntáng
birchleaf pear (Pyrus betulifolia)
遺
yí
remain
愛
ài
love
		 ‘(This person was like Duke Shao in the Zhou Dynasty, who used to sit
under) a birchleaf pear tree (to work), still fondly (remembered by people).’
The keyword in (6) is 甘棠 gāntáng ‘birchleaf pear (Pyrus betulifolia)’, metonymically
referring to Duke Shao （周召伯） in the Zhou Dynasty. According to The
Book of Songs (詩經 shījīng), Duke Shao was a political figure in the Zhou Dynasty,
who used to attend business and rest under a birchleaf pear tree. After his passing,
people still missed him so much that they decided to preserve the tree under which
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148	 Wei-lun Lu
he had worked, in order to commemorate him. The entire historical background is
crucial to analyzing the meaning of the idiom, so serves as the cultural-conceptual
base against which the idiom is understood in its context.
At the linguistic level, the function of the keyword here is to prompt (Langacker
2008: 42; Lu 2008), or to provide mental access to, a coherent conceptual substrate
that can serve as a basis of a highly elaborate and culture-specific conceptualization,
i.e. in our case, a metaphorical understanding of the deceased politician in
terms of Duke Shao. In understanding the idiom, people and country are also
indirectly invoked, as they reside in the story frame of Duke Shao, so remains in
the conceptualizer’s maximal scope of attention.
Another illustrative example is (7), the meaning of which is related to a historical
event and a monument.
	
(7)
	
功
gōng
achievement
高
gāo
high
麟閣
língé
Qilin Building
		 ‘(This person’s) achievement was so great (that his picture should be
painted) high (on a plaque on a building like) Qilin Building.’
In (7), the achievement of the deceased is great so that his picture should be painted
high on a memorial building. The keyword in this idiom is 麟閣 língé, short for
麒麟閣 qílíngé ‘Qilin Building’, which is a monument erected in the Han Dynasty
with 11 national heroes’ pictures painted on it. Again, the keyword provides an
indirect access to politics, people, and country by prompting a historical anecdote
as the source of a metaphorical understanding of the politician.
Moreover, note that the orientational metaphor good is up is also present
in this idiom, but is not the only conceptual element that contributes to the
positive evaluation of the deceased. The orientational metaphor nests (in the sense
of Charteris-Black 2004: 224, 2005: 53–55) with the cultural allusion to Qilin
Building and the pictures high on the building to construct a coherent scenario
against which the politician is construed.
An additional example is (8), which also involves an allusion to a historical
figure.
	
(8)
	
峴首
xiànshǒu
Mountain Xianshou
留
liú
leave
碑
bēi
stone tablet
		 ‘(This person was like General Yang Hu from the Jin Dynasty, for whom) a
stone tablet was erected on Mountain Xianshou.’
The keyword in (9) is 峴首 xiànshǒu ‘Mountain Xianshou’, which is famous for
a stone tablet erected for General Yáng Hù（羊怙） in the Jin Dynasty. General
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	 Chapter 7.  Cultural “Signs of life” in politics	 149
Yang had been remembered by his people for his various compassionate policies,
so after his passing, a stone tablet was erected in remembrance of him on Moutain
Xianshou, to which General Yang had paid frequent visits. The stone tablet has
a romantic name of 墮淚碑 duòlèi bēi ‘(lit.) drop-tear tablet’, which represents
the strong emotion that General Yang’s people had about him. In this idiom, the
keyword similarly invokes the story frame about General Yang as the conceptual
background, in terms of which the Taiwanese politician is metaphorically
conceptualized.
I argue that the orientational metaphor good is up is invoked, although in
an indirect way. There is no textual prompt that directly encodes the upward
orientation, but since the keyword invokes mountain, height is naturally in
the maximal scope of the conceptualization, which forms a natural ingredient for
good is up and participates as an evaluative component imminent in the political
message. But note that in this sense, good is up is nested with various culturespecific
components to form a coherent substrate of the conceptualization and
becomes an imminent part of the political rhetorical apparatus in Mandarin.
textile metaphor in Chinese idioms of politics
This section introduces another cultural metaphor that exists only in Chinese –
talking about politics in terms of textile metaphor. Example (9) is the evidence
from the request system.
	
(9)
	
才
cái
talent
厄
è
difficult
經綸
jīnglún
political wisdom  
(lit. organize-silk-line)
		 ‘(This) talent encountered difficulty (and consequently had to stop
contributing his/her) political wisdom.’
In (9), the politician who passed is described as a talent who owned political
wisdom. The keyword in this idiom is 經綸 jīnglún, a compound formed by jīng
‘organize’ as a verb and lún ‘silk lines’ as a noun, which altogether means “the
wisdom for ruling the country”. However, a natural question that follows is: If
organizing silk lines can have an extended meaning of dealing in politics, is it a
one-shot metaphor or is it used systematically in Mandarin?
Here, I present two additional examples of a similar nature that supports the
existence of a systematic textile metaphor in discussing politics, as (10) and (11).
	
(10)
	
國
guó
country
事
shì
issue
如
rú
link
麻
má
hemp
		 ‘Various issues (about ruling) the country is like (arranging fibers of) hemp.’
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150	 Wei-lun Lu
Example (10) is an idiom obviously used exclusively in the political domain, with
country already linguistically encoded in the idiom. The idiom is based on a
simile that compares numerous political issues to hemp fibers, which are difficult
to put into place, so the metaphorical meaning of the idiom is the difficulty of
organizing the country’s various issues as encountered when one tries to arrange
fibers of hemp. Example (11) is similar, although the idiom is not restricted to
the political domain.
	
(11)
	
治
zhì
organize
絲
sī
silk
益
yì
more
棼
fén
mess
		 ‘(When one) organizes silk lines, (if he does not do it right, that will make
the lines) even messier.’
The metaphorical meaning of this idiom is similar, presenting the dealing of general
business as the organization of lines of silk.
Based on the above examples, I argue that textile metaphor not only has
instantiations in general Mandarin but has very specific usages in the political
genre. Accordingly, I propose the following cultural conceptual metaphor: lines
are (political) business. attending (political) business is organizing
fibers. organization is wisdom in dealing with (political) business.
Cultural signs of life in Taiwanese political eulogies
From the above analysis, various aspects stand out and should be treated as cultural
signs of life in the eulogistic idioms for Taiwanese politicians. I discuss them
at the linguistic, conceptual and the social level.
First, at the linguistic level, I showed that archaic constructions under the lexical
level may still reflect the etymology as the cultural-historical root of eulogistic
idioms. As seen in (1), 干 gān is a construction that occurs only in idiomatic
expressions in modern Chinese. But if we dig deep enough for the etymology, that
yields shield in the domain of war. The case of 經綸 jīng lún in (9) is similar;
without a deep analysis, one would not uncover the systematicity of the textile
metaphor in Mandarin political communication. The meanings of the idioms
become more transparent and we may get to get a grip on how the constructions
are used in the political genre about a politician’s passing.
In addition to etymology, allusion is another significant cultural linguistic
sign of life in Taiwanese political eulogies. We saw that 甘棠 gāntáng in (6), 麟閣
língé in (7), and 峴首 xiànshǒu in (8) are all linguistic signs that allude to specific
cultural-historical events and figures. Each of the constructions also affords access
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	 Chapter 7.  Cultural “Signs of life” in politics	 151
to a highly specialized cultural knowledge structure as the conceptual basis for
understanding and evaluating the political figure in an important public occasion.
Therefore, a full understanding of the signs of life of any deceased Taiwanese politician
simply cannot do without the complete cultural-historical background, so
that the conceptualizer may follow the reasoning based on the knowledge frame.
At the conceptual level, there are three figurative usages that should also be
discussed as important cultural signs of life.
As has been discussed in the literature, body metaphor is productive in the
political genre (cf. Charteris-Black 2004, 2005; Mulsoff 2010), with throat and
tongue in (2) as a typical example. However, what remains under-explored is
how the various conceptual metaphors are instantiated in actual linguistic constructions.
As I mentioned, the packaging of throat and tongue into one single
lexical construction is not seen in other languages, although the existence of the
two concepts as the metaphorical source has been extensively reported in the
literature. Therefore, what makes the Mandarin eulogistic idiom unique is not its
use of body parts but the way the body parts are constructionally elaborated in
actual language use.9
In addition to metaphor, metonymy is another major foundation of various
cultural conceptualizations in the Taiwanese political eulogies (Panther and
Radden 1999; Zhang 2016). Although a high number for countlessness
exists in many of the world’s languages, ten thousand for countlessness
is not that frequent. It is ten thousand clans that mourn for a political figure in
Taiwan but may well be constructionally elaborated as a different number of clans
in another culture.
Thirdly, although the orientational metaphor good is up is productive in the
political eulogies as it is in the general language, we saw that in the idioms it is
embedded in various cultural metaphors and allusions as an integral part of an
elaborated conceptualization of the deceased politician in question; it is nested
with the cultural beliefs about death heaven is full of lotuses (for souls)
and death is a return journey to heaven in (3), with the allusions to Qilin
Building in (8) and Mountain Xianshou in (9). Therefore, good is up is not
only a mere evaluative tool in Mandarin political communication but is loaded
with culture-specific details and instantiations as the rhetorical substrate in the
Mandarin political genre.10
9.  For similar proposals of more closely studying the interplay between construction and
metaphor, see Sullivan (2013) and Lu (2017a).
10.  For the cultural specificity of orientational metaphor good is up, see also Lu’s (2016: 571–
574) discussion of the cognitive motivation of the meaning of “good” of the English particle up.
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152	 Wei-lun Lu
At the social level, I argue that occupation is a major cultural sign of life in
the Taiwanese politics and in the Taiwanese society as a whole. As was seen in the
data, in the verbalization, the deceased politician is always conceptualized with
country or people, whether the concepts may be included in the profile or only
lie in the maximal scope of conceptualization. That means when people mourn for
a politician and remember him by praising him with eulogistic idioms, that person
is always remembered and construed only in the political sphere, rather than in
the personal. Consequently, his personal traits (being a loving father, an enduring
mother or a humorous colleague, etc.) are excluded from the verbalization and
conceptualization and do not at all concern the society. This observation echoes
with Lu’s (2017b) observation of Taiwanese society’s obsessive emphasis on career
success, which in Lu’s article explains why the eulogy request system displays the
mourner’s affiliation and job title along with the eulogy.
A cross-cultural comparison of eulogies supports the above argument. In
American presidential eulogies, very often the personal traits of the deceased
politician are verbalized with a note of affection, which is announced through the
president as part of the society’s memory of the national figure. Examples (12)
and (13) are illustrative passages both from Barack Obama’s eulogy for Senator
Edward M. Kennedy.
	 (12)	 But those of us who loved him and ache with his passing know Ted Kennedy
by the other titles he held: father; brother; husband; grandfather; Uncle Teddy,
or as he was often known to his younger nieces and nephews, “the Grand
Fromage,” or “the Big Cheese.” I, like so many others in the city where he
worked for nearly half a century, knew him as a colleague, a mentor, and above
all, as a friend.
	 (13)	 Ted Kennedy was the baby of the family who became its patriarch, the restless
dreamer who became its rock. He was the sunny, joyful child who bore the
brunt of his brothers’ teasing but learned quickly how to brush it off. When
they tossed him off a boat because he didn’t know what a jib was, 6-year- old
Teddy got back in and learned to sail.
From (12) and (13), we see that Obama’s eulogy for the politician sounds personal,
at least much more so than the Mandarin eulogies that I have analyzed, and elements
from the private domain are carried over to serve a public interpersonal
function. In (12), the president openly mentions the politician’s various identities
from his family’s point of view, even mentioning his nickname to properly
reflect their viewpoint (in the sense of Dancygier, Lu and Verhagen (ed.) 2016).
In (13), the president takes one step further by even relating to a detailed personal
anecdote from the politician’s childhood to show a more vivid picture of the
deceased as a person.
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	 Chapter 7.  Cultural “Signs of life” in politics	 153
A similar rhetorical strategy can be found in another presidents’ speech at a
funeral. Example (14) is a passage from Richard Nixon’s eulogy delivered at the
State Funeral for General Eisenhower.
	 (14)	 I know Mrs. Eisenhower would permit me to share with you the last words he
spoke to her on the day he died. He said: “I have always loved my wife. I have
always loved my children. I have always loved my grandchildren. And I have
always loved my country.” That was Dwight Eisenhower.
In Nixon’s eulogy for Eisenhower, he mixes the two spheres – one of the family and
the other of the country. Specifically, Nixon adopts Mrs. Eisenhower’s viewpoint
by directly quoting what she heard from Eisenhower before he died. The insertion
of Eisenhower’s last sentence verbatim creates a rhetorical effect of portraying him
not only as a national hero but also as a loving husband, father, and grandfather in
the public’s memory.
In a similar vein, it is reported that in the Italian context, the Catholic priest
typically inserts a narration that presents the family’s voice, in addition to viewing
the deceased from God’s point of view. Example (15) is a passage taken from
Capone (2010: 15).
	 (15)	 Le figlie mi hanno detto che è stata una buona madre, che si è sempre spesa per
gli altri, che ha sempre dato generosamente.
		 ‘Her daughters told me that she was a good mother, that she has always
devoted herself to her families, that she has always given generously.’
Therefore, from a comparison between the Taiwanese Mandarin eulogies for politicians
and the Western ones in (12) to (15), we see that the eulogies for Taiwanese
politicians are distinct from those in the Western societies: In the Taiwanese eulogistic
communication, it is only the social role of the deceased and the mourner
(their profession, affiliation, job title, etc.) that is verbalized and conceptually
profiled in the communication around a politician’s passing. On the other hand,
in American and Italian eulogies, the politician who passed is construed not only
as a national figure that used to play a certain social role but was a person of flesh
and blood who will be fondly remembered by family and friends in his private life.
The above comparison between samples of eulogies from the Taiwanese culture
(a culture in the East) and the American and the Italian cultures (cultures
in the West) can be seen as a reaction to Eurocentrism, as thoroughly discussed
in Shohat and Stam (1994). As we can see in the field, previous literature on the
language of death discussed only data from the Italian context, without due attention
paid to cultures from the East. The data and analysis presented in this chapter
fills exactly this gap in the field.
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154	 Wei-lun Lu
In all, the present chapter presents various signs of life in Taiwanese political
eulogiesatthelinguistic,conceptualandthesociallevelbyinvestigatingtheeulogistic
idioms that are displayed at politician’s public funerals and by comparing them
with Western eulogies. However, be aware that what was presented in the chapter
is only of pilot nature and the topic certainly deserves more in-depth research. It is
hoped that this chapter has shown the potential of integrating Cognitive Grammar
as part of the analytical arsenal for investigating political communication and has
made a case for the necessity of cultural-historical knowledge in understanding
the political genre.
Acknowledgements
The completion of this paper was supported by the research grant “The influence of sociocultural
factors and writing system on perception and cognition of complex visual stimuli”
(GC19-09265J). I thank two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, with the typical
disclaimer that applies.
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[8] Lu, Wei-lun. 2020. Viewpoint and metaphor in culture: A Cognitive Linguistic analysis on a
selection of Chinese eulogistic idioms used in Taiwan. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7(1), 260-279.
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Viewpoint and metaphor in culture
A Cognitive Linguistic analysis on a selection
of Chinese eulogistic idioms used in Taiwan
Wei-lun Lu
Masaryk University
The paper presents an in-depth analysis of the language of death in Chinese
and discusses the relation between language and occupation as a social
factor in analyzing the language of death. In this paper, I address in what
specific ways Cognitive Linguistics may serve as a useful analytical framework
in studying Chinese idioms used in funerals, in an attempt to uncover
cultural elements and viewpoint structure in communicating death. The
study introduces basic constructs in Cognitive Linguistics which could be
used for such an analysis, and applies this CL machinery to analyzing three
selected groups of four-character eulogistic idioms used at funerals in
Taiwan. The analysis shows that, in addition to Conceptual Metaphor
Theory, which has been considered the classic CL tool for studying abstract
concepts like death, the subjectivity/objectivity distinction in Cognitive
Grammar may also be employed as a complementary and useful theoretical
construct in studying the language of death, as it helps identify the special
characteristics of the eulogistic idioms for teachers as a special profession in
the Chinese culture.
Keywords: allusion, cultural metaphor, cultural conceptualization of death,
eulogistic idioms, funeral, viewing arrangement
1. Language of death as a cultural product
As authentic language in use, discourse is functionally defined as communication
in context that does some job, such as creating social relations and social functions
of various kinds (Carter et al. 1997; Gee 1999; Halliday 1985; Partington
et al. 2013, among others). As a linguistic means of humans operating in a cultural
context, discourse is loaded with implicit social and cultural assumptions that
govern norms and beliefs in real life settings. Therefore, the study of discourse is
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00056.lu
Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:1 (2020), pp. 254–274. issn 2213-8722 | e‑issn 2213-8730
© John Benjamins Publishing Company 161
a way of uncovering patterns of thought specific to a cultural group by looking
closely at the community’s language use.
A funeral is a human ritual of central cultural importance, packed with norms
and beliefs of various kinds, with the issue of life and death being a key component
communicated therein. In the present chapter, I examine how the concept of
death1
is verbalized at funerals as a distinct type of cultural event (in the sense of
Sharifian 2011), and how that verbalization reflects the way death is conceptualized
by a representative community of speakers of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan.
2. Metaphor and viewpoint in discourse
Cognitive Linguistics is a broadly defined theoretical framework that studies the
relation between language, culture and thought, following the landmark publications
of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and of Langacker (1987, 2008), among
numerous others. A central commitment of Cognitive Linguistics is usage-based
analysis (Barlow & Kemmer 2000), examining language use in actual context;
thus, it has been considered a close companion of the discourse-analytic approach
to language. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, henceforth
CMT) is one of the most comprehensive Cognitive Linguistic approaches to
patterns of thought in discourse, arguing that analyzing metaphor in language
can help identify cultural values and assumptions. Yu (1998) is a pioneer study
that applies CMT to the study of the Chinese language and thought. Yu examines
metaphors of emotion, time and event structure in Chinese. A follow-up empirical
study (Lai & Boroditsky 2013) shows that the different set-ups of spatial-temporal
metaphor in different cultures do have immediate and long-term influence on the
way different cultures reason about time, one of the most fundamental abstract
concepts in human life. Following this line of thinking, studying metaphor in
funeral discourse of a particular language is a very good opportunity for analyzing
and uncovering a culture’s assumptions and reasoning about death. The language
sample analyzed in the present paper is extracted from a representative database
(more details given in Section 3).
Another important construct in Cognitive Linguistics is viewpoint, which is
a crucial aspect in studying human communication across genres and modalities.
Understanding the feelings and the assessment of others about a certain
state of affairs is an important root of human social interaction (Dancygier et al.
2016; Langacker 1987, 2008). In the study of public discourse, the manipulation
1. I follow the typographic convention in Cognitive Linguistics of putting concepts in small
caps.
Viewpoint and metaphor in culture 255
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of discourse viewpoint has been identified as a key source of persuasiveness and
poetic effects (Pelclová and Lu 2018). With that in mind, when analyzing the
persuasive and the emotional effect in funeral discourse, it is necessary to identify
from whose perspective the utterance is produced, so that we can really come to
grips with how exactly the family can be comforted and their feelings accommodated
by verbal means. This is especially important in the Taiwanese context in
the digital era, where eulogistic expressions can be requested online in advance
and displayed in an electronic banner in the funeral hall at the time of the death
ritual (so the mourner does not necessarily present himself at the funeral site).
At the public funeral of a figure with a certain degree of regional importance,
the family will be present, but the mourners may either be physically present or
distant. A mourner may deliver a word of comfort on behalf of only himself, or
on behalf of the group that he represents. In such a case, the pragmatic effect of a
eulogistic expression may be a result of the perspective taken by the presenter and
the effect may be invoked by the eulogistic expression, which allows the family
and the other mourners to understand and share in an intersubjective fashion (in
the sense of Verhagen 2007), what the presenter sees, feels and has delivered.
3. Previous studies of the cultural conceptualization of death
and Chinese funeral discourse
The conceptualization of death has been a topic extensively researched in Cognitive
Linguistics, with various languages already investigated using different
methodologies. From a cross-linguistic point of view, Marin-Arrese (1996)
compares the expressions related to death in English and Spanish. Özçalişkan
(2003), in a similar vein, studies the similarities and differences of metaphorical
mapping between English and Turkish, using a corpus that contains literary texts,
news, speeches and lyrics. Using a specialized corpus, Flores (1999) studies the
poetic metaphors related to time, life and death in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Crespo
Fernández (2006, 2011, 2013) are a series of studies of euphemistic metaphors also
in a specialized corpus that contains obituaries and epitaphs, mainly on English
(with Spanish as a contrast in the 2013 paper). On a more recent note, Migut
(2016) investigates online obituaries in English and Polish as comparable corpora
and reports how metaphor and metonymy are used in verbalizing death in the
two languages, and how the two languages differ in terms of the lexical composition
of the metaphors of death. Benczes & Burridge (2018), based on Allan &
Burridge (2006), introduces metaphors related to death in English and the lexical
instantiations of the metaphors.
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The above studies have formed a solid body of literature that allows for a deep
understanding of how different languages and cultures verbalize and conceptualize
events of death. However, in spite of the various scholarly efforts that have
been made, a question still remains – given the usage-based nature of Cognitive
Linguistics, can we find an effective method to study whether social and cultural
factors may come into play in how people from a culture speak about, and think
of death? If the answer to the above question is YES, then what factors can we say
are of importance, and can other theories in Cognitive Linguistics be employed
as a useful machinery for studying language use in culture? To deal with the first
methodological issue, we need to turn to the systematic effort made in Lu (2017a,
2017b, 2020), which need to be reviewed in detail.
Research on Chinese funeral discourse is still a relatively new area, with only
very few publications in the field. These (few) previous studies of the language of
death in Chinese (Lu 2017a, 2017b, 2020; Tay 2019; Tien 2017; Tseng 2017) have
identified different forms of the language of death rituals and the beliefs that
underlie the use of such language. Capone (2010) is a pragmatic study that investigates
the discourse of death in a southern Italian context, using Catholic sermons
as the research material. The author analyzes language use at mourning events as
social practice, and shows how such ritual discourse involves a social intentionality.
Following that, Lu (2017a, 2017b, 2020), Tien (2017) and Tseng (2017) are
(cognitive-) pragmatic studies of ritual discourses in the Chinese context. Tien
(2017) studies euphemisms, kinship terms and honorifics used in funerals in terms
of the Chinese social hierarchy, and discusses the socio-cultural function of ritualized
crying by hired professional mourners. The author argues that some eulogistic
idioms are Confucianism-inspired, praising the righteous life and all the virtues of
the deceased when he was alive, and that the Chinese ritual discourse at death is
indirect and emotionally expressive, reflecting the hierarchy of the living and the
deceased. Tseng (2017) is another (partial) analysis of selected funeral discourse of
four-character eulogistic idioms, the Buddhist ritual language for guiding the dead
(祝念) and the farewell speech (家奠文) delivered by the family of the deceased.2
According to the author, the Buddhist ritual discourse and the farewell speech are
addressed to the deceased with the cultural belief that the spirit of the deceased still
exists after death; the two types of discourse in addition bear the pragmatic function
of offering solace to the family of the deceased. Tay (2019) is a study on the
interaction between religion and language metaphor in obituaries in Singapore. In
2. 祝念 zhù niàn is the recitation of Buddhist scripts at a Buddhist funeral, discussed in detail
in Tseng (2017:268–270). This kind of ritual language is used only at a Buddhist funeral, which
is different from four-character eulogistic idioms, which are always used at all funerals regardless
of the religion of the deceased.
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that paper, the author discusses the use of metaphor in a multi-lingual and multicultural
setting, with Chinese as only part of it. The study contributes to the intrasocietal
pragmatics of metaphor use without going into the details of the
substantive content of death-related metaphors in Chinese. While Capone, Tien,
and Tseng offer interesting contributions, none of them is based on a representative
sample of data, so there is a need for methodological systematicity in the field.
On the other hand, Lu (2017a, 2017b, 2020) studies the language of death
using a representative database and well-defined scopes, which allows for one
to make methodologically solid generalizations of how a certain culture (in this
case the Han Chinese in Taiwan) conceives death and how discourse around
death communicates cultural values and assumptions. In particular, Lu (2017a)
reports a comprehensive online database of Mandarin eulogistic idioms, officially
set up and maintained by the Taipei City Government, and addresses the influence
of profession as a social factor in how the Taiwanese people interact around
a death, using idioms from the official database. The author argues that the
discourse factor of the Taiwanese culture’s obsession with career success fundamentally
shapes the design of the online eulogy-request system, which allows for
the mourner to add his affiliation and job title to the eulogy displayed in the
funeral hall and makes the occupation of the deceased an important filter for the
eulogistic idioms in the system. Using the same database, Lu (2017b) reports that
the religious belief of the deceased determines the repertoire of eulogistic idioms
available for use by the mourner, and how a conceptual semantic analysis of the
idioms helps uncover the conceptualization of death by Buddhists and Christians
as two sub-cultural groups in Taiwanese society. Adopting a similar method, Lu
(2020) analyzes all the 16 eulogistic idioms for politicians in the official system,
and uses the notions of conceptual base and profile in Cognitive Grammar to study
how metaphor and metonymy shape the cultural conceptualization of the loss of
a political figure of national importance. In view of the need for methodological
systematicity, the present paper adopts a similar approach, and uses as its
research material the official online eulogy request system that was set up and has
been maintained by the Taipei City Government, since the data from this set is
authoritative and representative. The three case studies presented in the present
paper are based on the entirety of three groups of eulogistic idioms drawn from
the system for different professions of cultural significance, including teachers,
media workers and legal experts. The three analyzed collections of idioms are
given in the Appendix of this article. In addition to introducing the general Cognitive
Linguistic framework, the present study applies this machinery to the three
chosen job types and discusses how the use of eulogistic idioms in a ritual context
reflects the cultural conceptualization of death of Han Chinese in Taiwan associated
with the three professions.
258 Wei-lun Lu
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4. Data and method
The data presented in this paper is a selection from the comprehensive list of
four-character idioms stored in the online eulogy-request system set up and
maintained by the Taipei City Government, which methodologically ensures the
representativeness and the authoritativeness of the data. Below, I present the
steps for acquiring the data. Interested readers are referred to Lu (2017a) for
a detailed description of the official eulogy request system. In particular, as a
mourner enters the eulogy request system, he is asked to confirm the details of
the deceased person for whom the eulogy is requested. After that, the mourner
chooses the occupation of the deceased, which automatically generates a collection
of idioms for the mourner to choose from (for that particular occupation).
The data analyzed in the present study consist of all the idioms from three occupations
turned up by the system: teacher, media worker and legal expert, all three
of which are of high cultural importance in Taiwanese society. Each of the three
occupations accordingly stands alone as a category in the system.
Following the analysis laid out in Lu (2017a), we see that an analysis of the
use of eulogistic idioms can be considered a study of language use in its natural
habitat, as the use of eulogistic idioms is restricted by various socio-cultural
factors in the real-world setting: the gender/sex of the deceased, the occupation
and age of the deceased, the relation between the deceased and the mourner, the
mourner’s career achievement, etc. Therefore, a look into the use of eulogistic
idioms is capable of providing a contextualized take on the interaction around a
death event, uncovering various cultural values and assumptions that underlie the
language use.
In the analysis, I discuss the idioms available for use in public funerals for
people of three professions, including teachers, media workers, and legal experts.
Media workers and legal experts have been chosen in order to form a comparison
to politicians, which is a profession of high social visibility and influence, already
discussed in Lu (2020). The professional category of teachers has also been
selected, given the cultural significance of the profession in the Chinese society,
and to form a contrast with the three politics-related professions. I first characterize
the idioms used for each of the professions automatically generated by
the system, and then discuss the cultural meaning behind the language use. In
the analysis, I also discuss the various culture-specific metaphors and assumptions
that underlie the various verbalizations of death. For the identification of
metaphor, I follow Lu and Chiang (2007) and Lu and Ahrens (2008), using a
mixed approach with the native speaker intuition verified by corpus tools. In
particular, all the idioms were first processed by a native speaker of Chinese, in
order to identify possible metaphor keywords and the source concepts invoked.
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The next step was to check whether the metaphor keywords co-occurred with
words typically associated with the source domain in a balanced corpus of
contemporary Chinese and the Chinese Wordnet.3
Only metaphor keywords and
relevant source concepts that could be verified by this method were included in
the present study.
5. Mandarin eulogistic idioms for teachers, media workers
and legal experts
5.1 Ritual idioms used in funerals of teachers (師長喪）
Being a teacher is a very important profession in Chinese society, evidenced by
the high esteem given to Confucius. It is, therefore, relatively suitable to serve as a
case in point.
The first and foremost characteristic of eulogistic idioms for teachers is the
presence of plant as a culture-specific metaphorical source concept in the
domain of education. This metaphor is a linguistic legacy of historical anecdotes.
Examples include 杏 xìng “apricot” in (1) and 桃李 táolǐ “students (lit. peach and
plum)” in (2).
(1) 風
fēng
wind
冷
lěng
cold
杏
xìng
apricot
壇
tán
pavilion
“The wind makes cold the apricot pavilion (as a result of the teacher’s
passing).”
(2) 桃李
táolǐ
peach and plum
興
xīng
raise
悲
bēi
sad
“(The) students (of this person have) become sad.”
The concept of apricot in (1) is culturally associated with education, especially
when it occurs within the lexical construction 杏壇 xìng-tán “apricot-pavilion.”
The allusion that motivates the existence of the construction is the life story of
Confucius, who used to lecture sitting on a podium under an apricot tree. The
conceptual association is therefore metonymy-based, as the use of the expression
invokes the entire story frame of Confucius sitting under an apricot tree to lecture
3. The corpus consulted is Academic Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (http://ckip
.iis.sinica.edu.tw/CKIP/engversion/20corpus.htm). The Chinese Wordnet is available at http://
compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/cow/.
260 Wei-lun Lu
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(or a general scenario of a teacher lecturing to his students). The construction
桃李 táolǐ “students” in (2) has its root in a historical anecdote of 子質 zǐzhí in
the Warring States Period, in which Zǐzhí complained about having been rejected
by his students instead of being helped when he was in trouble. In the story,
Zǐzhí got a response to his complaint: 夫春樹桃李，夏得蔭其下，秋得食其
實。春樹蒺藜，夏不可采其葉，秋得其刺焉。由此觀之，在所樹也。 “If in
the spring one plants peaches and plums, in the summer one gets to shade under
them and in the autumn gets to harvest the fruits. If in the spring one plants puncture
vine, in the summer he cannot pick its leaves and in the autumn gets only
thorns. Therefore, what matters is what one plants (author’s own translation).” In
this anecdote, the concepts peach and plum are, in a culturally conventional way,
employed to figuratively refer to students who return a favor for the teaching they
received. puncture vine, also in a culturally conventional way, represents the
conceptual opposite of peach and plum. Later, the combination of the concepts
got further conventionalized, so that the combination has generalized to mean
“students (of a teacher)” in various contexts. In such situations, there are systematic
mappings between the source domain of farming and the target domain
of education, where teacher is understood as farmer, student as plant or
fruit, and teaching as gardening.
But note that in (1), apricot may metonymically invoke education only
when it occurs within the lexical construction xìng-tán, immediately joined by
pavilion. Xìng metonymically invokes a different concept when occurring in a
different lexical construction – for instance, apricot invokes medicine in the
construction of 杏林 xìnglín, as is the case in 杏林春滿 xìnglínchūnmǎn, a typical
eulogistic idiom for medical doctors. The semantic context-sensitivity of a
concrete concept used as the source concept in a metaphor in eulogistic idioms
is also witnessed in (2), where the conceptual composite of peach and plum can
only refer to one’s students in a way that is conceptually relative to the role of a
teacher in the domain of education. Specifically, táolǐ may have the meaning of
“students” only when the teacher is known and contextually retrievable. In other
words, the concept of teacher is always in the conceptual base (in the sense of
Langacker 2008) as a reference point for táolǐ to be used to refer to the students
of that particular teacher. For example, the compliment of 桃李滿天下 táolǐmǎntiānxià
“(to have one’s) students all over the world” is appropriate to teachers, but
not so much to other roles in the domain of education, such as the administrative
staff of a school or even a school that has had many students. In a different
context, táolǐ similarly develops a completely different meaning, that of ‘people
with a noble character’ in the context of 桃李不言，下自成蹊 “The peach and
the plum trees need not speak; under them there is a beaten path (by people
coming for the fruits).”
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Therefore, in (1) and (2), we have seen how the culture-specific use of concrete
concepts in the funeral idioms are sensitive to their co-text, or textual prompts (in
the sense of Lu 2008).
In addition to the use of types of plants as the culture-specific use of source
concepts, eulogistic idioms describing the teacher-student relationship are also
characterized by the presence of allusions to historical figures, such as 立雪 lìxuě
in (3) and 馬帳 mǎzhàngin (4).
(3) 立雪
lìxuě
stand (in the) snow
神傷
shénshāng
saddened
“(Respectful students are as) saddened (as Yang Shi and You Zuo, who) stood
in the snow (waiting for Master Cheng Hao).”
(4) 馬帳
mǎ-zhàng
(Master) Ma-tent
安
ān
prt
仰
yǎng
look up
“How (can one still now) look up to (the teacher, who used to teach me like)
the great Master Ma Rong!”
In (3), the expression 立雪 lìxuě invokes an allusion to a historical anecdote of
students’ respect for a teacher in the Sung Dynasty: Two students 楊時 Yáng Shí
and 游酢 Yóu Zuò went to visit their teacher 程頤 Chéng Yí, but Master Cheng
was taking a nap and the students did not want to disturb him, so they chose to
wait outside standing in the snow for a long time. By using the idiom, the mourner
creates systematic conceptual mappings by comparing the deceased to Master
Cheng and himself to the students. The students’ admiration for Master Cheng is
also mapped from the source domain to create an understanding of the mourner’s
attitude toward the deceased. Example (4) contains an allusion to Master 馬融
Mǎ Róng in Han Dynasty, who used to teach in a tent. The idiom contains a
metaphor where the cultural knowledge of Master Ma is mapped to help understand
the social status of the deceased and the recognition that he receives from
his students. But the idiom is more complicated than (3), as there are two more
rhetorical devices involved: an orientational metaphor, and a rhetorical question.
The posture verb 仰 yǎng “look facing upward” is the textual prompt for the orientational
metaphor good is up and heaven is up, referring to the mourner looking
up to the deceased in a respectful fashion. Another important rhetorical device is
the adverb 安 ān, which is used in an interrogative question in classical Chinese.
The presence of the adverb indicates the idiom as an interrogative, instead of
a simple declarative like most other eulogistic idioms. Used in such a context
where the question cannot really be answered by any ritual participant (nor by
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the deceased!), the question is rhetorical, and bears an intersubjective function in
discourse (Verhagen 2007:129–130). I will return to this matter in Section 6.
5.2 Ritual idioms used in funerals of media workers (媒體喪）
The second case study presented here is the analysis of the idioms used at funerals
of media workers. A media career is a profession of great socio-cultural influence,
as the words and opinions of a media worker get to be publicized, thus reaching a
wide audience. A media worker of a certain degree of importance can easily sway
the opinion of the public.
In the data, the most prominent feature of the eulogistic idioms in the domain
of media is the culture-specific use of source concepts, such as 南針 nánzhēn
“compass” (compass) in (5) and 喉舌 hóushé “tongue and throat” (tongue and
throat) in (6).
(5) 輿論
yúlùn
general opinion
南針
nánzhēn
compass
“(This person was the) guide (of the) general opinion.”
(6) 民眾
mín-zhòng
person-crowd
喉舌
hóu-shé
tongue-throat
“(This person was the) tongue and throat (for the) people.”
Example (5) uses the concept compass to create an understanding of the social
influence of the deceased when he was alive; the deceased guided the public’s
opinion in the way the compass guides the physical direction of a traveler in a
journey. Similarly, in (6) the deceased is compared to the tongue and throat of
the general public – acting as the voice for the people, just as the tongue and the
throat do for the human body.
In addition to the culture-specific metaphors that involves concrete source
concepts such as compass, tongue and throat, hyperbole is another rhetorical
device in the ritual idioms for media workers, as seen in (7).
(7) 發
fā
open
聾
lóng
deaf
振
zhèn
boost
聵
kuì
deaf
“(When this person was alive, his voice could even) make the deaf hear and
enliven them.”
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Example (7) is a typical hyperbole, as the deaf certainly cannot hear. Note that the
rhetorical meaning in (7) is coherent with the tongue and throat metaphor in
(6) – in (7), the media worker is similarly construed as an agent metaphorically
voicing for the people, with his opinion spread wide enough so many people
have become aware of it. It has the same effect as when one physically speaks –
as one speaks louder, more people get to hear the message. If the influence of
the deceased is relatively wide, that gives the hearer an inference of the media
worker’s voice being loud enough that his voice could even reach and be “heard”
by the deaf.
5.3 Ritual idioms used in funerals of legal experts (法界喪）
The third case study presented in the present paper is the idioms used at the funeral
of a legal expert. Legal experts have a profession of socio-cultural importance, as a
legal case can be a matter of life and death, social justice and even public welfare.
The socio-cultural status of a judge is also evidenced by the Chinese people’s admiration
of the character Judge Bao (包青天) in different folk stories.
In the eulogistic idioms used in the domain of law, we also see an abundance
of culture-specific use of concrete concepts, with the image schema straight4
in
(8) and (9) being most typical, linguistically elaborated as 正 zhèng.
(8) 公
gōng
fair
正
zhèng
straight
嚴
yán
strict
明
míng
observant
“(This person was) fair, straight, strict and observant.”
(9) 守
shǒu
keep
正
zhèng
straight
不
bù
neg
阿
ē
kiss up
“(This person) kept straight and did not kiss up.”
Examples (8) and (9) both contain the concrete concept straight. In literature,
straight has been identified as a productive source concept in the Chinese
discourse of morality, where straight is used to metaphorically conceptualize
good and crooked, evil (see the discussion of moral is straight; immoral is
crooked in Yu 2016). Here, not only do the idioms add on to the data covered
in the previous study but we witness the linguistic instantiations of the above
4. According to Yu (2016), straight is an image sub-schema of path, as opposed to crooked,
which both map onto the domain of morality.
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metaphors in communicating death in the domain of law, showing the cultural
expectation of a high moral standard associated with the profession.
In addition, the eulogistic idioms in law give high consideration to the
concept of clean, which also reflects the cultural expectation of a high moral
standard for legal experts, as (10) and (11) show.
(10) 廉潔
lián-jié
honest-clean
可
kě
mod
風
fēng
praise
“(This person was) honest and clean so is worth praising.”
(11) 激
jī
rid of
濁
zhuó
murky
揚
yáng
raise
清
qīng
clear
“(This person) got rid of murky (water) and exalted clear (water).”
In (10), the compound lián-jié is an instantiation of clean as a part of the conceptual
metaphor moral is clean; immoral is dirty (Yu 2015). Following Yu (2015),
the idiom conveys the similar cultural expectation of a legal expert, since it shows
that being clean is a property that “may be praised”. Example (11) expresses the
same cultural value, but in addition to the metaphor of morality, an orientational
metaphor good is up is also present, with the verb 揚 yáng “hold up” as
the textual prompt.5
In particular, the deceased is metaphorically construed as a
person who eradicates the immoral and exalts the moral just as one physically
removes the murky and lets the clean go up and be visible. Used in this way,
the orientational metaphor is an evaluative rhetorical means of appraising the
conduct of the deceased, to show how that meets with the sociocultural expectation
associated with the profession.
6. When the mourner becomes the object of conceptualization
In the previous sections, I discussed the various culture-specific usages of concrete
source concepts, and metaphors and allusion used in the eulogistic idioms. In addition,
I argue that the issue of viewing arrangement, or the subjectivity/objectivity
distinction in construal (Langacker 2008:77–78) is also important in the ritual
idioms for analyzing the three case studies addressed above.
5. I consider clean and clear largely overlapping concepts, given the existence of a highly
frequent compound 清潔 qīngjié “visually clean (lit. clear-clean)” in Mandarin. Therefore, in
my analysis, I subsume the concepts in a broad category for the convenience of discussion,
although the two are discussed separately in Yu (2015).
Viewpoint and metaphor in culture 265
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In Cognitive Grammar, a distinction is made between a subjective role in
conceptualization and an objective one. A subjective role is taken by an entity
when it acts as the subject of conceptualization, and an objective role is taken
when it acts as the object of conceptualization. An analogy is made to participating
in a drama performance – when an entity is the subject of conceptualization,
it does not itself act as an object to be perceived but remains offstage as a
perceiving subject, receiving the lowest degree of attention; but when the entity
becomes an object of conceptualization, it moves onstage as a perceived object
receiving more attention. Following such a stage model, when we see no trace of
the speaker or the hearer in the verbalization of an event (for instance, in stating
the objective truth Water boils at 100 degrees), the speaker and the hearer take
the purely subjective role in the conceptualization. On the other hand, when
the speaker and the hearer are verbalized somehow (perhaps by appearing in
the sentence in the form of first or second person pronoun), they become an
object of conceptualization. The distinction will be important, especially when
we discuss the idioms for teachers. I will return to the stage model in a few lines
in this section.6
The first and foremost observation that can be made of the data analyzed is
a distinct pattern of viewpoint reflected in the idioms for teacher – some eulogistic
idioms in that category reflect the viewpoint of the student, illustrated by
(12) and (13).
(12) 永
yǒng
forever
念
niàn
miss
師
shī
teacher
恩
ēn
kindness
“(I will) always miss (my) teacher’s kindness.”
(13) 教
jiào
teach
澤
zé
kindness
永
yǒng
forever
懷
huái
fondly remember
“(I will) always fondly remember the kindness of (the teacher’s) teaching.”
Examples (12) and (13) are both obvious eulogies requested by a (former) student
of the deceased, given the use of the verbs 念 niàn “miss” and 懷 huái “fondly
remember”, typical human reactions to the passing of an endeared one. One
may therefore reasonably identify the student as the source of the information
communicated, although it is not linguistically elaborated in the idiom. A similar
student viewpoint can be observed in the rhetorical interrogative (4) and in its
variant (14).
6. A similar cognitive analysis of opera can be seen in Havlíčková Kysová (2016).
266 Wei-lun Lu
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(14) 高山
gāoshān
high mountain
安
ān
prt
仰
yǎng
look up
“How (can one still now) look up to (the teacher, who towered like a) high
mountain!”
Both (4) and (14) use the posture verb 仰 yǎng without specifying the agent of the
posture, but the Chinese cultural knowledge of the hierarchical relation between
a teacher and a student allows one to instantly figure out that the student who
requested the eulogy is the agent looking up and the teacher is the target of the
gaze (or of the metaphorical worship). In such examples, not only the conceptual
metaphor good/power is up is present but also the Chinese cultural knowledge
of a teacher being more powerful and respectable than a student. In (14), the
target of the student’s gaze is linguistically elaborated as 山 shān “mountain”.
The construal invoked by the above two types of idioms represents a viewing
arrangement (in the sense of Langacker 2008), where the mourner takes an objective
role in the conceptualization. By using an idiom that reflects a student viewpoint,
the mourner places the role of the student in the conceptual frame in
the onstage region as an object of conceptualization (though meanwhile being
a subject of conceptualization). Following that, the teacher-student relationship
between the deceased and the mourner is also included onstage as an object
of conceptualization as a direct consequence of the student mourner putting
himself and the deceased onstage, both verbalized as part of the idiom. As a result,
the interpersonal teacher-student relationship receives more attention from the
conceptualizer. On the other hand, in the use of most other eulogistic idioms
(such as those for legal experts and media workers), the mourner does not encode
his own viewpoint in the verbalization, i.e. does not at all mention his interpersonal
relationship with the deceased, but rather adopts a general and impersonal
viewpoint, leaving himself and his interpersonal relationship with the deceased
completely offstage, thus minimizing the mourner’s own role as the object of
conceptualization. The role played by the mourner in such conceptualization is
thus more subjective (or less objective). Typical examples are all the idioms for
legal experts and media workers, which are mere objective descriptions of the
personal trait and the achievement of the deceased as the only object of conceptualization,
without any identifiable trace of the mourner in the idioms.
I furthermore argue that the use of a rhetorical interrogative is coherent with
the more objective role in the conceptualization played by the student mourner,
as a rhetorical interrogative is an intersubjective expression, which, according
to Verhagen (2007:18), conceptually highlights the relation between the speaker
and the hearer, who together constitute the subject of conceptualization, thereby
Viewpoint and metaphor in culture 267
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including the speaker and the hearer in the onstage region to become an object of
conceptualization that receives more attention. Therefore, at the cognitive level,
use of a ritual idiom that contains a rhetorical interrogative invokes a construal
that assigns the student mourner and the rest of the mourning group a more
obvious role as an object of conceptualization, the cognitive function of which is
similar to that discussed in the idioms which have the mourner as the implicit
agent of the activity encoded.7
7. Culture in discourse and vice versa: What Cognitive Linguistics
can reveal about occupations in society
In the present paper, I have first given an overview of Chinese funeral discourse
and introduced the general framework of Cognitive Linguistics. I also showed how
Cognitive Linguistics machinery may be applied to the study of eulogistic idioms
used in communicating death in public funerals in Taiwan. Three groups of idioms
used for different professions were analyzed as case studies for illustration.
The present study goes beyond the existing Cognitive Linguistic literature on
the language of death (those reviewed in Section 3), at least in two ways. First
of all, it shows the interaction between occupation as a social factor and the
usage of eulogistic idioms at funerals. Each of the three occupations studied, each
representing a sub-culture within the Taiwanese society, has its distinctive set of
metaphorical mappings and cultural elements in the eulogistic idioms. Secondly,
the present study shows that Cognitive Grammar, in addition to CMT, constitutes
an effective analytical tool that well complements CMT in studying the language
of death. In particular, my analysis shows that whether the mourner places himself
onstage as an object of conceptualization is a factor that correlates with a student
viewpoint in a teacher’s funeral.
In addition, in the analysis, we witness an abundance of cultural elements and
assumptions that underlie the use of eulogistic idioms at Han Chinese death rituals
in Taiwan, reflected by the different usages of metaphor in the idioms about the
three occupations addressed. First of all, cultural metaphors abound in the ritual
language, such as plant metaphors in the domain of education, sound
metaphors in media, and cleanliness metaphors in law. Following that, each
of the above metaphors has its own culture-specific linguistic instantiations, such
as táo, lǐ, and xìng, which invoke plant, hóu, shé, lóng, kuì, which invoke sound,
7. The subjectivity/objectivity distinction has similarly been applied to the study of Chinese
lexical semantics. Interested readers are referred to the discussion of the subjectification of the
[V] – [SHANG] construction in Lu (2017c).
268 Wei-lun Lu
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jié, zhuó, and qīng which invokes cleanliness, and so on. In addition, allusions
to famous historical figures are also present in the idioms, such as the anecdotes
that involve Master Cheng of the Sung Dynasty and Master Ma Rong of the Han
Dynasty. In the sample investigated, we also witness how different figurative
devices collaborate in communicating death in a ritual context, including the
culture-specific use of source concepts, metaphor, allusion and hyperbole. Specifically,
Example (4) demonstrates the co-occurrence of a historical allusion, an
orientational metaphor and a rhetorical question in a ritual idiom, while
Example (11) demonstrates the visual moral metaphor of moral is clean;
immoral is unclean, and an orientational metaphor. In addition, we also see how
the culture-specific use of concrete concepts in ritual language is sensitive to its cotext
– apricot and peach and plum each develops a completely different meaning
when used with different textual prompts.
However, a more interesting, and much less addressed issue, is the viewpoint
invoked by the ritual idioms, and what a viewpoint analysis informed by Cognitive
Grammar can tell us about cultural values associated with the three occupations
discussed here. As has been discussed, the Chinese eulogistic idioms
used at teachers’ funerals have a special status in comparison to idioms used
at the funerals of representatives of the other two professions, because in some
idioms of that category, the mourner presents his viewpoint as a student and puts
himself onstage as an object of conceptualization, whereas idioms for the other
occupations comment merely on the personal traits or the past achievements,
taking an impersonal viewpoint. Here, I argue that viewpoint analysis actually
reveals a Chinese cultural assumption about the profession of teachers – in this
culture, being a teacher is much more than a regular job; it is actually about
building an interpersonal relationship with one’s student. There is a Chinese
saying about teachers that precisely captures the cultural attitude: 一日為師，終
身為父 yírìwéishī, zhōngshēnwéifù “Once a teacher, for life a father.” I believe that
the general cultural conception of a teacher accounts for why a personal viewpoint
is common in the death ritual of teachers and why the student mourner puts
himself onstage as an object of conceptualization. Such an interpersonal bond
simply does not exist between the mourner and a media worker, a legal expert
or a politician (discussed in Lu, 2020), so naturally the mourning idioms for the
other job types take an impersonal viewpoint, only talking up on one’s traits and
achievements when he was alive.8
A comparison of the three case studies and that
8. It is likely that the conceptual difference between the idioms for teachers and those for the
other professions can be explained in terms of the more (inter-) personal nature of the job.
A similar case might be medical doctors, which is also a professional category in the eulogy
request system and could be a useful topic for future study.
Viewpoint and metaphor in culture 269
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of politicians (Lu, 2020) allows one to see in what specific ways Cognitive Linguistics,
especially the stage model in Cognitive Grammar, is useful in uncovering the
relation between language use in culture and cognition.
However, a question immediately following the discussion of the cultural
default is: Why is talking up the achievements of the deceased the cultural norm,
rather than the mourner truly expressing his personal feelings and his connection
with the deceased? I argue that the norm has two cultural roots. First, it reflects
the Confucian value of celebrating the life of the deceased by praising one’s virtues
and righteousness when alive (Tien 2016:6, 2017:197–200). Therefore, the ritual
idioms analyzed in this paper concentrate merely on how the media worker’s
voice influenced society and how the legal expert was straight and clean, etc.,
instead of communicating the personal grief of the mourner. In addition, I believe
that the almost exclusive praise of one’s life achievements at the death ritual has
much to do with Taiwanese society’s obsessive worship of career success and the
face want of the family of the deceased (Lu 2017a).
Finally, I hope that the present Cognitive Linguistic analysis, informed by
CMT, Cognitive Grammar and viewpoint analysis, has done justice to a selected
number of case studies that involve the use of Chinese eulogistic idioms in
communicating death. In particular, I hope to have shown in what specific ways
Cognitive Linguistics is equipped with an appropriate and powerful apparatus for
analyzing the language of death, with a view to uncovering hidden cultural values,
expectations and assumptions that underlie real-life communication, which is still
an area under-explored in Cognitive Linguistics. The analysis has clearly shown
various Chinese cultural expectations associated with each of the occupations
investigated, such as “close to the student like a father figure” for a teacher, “voice
loud and influential enough” for a media worker, and “straight and clean” for a
legal expert. I believe that I have shown how an application of Cognitive Linguistics
is to an extent useful to studying funeral discourse in Chinese and that rich
discourse data from the Chinese-speaking world may continue to contribute to
the development of Cognitive Linguistics in return. The ritual idioms studied
in the present paper are only the tip of the iceberg of the entire eulogy request
system, and capture only a partial picture of the Han Chinese people’s worldview
of life and death, so I expect more future studies in the same direction to help us
understand the meaning of life and death in Chinese culture.
270 Wei-lun Lu
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Acknowledgements
I thank Chris Shei, Réka Benczes and the reviewers for valuable comments, with the typical
disclaimer that applies. I also thank Joseph Lennon for his kind assistance in proofing the
manuscript into a more readable shape.
Glossary
The glossing in the present chapter follows the Leipzig Glossing Rule:
prt particle
mod modal
neg negation
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法界喪 (10 idioms in the system)：
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Appendix. Eulogistic idioms in the online request system analyzed
天喪斯文、永念師恩、立雪神傷、風冷杏壇、師表千
古、師表常尊、桃李興悲、馬帳安仰、高山安仰、教澤永懷、教澤長存、教澤流詠。
才華橫溢、公正嚴明、守正不阿、法學浩瀚、法學權
威、芸眾慧人、廉己奉公、廉潔可風、德孚眾望、激濁揚清。
媒體喪 (8 idioms in the system)：文化先聲、民眾喉舌、立論公正、宏揚正義、啟迪文
化、發聾振瞶、領導輿論、輿論南針。
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Address for correspondence
Wei-lun Lu
Masaryk University
Kamenice 5–A15
625 00 Brno-Bohunice
Czech Republic
wllu@med.muni.cz
274 Wei-lun Lu
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Publication 9
[9] Lu, Wei-lun and Svitlana Shurma. 2021. Rituals. Analysing Religious Discourse, ed. by Stephen
Pihlaja, 217-234. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Experimental work (%) Supervision (%) Manuscript (%) Research direction (%)
55 55 55 55
Substantiation: I (first author) was responsible for the collection of the data, data analysis, the
writing of the main body of the analysis, the method and the conclusion. The second author was
responsible for the writing of the introduction and part of the conclusion and for proofreading and
editing the entire text.
182
13
Rituals
Wei-lun Lu and Svitlana Shurma
13.1 Background, History, and Key Terms
Rituals, both religious and non-religious, pervade and sometimes define our everyday
lives. While rituals, such as puja, hajj, kathina, or baptism are of the religious character
since they are connected with the religious practices across the world, rituals taking
place during some sports events, awards, or ceremonies have a secular character. Both
secular and religious, rituals are flexible or semi-flexible events functioning as models of
human behavior in space and time (Grimes, 1982). These are a “prescribed sequence of
verbal and nonverbal acts,” having a highly formalized and predictable communication
mode (Feuchtwang, 2010). Snoek (2006, p. 10–12) argues that rituals should be defined
through a set of shared characteristic rituals of different kinds, such as cultural
construction, typicality of physical and verbal behavior, space- and time-bound,
interactivity, symbolic nature, organizing function, etc. Yet, what we will discuss in the
chapter is how rituals are connected not just with the performance of certain
conventionally prescribed and symbolic actions, but also with formulaic language use.
For example, in the Eastern Slavic Orthodox conventions of celebrating Easter, after the
participation in the divine service in the church and priest’s blessing of the Easter food,
it is common to greet others with the phrase Christ has risen! and the answer Truly He
is risen three times. In Hinduism, for instance, Diwali celebration includes the ritualistic
183
greeting Diwali ki hardik shubhkamnaye (Heart-felt wishes on the occasion of Diwali).
Ritualistic greetings can be found as parts of many other rituals across the globe. Thus,
language and actions are firmly tied in the rituals.
One of the main roles of the rituals is to guide cognition (Snoek, 2006). For
example, rituals connected with someone’s death, such as cremations or burials with
the preceding and subsequent traditional practices, “exude vital importance to humans
in the quest to make sense of the mysteries surrounding death” (Hoy, 2013, p. 1). Just as
any other ritual, death rituals across the world possess a set of cultural and
performative characteristics and temporal and spatial requirements. “Whether in a
family, friendship circle, nation, or planet, every death introduces some sense of social
upheaval; the deliberate cadence of rituals helps to restore balance, reminding all
concerned that order will prevail” (Hoy, 2013, p. 11). The actions taken during burials
and mourning allow the participants make sense of the death, offer a feeling of safety
and facilitate grieving (Giblin and Hug, 2006). For example, night vigils over the dead
body in some religious communities are a way of family saying goodbye; ritualistic
washing of the dead body in some religions is a way to prepare the soul for the afterlife;
prayers, chants, speeches, or eulogies are all praxes that are performed with the aim of
accommodating the family (Capone, 2010) of the deceased and prepare the soul of the
person who died to what awaits the soul after death according to the shared beliefs.
Linguistic practices are often an important part of death rituals across cultures
and religions (Dumitru-Lahaye, 2009). The verbalization of death becomes important
for certain elements of rituals and helps the mourners strike a balance in the time of
grief. Such formulaic language of ritual is associated with standardized and culturally
bound linguistic expression (Weinert, 2010). A formulaic sequence is further defined by
184
Wray (2002, p. 9) as “a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other
meaning elements, which is, or appears to be prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved
whole form memory at the time of use, rather than being subjects to generation or
analysis by the language grammar.”
Linguistically, formulae are characterized by restrictions in form and
distribution and compel the reader to choose a pre-formatted word combination within
a given context. Such formulae are typically bound to certain language styles, which
means that the formulaic language is connected to specific communicative situations.
For example, formulae include:
My condolences.
My deepest sympathies to you and your family.
I am truly sorry to hear of the loss.
These phrases are typically bound to communicative situations of mourning,
appear on cards or in other messages, or are verbalized during the ritualistic practices
connected with mourning and death. Such verbalizations become a part of consistent
verbal behavior that accompanies the practices. These formulae are meant to provide
solace and accommodate mainly the close relatives of the deceased, yet they still depend
on the individual speaker. Given the highly structured nature of ritual, it inevitably
involves elements of formulaic language. “Compared to ordinary propositional speech
and its almost infinite openness and logic, ritual is far less communicative; it is not
logical or propositional but is instead a manifestation of traditional authority”
(Feuchtwang, 2010, p. 282).
Traditionally, formulae include fixed phrases, clichés, idiomatic expressions,
complex word forms as well as “sentence-building frameworks” (Wood, 2002, p. 2) and
185
have even been extended to social routines, narratives, and proverbs (Weinert, 2010).
This fuzziness in defining and identification of formulaic language is problematic
because of the semantic and structural diversity of the linguistics sequences which
different scholars refer to as “formulae”.
Formulaic language can be seen as an indispensable element of speech act(s)
associated with a typical situation of communication, or pragmeme. Pragmemes are
defined as a “general situation prototype” (Mey, 2001, p. 221) equal to a speech act that
is motivated by extra-linguistic context and aims to achieve a certain pragmatic effect.
The linguistic shape and pragmatic inferences depend largely on the cultural context
and the rules in a society. According to Mey (2001, p. 222), two constituents are
important in a pragmeme: text and activity. The activity part involves all sorts of acts,
from speech to psychological and physical acts. Assuming that the linguistic behavior is
embedded in the human behavior, the textual part, on the other hand, is what carries
the speaker’s intentions. Therefore, the choice of language formulae, for instance, bears
the pragmatic meaning required by the situation or the speakers themselves. The
meaning is always context dependent, and extra-linguistic factors cannot be separated
from what constitutes a pragmeme. In such an approach, eulogies, for example, can be
seen as types of texts along with others, such as sermons, consolations, and so on,
within a composite pragmeme of accommodation. The interactive part of the eulogies
comes from the type of the speech act and its referentiality, emotions involved, physical
acts, and paralanguage; therefore, we claim that eulogy is an act of language use within
a general situational prototype executed in a situation of mourning as part of a death
ritual that varies depending on the religion of the perished.
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The participants in a communicative situation are not just restricted by the
conventions, and they can also shape those conventions based on their own intentions,
beliefs, wishes, and so on. Communicative cooperation occurs when the intention of the
sender, attention of the addresser and the common socio-cultural knowledge are in
balance. This shared knowledge often relies on cognitive scenarios, which are modified
in the course of history and changing sociocultural context and reflect how humans
view social actions. As cultural models, scenarios help to govern rituals and include
“propositional, image-schematic, metaphoric, and metonymic models” (Palmer, 2006, p.
15). Scenarios therefore influence discourse, while formulaic language, though not a
speech act, plays an important part in the construal of discourse scenario since it has its
specific place and time in the ritual. For example, the greeting Christ has risen! in the
aforementioned example should be said only after the worshiper has participated in the
full ceremony, and this phrase symbolically marks the end of the official church rite and
the beginning of the unofficial family rite, if the ritual is kept. At the same time, for lesspious
participants it becomes a greeting, a wish, and an act of participation in the
celebration of Easter.
The formulaic language in these situations can be understood as pragmatic
idioms, or pragmatic units of high conventionality used in standardized situations of
communication that fall into conversational routines and situation-bound utterances.
Because formulae are conventionally constructed solutions in socially determined
situations such as rituals, ritualistic idioms can be referred to the situation-bound
utterances, as they become “safe” prefabricated verbalizations that function as
“guidelines” of social verbal behavior in typical or ritualized situations. The ritual sets a
certain pragmatic property to such formulaic chunks of language. For example, a eulogy
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at a funeral follows certain rules, since it becomes a way of saying farewell to the
deceased. It is a social action that conforms to the norms the ritual prescribes. Thus, it
becomes an idiom, or a multi-word formulaic sequence that has a rather fixed form and
semantic features and can be treated as “a unit in processing” or “the expression of
creative conceptual metaphors” (Espinal and Mateu, 2019). In this chapter, we discuss a
particular form of idioms: 成語 chéngyǔ, which are four-character lexical constructions
that can be found in dictionaries. Such eulogistic idioms are extensively used in
pragmemes of accommodation around events of death.
13.2 Key Topics, Questions, and Debates
Like much language around religious discourse, rituals often include metaphorical
language and actions. Rituals by engaging its participants into a set of activities such as
dance, music, or meditation, appeal to the senses and feelings of those involved.
“Mystical interpretations frequently comment on sensation as a source of metaphors for
religious experience” (Watts, 2019, p. 2). As a rule, the ritual shifts attention from the
senses involved in the ritual to the actions and behaviors, including the verbal ones,
often metaphorical in their nature. For example, death rituals in the Christian tradition
have an aim of keeping the feelings of the mourners under some degree of control
(Capone, 2010). The metaphorical rhetoric helps to accommodate or ease the situation
of grief, and typically appears with regard to interpreting the rituals and substitutes the
sensations involved (Watts, 2019). Metaphor in death rituals becomes a part of the
pragmeme of accommodation (Capone, 2010) as they help to cope with the negative
feelings that accompany deaths of the near and dear (Sexton, 1997).
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Cognitive Linguistics offers an approach through which the metaphoricity of the
language of death can be examined: it sets both the metaphorical speech acts and
conceptualizations involved in the speech act production in context. Conceptual
metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) offers a framework for analysis of the
language of death as it allows us to look at how thought and knowledge about the death
is structured in different communities.
Since death rituals are ways to understand and communicate about the act of
dying, conceptual metaphors also penetrate the common discourse practices. As death
is an unpleasant and painful topic, metaphors, as a means of secondary nomination and
a euphemistic resource, make the subject less painful. DEATH acts as the target domain
onto which the elements of the source domain related to a more concrete concept are
mapped. The source domain is often related to some embodied experience circulating
within a culture (Kövecses, 2010), since the knowledge about it makes it easier to
explain death. In this way, the community structures the knowledge and offers sense of
it. The formulaic language of the ritual reflects the ideas and beliefs circulating in a
culture through conceptual metaphors. What becomes the source domains of the
culturally bound conceptual metaphors are typical representations of values and
knowledge about a given community (Crespo-Fernández, 2013).
Through the analysis of conceptual metaphorical representations, culturally
specific interpretations of death can be seen within death rituals. Marín Arrese (1996)
and Crespo-Fernández (2013) traced and contrasted the conceptualizations of death in
English and Spanish, thus drawing attention to cross-cultural representations and, what
is important, differences in cultural representations. The scholars argued that three
aspects are significant for the metaphoric language of death: bodily and social
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experiences as well as cultural constraints. Crespo-Fernández (2013) sums up that it is
the cultural context that drives the differences between the conceptual representations.
Perhaps, the most comprehensive contrastive study of conceptual mappings within
euphemistic death metaphors across six languages of different language groups was
conducted by Gathigia et al. (2018). A group of authors identified and examined four
conceptual metaphors in Chinese, Farsi, Gikuyu, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish: DEATH IS
A JOURNEY, DEATH IS THE END, DEATH IS A REST, and DEATH IS A SUMMONS. They concluded that
the DEATH IS A JOURNEY metaphor is present in the languages of the six linguocultures.
Within the study of the language of death functioning in a specific cultural
context, a socio-pragmatic approach has been pioneered by Capone (2010) who looks at
the language of death as specific speech acts or pragmemes. In his seminal paper,
Capone (2010, p. 6) considers death rituals as “prototypical events” having “social
intentionality built into them. He places pragmemes in a key position for explaining the
formulaic language choices during mourning events and thus steps away from the
actual conceptualizations, rather offering an analysis of sociocultural context.
Since rituals are “institutional events” that “enforce interpretation rules”
(Capone, 2010, p. 10), agreement on the connotations and meanings of certain sets of
words within a given community allows them to become formulae through their
recurrent use, entering the community’s long-term memory. In fact, it is possible to
speak about the “ritual language” or specific utterances that acquire significance in the
process of the ritual (Wheelock, 1982, p. 50). The language becomes a part of the
multimodal system, where other semiotic systems contribute to, complement, or
overlap with the linguistic means (Wheelock, 1982). This claim makes it important to
look at the ritual language from cognitive, social, and cultural perspectives.
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Socio-pragmatic, sociocultural, and cognitivist approaches to pragmemes have
been taken to analyze formulaic language in condolences, euphemisms, eulogies,
sympathy cards, and so on in English, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and some
other contexts (Parvaresh and Capone, 2017). This research into the cultural aspects of
pragmemes has shown the origins of linguistic representations across linguocultures as
well as similarities and differences in the conceptualizations, and has challenged the
idea of universality in languages and rituals. The linguistic formulas are uttered or
exchanged in line with certain procedures of rituals that vary between cultures,
communities, and geographies, showing how seeming similarities of conceptual
representations might be more complex than they first appear.
13.3 Case Study
The eulogistic idioms that are the focus of this chapter are fixed phrases or elements of
formulaic language used at funerals in Taiwan. The phrases are prefabricated and
always come in the form of four-characters. In traditional funerals in Taiwan, a mourner
presents a white plaque to the family of the deceased (with the white color invoking
DEATH in the Taiwanese culture). The plaque typically contains the name of the
deceased, information of the mourner (name, affiliation, job title), and the eulogistic
idiom of the mourner’s own choice (from a conventionalized repertoire of idioms). The
semantic content of such eulogistic idioms may reflect the mourner’s personal feeling, a
general description and praise of the past achievement of the deceased, or the
mourner’s imagination of the current state of the soul of the deceased.
However, the mourner’s choice of the idiom to present cannot be random –
instead, the mourner needs to use their discretion in deciding which idiom to use. The
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reason is that some formulaic expressions contain a specific characterization of a
certain profession (such as politicians and teachers, or media workers and legal
experts) or of the religion (Buddhists and Christians) of the deceased. Therefore, the
choice of the idiom must be based on the actual occupation or the religious belief of the
deceased, in order to make the act of delivering the eulogy pragmatically appropriate
and acceptable to the family. An inappropriate choice of the eulogistic idiom (such as a
Buddhist idiom delivered at a Christian funeral) may be offensive. In traditional funerals
in Taiwan, the white plaques are displayed in the funeral hall. After the ceremony, the
plaques are incinerated along with the corpse. In order to reduce the carbon footprint
produced as a result of funerals, the Taiwanese government set up an online eulogy
request system, where a mourner may apply for a user account and request an idiom to
be displayed on the electronic banner in a state-run funeral hall, where the funeral for a
deceased known to them is scheduled to take place.
Once the mourner logs onto the eulogy request system, they are allowed to select
the exact date, the exact venue, and the name of the deceased from a list of scheduled
funerals. Once the selection is made, the mourner may proceed to select a predefined
category from a pulldown menu that contains a handful of occupations and three
religions: Buddhism, Catholic and Protestant. Once the mourner clicks on one of the
characterizations that suits the deceased, the system turns up a selection of idioms that
correspond to the religion or the occupation, all included by Taipei Mortuary Services
Office from existing lexicographic sources. We focus on the idioms used for the two
religions in the system: Buddhism and Christianity. The system presents eight idioms to
choose from in the Christian category and fifty-nine idioms in the Buddhist category.
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This case study draws on a previous study (Lu, 2017) and shows linguistic
analysis of the eulogistic idioms informed by Cognitive Linguistics, in particular
conceptual metaphor theory, investigating two religion-specific conceptual metaphors
LIFE CYCLE IS ONE SINGLE RETURN JOURNEY (Christian) and LIFE CYCLE IS A REPETITIVE JOURNEY
(Buddhist), both being a cultural instantiation of the more schematic LIFE IS A JOURNEY,
which has been extensively discussed in the field. We also investigate the metaphor
related to end-of-life, DEATH IS REST, and finally orientational metaphors used in the
eulogistic idioms in the pragmemes of both religions.
13.3.1 Life as Repetitive Journeys or as a Single
Round-Trip
The conceptual domain of JOURNEY has been often cited to relate to that of LIFE, the
association of which forms the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. In addition to that, not only
LIFE but also DEATH is conceptualized as a JOURNEY. Based on the aforementioned studies,
we may generalize a systematic conceptual metaphor as a first approximation of how
LIFE and DEATH are understood, applicable to both religions: LIFE IS A JOURNEY IN THIS
WORLD; DEATH IS A JOURNEY FROM THIS WORLD TO THE HEAVENS.
However, Buddhism holds a worldview that the human life cycle is repetitive,
where a soul does not perish but will reincarnate indefinitely. Under such rubric, we are
able to find an idiom that reflects such worldview, as in (1).
1. 乘 願 再 來
chéng yuàn zài lái
ride wish again come
“(The person will) come again with (great) wishes.” (adapted from Lu 2017, p.
53)
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In example (1), the idiom depicts the motion of an implicit agent, which can be
pragmatically identified as the deceased since the idiom is a formulaic lexical
construction presented at a funeral. The destination of the motion is toward the speaker
(and the hearer), encoded by the verb lái ‘come’, and can be understood to be this world
(as opposed to the afterworld). The motion is a journey that is repeated, encoded by the
construction zài ‘again’. All the conceptual pieces prompted by the lexical constructions,
when put together, correspond to the Buddhist thinking that a soul may appear in this
world again, which is metaphorically understood as another journey to this world. We
may, accordingly, formulate another conceptual association between LIFE and JOURNEY as
(THE CURRENT) LIFE IS A JOURNEY; NEXT LIFE IS A RETURN JOURNEY TO THIS WORLD. Being
analytically sensitive to the lexical cues that invoke the underlying conceptual pattern
allows a newly established conceptual construction the first approximation that we
identified in previous literature. This allows us to come up with a wider metaphorical
frame that accommodates our current understanding: LIFE CYCLES ARE REPETITIVE JOURNEYS.
In addition to the general metaphor that helps us construe LIFE and DEATH each as a
journey, this general conceptual frame sanctions the metaphor DEATH IS A JOURNEY
TOWARDS REBIRTH, which is instantiated by example (2).
2. 往 生 極 樂
wǎng shēng jí lè
go towards life extreme happy
“(This person has) gone towards life in the bliss.” (adapted from Lu 2017 p. 52)
In example (2), there are lexical prompts that help us identify the conceptual
metaphor. First, the PATH of the journey is invoked by the construction wǎng ‘go
towards’, with the GOAL of the trajectory being shēng ‘life’. The phrase jílè ‘(lit.) extreme
happiness’ has an extended meaning of ‘bliss’. In addition, the pragmatic knowledge of
the context in which the idiom is used is important, as the fact that the idiom is used at a
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funeral allows us to identify the deceased as the implicit agent of the motion. Again, we
see how the lexical cues, when they appear in a pragmeme, work together to form a
coherent conceptual picture that reflects DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH, a specific
cultural instantiation of the highly schematic metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY extensively
discussed in previous literature. In particular, in the Taiwanese Buddhist pragmeme of
death, there exists a most general conceptual frame of LIFE CYCLE IS REPETITIVE JOURNEYS,
which entails that (THE CURRENT) LIFE IS A JOURNEY; NEXT LIFE IS A RETURN JOURNEY TO THIS
WORLD. Within such a general frame, each return journey comprises two subparts: LIFE IS
A JOURNEY; DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH. The CIRCLE is a frequent cultural symbol in
Taiwanese Buddhist eulogistic idioms, which is invoked by the construction yuán-mǎn
‘(lit.) circle-full; perfect’ in the collection of Buddhist idioms. Example (3) illustrates this
point.
3. 功 德 圓 滿
gōng dé yuán mǎn
feat virtue circle Full
“(This person led a) full (life like a) circle, having had various achievements.” (adapted
from Lu (2017, p. 54)
This type occurs in three of the fifty-nine Buddhist idioms. The cyclic nature of
the Buddhist understanding of LIFE is symbolically associated with the basic geometric
fact that the beginning and the end of the shape coincide. In the following, we turn to an
analysis of the eulogistic idioms used in a Christian pragmeme of death in Taiwan (that
is, the repertoire of idioms that the mourner may choose from the request system once
“Christianity” is chosen). We find that an obvious difference between the Christian and
the Buddhist eulogies lies in the type frequency of CIRCLE – remember that it is invoked
by 圓滿 yuán-mǎn in three Buddhist eulogistic idioms, whereas in the database, we find
no lexical item that invokes the same concept in the Christian category. The lack of
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CIRCLE in Christian eulogistic idioms shows that cyclicity is not part of the conceptual
substrate associated with the Christian understanding of LIFE. We also find that in the
Christian idioms, there is no occurrence of motion verbs such as 來 lái ‘come’, as in
example (1) or 往 wǎng ‘go toward’, as in example (2). The only verb that comes close is
歸 guī ‘return’, which is given in example (4).
4. 息 勞 歸 主
xí láo guī zhǔ
rest toil return Lord
“(This person has) put down (their) hard work (and has) returned to the Lord.”
However, the use of 歸 guī comes with an important semantic entailment – when
one returns to a place, that place is not only the destination of that person’s motion but
also their origin. There are eight Christian idioms in the eulogy request system in total,
two of which contain 歸 guī. This fact shows not only that 歸 guī is the only verb that
instantiates the JOURNEY metaphor but also that RETURN constitutes an important
element of the journey, given the high type frequency of 歸 guī in the Christian category
(two of eight idioms). Based on this reasoning, we may formulate the JOURNEY metaphor
as follows: LIFE IS A JOURNEY; DEATH IS A RETURN JOURNEY. No linguistic prompt that may
invoke the repetition of journey is found in the collection of Christian idioms.
13.3.2 Death as a Break before the Journey Resumes
or as an Eternal Rest
In the Buddhist category, there is one lexical item that invokes REST, which is 歇 xiē ‘rest’
in (5).
5. 歇 即 菩提
xiē Jí pútí
rest LK bodhi/wisdom
“(As the deceased is,) rest is the ultimate wisdom.”
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NB: Contractions used in the glosses following Leipzig Glossing Rules.
In the Christian category, there is also one lexical item that invokes REST, which is
息 xí ‘rest’ in example (4). Again, remember that this idiom is a linguistic part of a
funeral as a pragmeme of accommodation, so the overarching theme should be DEATH,
with the immediate topic being identifiable as the deceased. However, although it seems
that in the pragmatic act of helping the family of the deceased accommodate grief, both
religions utilize idioms that conceptualize DEATH as REST, there is still a significant
difference. If we look up the lexical prompt of the REST metaphor in a corpus, we see that
歇 xiē and 息 xí actually involve different language formulas that reflect the different
nuanced semantic shades that correspond to the different ways LIFE is understood as a
JOURNEY in each of the respective religions. In particular, in corpus cognitive linguistics,
it is believed that the construal invoked by a construction can be portrayed by the
lexical and grammatical company kept by the construction. To apply that notion to our
data, what one can easily do is to look up the target word in a platform that contains a
sufficiently large and representative language sample, so that we may find the
behavioral pattern of the word that allows us to understand the exact meaning of the
word. A search in the Buddhist idioms for the verb 歇 xiē reveals some of its common
collocations and colligations, such as 歇會兒 xiē-huǐ-ér ‘break-moment-PRT’, 歇口氣
xiē-kǒu-qì ‘break-CL-breath’, 歇一歇 xiē-yì-xiē ‘break-TENT’, 暫歇 zhàn-xiē ‘temporarybreak’,
which allows us to extrapolate the semantic content of xiē being “a brief moment
off (from an activity).” On the other hand, a search of 息 xí does not turn up a similar
result – 息xí is used mainly as a noun in Chinese but the search does turn up a usage of
it as a verb, as in 奔騰不息 bēnténg-bù-xí ‘(lit.) (the manner of a river running) runningNEG-stop;
everlasting’. Another famous instance that contains 息 xí can be found in the
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Chinese version of First Corinthians 13 of the Bible, 愛是永不止息 ài shì yǒng-bù-zhǐ-xí
‘(lit.) love LK forever-NEG-cease-stop; love is everlasting’. From the above collocational
behaviour of 息 xí, which co-occurs with the negators for the whole phrase to convey an
imperfective meaning such as “river running” and “everlasting,” this allows us to figure
out “termination” as an important part of the conceptual substrate of 息 xí. A
comparison of the conceptual semantic structures of 歇 xiē and 息 xí allows us to map
the two structures onto the Buddhist and the Christian views on LIFE CYCLE – the
Buddhist LIFE CYCLE consists of repetitive journeys, with DEATH being a short moment off
in between the journeys, whereas the Christian LIFE CYCLE is only one round-trip from
heaven to the earth and back to its source, where the journey terminates.
Another difference between the religions lies in the type frequency of the REST
metaphors. The REST metaphor occurs in the Christian category (prompted by the word
息 xí) accounts for three idioms out of the total eight, whereas in the Buddhist category,
only one idiom out of a total of fifty-nine contains the REST metaphor (prompted by the
word 歇 xiē). (Type) frequency wise, this has an important cognitive consequence – the
notable difference in ratio (three of eight versus one of fifty-nine) shows that people
obviously pay more attention to REST in the Christian pragmeme of accommodation, as
people verbalize more about it, conceptually profile (Langacker, 2008, p. 61) it more
often, thus rendering the concept more cognitively salient in the pragmeme.
Orientational metaphors are exclusively Buddhist in the pragmeme. In the
eulogistic idioms in the pragmeme of accommodation in Taiwan, orientational
metaphors occur only in the Buddhist idioms but not in the Christian ones. In the
database, we identified two orientational metaphors: one that invokes the vertical
dimension and the other that invokes the east–west direction. In Taiwanese Buddhist
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eulogistic idioms, we find a set of formulae that involves the positive pole of the vertical
dimension, lexically instantiated by 上 shàng ‘up’, as in example (6), and 高 gāo ‘high’, as
in example (7).
6. 上 生 佛 國
shàng shēng fó guó
up birth Buddha country
“(This person has been) born up in the Buddha’s country.”
7. 高 登 蓮 品
gāo dēng lián pǐn
high elevate lotus category
“(This person has) risen high to the category of (being pure like a) lotus.”
As is obvious in the examples, 上 shàng and 高 gāo are both lexical items that
directly invoke the positive pole of the vertical dimension and are used to describe the
positive quality of a person, invoking the conceptual metaphor GOOD IS UP. The second
orientation metaphor in the Taiwanese Buddhist death ritual is DEATH IS WEST,
instantiated by example (8).
8 化 滿 西 歸
huà mǎn xī guī
die complete west return
““(This person has) died (with his life being) complete (and he has) returned to the west.”
The motivation of DEATH IS WEST appears to be religion specific, but it does involve
an embodied basis. In trying to explain the motivation of why the Buddhist heaven is in
the west, Shì (2017, p. 47) refers to an excerpt by a Buddhist monk, Master Dàochuò (道
綽大師) in the sixth century, quoted as example (9).
9. 日 出 處 名 生，
rì chū chù míng shēng
sun out LOC name birth
沒 處 名 死 …
mò chù míng sǐ
(sun) set LOC name death
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法藏菩薩 願 成 佛 在
fǎcáng púsà yuàn chéng fó zài
Fǎcáng Bodhisattva wish become Buddha LOC
西， 悲 接 眾生。
xī bēi jiē zhòngshēng
west sympathy receive all
creatures
“The place of sunrise is named birth, sunset death … Fǎcáng Bodhisattva (is/was) willing to
become a Buddha in the west, in order to receive all creatures with sympathy.”
Example (9) shows that as early as the sixth century, Master Dàochuò already
related the Buddhist human life cycle to the pattern of sunrise and sunset, where he
associated BIRTH with SUNRISE, which directly invokes EAST and DEATH with SUNSET, which
invokes WEST. Following on from that, the conceptual extension to couple DEATH with
WEST, which is the spatial orientation of the sunset, seems to be natural. In the second
half of the passage, it is stated that the location of Fǎcáng Bodhisattva is in the west, and
that all creatures are to be received by the bodhisattva in the west after death. The
master’s preaching not only is consistent with the metaphor DEATH IS A JOURNEY but also
fleshes out the detail of the journey by specifying WEST as the DIRECTION of the JOURNEY.
Another point to note is the systematic conceptual association between MOVEMENT OF THE
SUN and PROGRESSION OF LIFE and between DAY and LIFE by the Buddhist master. What is
more, the source concept DAY is not a one-time event but occurs repetitively, and when
that is used to reason about LIFE as the target concept, it associates REPETITION with the
target concept. Therefore, the Buddhist-specific metaphor of DEATH IS WEST is based on
the systematic conceptual mappings between the various elements in the conceptual
domain of DAY (as the source domain) and that of LIFE (as the target domain). In addition
to that, with a conceptual metaphor theory approach, we are able to relate the Buddhist
conceptual pattern DEATH IS WEST to DEATH IS A JOURNEY and LIFE CYCLE IS REPETITIVE
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JOURNEYS, and are able to assemble the three into a coherent whole that reflects the
Buddhist worldview.
In pragmemes of accommodating human death, the linguistic means include
lexical instantiations that comply with the conceptual patterns reflecting the
worldviews of the religions involved. The most typical examples are the Christian
metaphor LIFE CYCLE IS ONE SINGLE RETURN JOURNEY and the Buddhist metaphor LIFE CYCLE IS
A REPETITIVE JOURNEY. The REST metaphor is related to how LIFE is conceptualized as a
JOURNEY in the religions involved. In particular, in Christian funerals in Taiwan, which
contain verbal instantiations of LIFE IS A JOURNEY; DEATH IS A RETURN JOURNEY (based on the
belief that the human life cycle is a single return journey to and from the world), the
REST metaphor used in the funerals is lexically instantiated by 息 xí ‘termination’. On the
other hand, in Buddhist funerals in Taiwan, the life cycle is considered repetitive, based
on (THE CURRENT) LIFE IS A JOURNEY; DEATH IS A JOURNEY TOWARDS REBIRTH; NEXT LIFE IS A RETURN
JOURNEY TO THIS WORLD. Under such conceptual rubric, the lexical instantiation of the REST
metaphor is 歇 xiē ‘a brief moment off’. Finally, the exclusive presence of orientational
metaphor DEATH IS WEST in Buddhist eulogistic idioms is based on the conceptual
mapping between the human life cycle and the movement pattern of the sun, matching
BIRTH with SUNRISE and its spatial direction EAST, and DEATH with SUNSET, which is WEST.
Differences between the eulogistic idioms used by the different religious groups
at death rituals in Taiwan constitute authentic linguistic evidence that reveals the
differences in terms of worldview and how different religious groups reason around an
event of death. First, although there is a general overarching metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY,
we see that, in the pragmeme, each of the two groups has its own religion-specific
metaphor that reflects its own understanding of LIFE. Secondly, there is another
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schematic metaphor related to JOURNEY that is shared by the two groups, which is DEATH
IS REST. Each of the two groups uses a distinct set of lexical instantiations in its idioms,
which reflects what type of REST is envisaged in relation to the type of JOURNEY that is
involved in that particular religion. In addition, Buddhism conceptually relates human
life cycle to celestial movement of the sun, which gives rise to the exclusively Buddhist
orientational metaphor DEATH IS WEST. The religion-specific conception and reasoning
involved in human death rituals is linguistically manifested in the collection of eulogistic
idioms used in the pragmemes in each of the religions.
In this study, only Buddhist eulogistic idioms involve the metaphor GOOD IS UP. As
a multicultural society, Taiwan has been heavily influenced by Confucianism and
(especially Mahāyāna) Buddhism. A central tradition in Confucianism is to extol the
virtue and the good deeds of the deceased at a funeral and since Mahāyāna Buddhism
shares a lot of similarities and converges with Confucianism in East Asian societies (Fu,
1973), Buddhist eulogistic idioms used in a largely Confucian society pick up such a
cultural practice in a death ritual. Furthermore, although Buddhism is a religion that
advocates transcendence of transient phenomena by preaching the rejection of
attachment to bodily reasoning patterns, Buddhist doctrine-conveying texts are still full
of embodied metaphors (see the analysis of Heart Sutra in Lu and Chiang, 2007). In
contrast, we may see that the Christian eulogistic idioms used in Taiwan are less
conceptually complex and less rich in terms of their semantic content. We believe the
main reason is sociocultural, in the sense that Christianity is not the dominant religion
in Taiwan, only accounting for a relatively small part of the population (around 4
percent of the population). The demographic fact is reflected in the much lower
frequency of the idioms and the lower conceptual complexity compared to the Buddhist
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eulogistic idioms. Another important reason is historical; Christianity was introduced to
Taiwan only a few hundred years ago, with aggressive (Presbyterian) evangelism
recorded only as late as 1865, which has left a shorter time span (than Buddhism) for
the local development of Christianity and for Christian elements to integrate with local
funeral practice. These points, therefore, show the importance of the sociocultural and
the historical context in the analysis of religious discourse.
13.4 Future Directions
The previous discussion allows us to see the usefulness of the pragmeme analysis of
death rituals conducted through a conceptual metaphor theory approach. Such a
Cognitive Linguistic approach to analyzing religious language has been lacking in the
field and should be advocated. As we have shown, a cognitive approach to the language
of rituals can be useful in the sense that such an approach allows us to use the linguistic
constructions that are relevant to certain worldview of a religion and assemble the
conceptual pieces invoked by the constructions into a coherent whole. However, in
addition to conceptual approaches to metaphor, we believe that there are other
Cognitive Linguistic frameworks and research methods that will be equally useful in
analyzing language use in rituals. Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), for instance,
may be a good candidate, in the sense that it allows us to explore not only individual
lexical expressions but also connected discourse. In the language of rituals, the issue of
subjectivity, which is the speaker’s role and conceptualization of self in his interaction
with the other participants of the ritual, may be an aspect worth looking into. In this
connection, sermon has been referred to (though only in passing) as a discourse genre
potentially interesting to a cognitive grammar approach. The issue of subjectivity, or the
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way the ritual participants are conceptualized in their verbal exchange, underlies the
discourse viewpoint (Dancygier, 2012) adopted by the participants of the ritual.
Another discussion that has been going on in Cognitive Linguistics is the limits of
the conceptual metaphor theory. Though, it is true that a large proportion of our
thinking is metaphorical in nature, conceptual metonymy, oxymoron, and antithesis are
often kept at the background. Their relationship with conceptual metaphor and their
roles in rituals are of no less importance than meanings created through metaphor. If
we assume that symbolism is based on the metonymic relations, and rituals are highly
symbolic acts, then it opens a new dimension of research not only of the death rituals,
but also of the other rituals, such as marriages, coronations, and so on.
In addition to theoretical constructs that may be useful in analyzing the language
of rituals, there are various aspects of rituals that can be explored. Note that what we
showed in this case study was relatively small; in particular, the linguistic part of death
rituals. Therein, we focused only on a highly formulaic type of language usage (i.e.,
Chinese chéngyǔ “four-character idioms”). What we presented was merely one-way
verbal communication that the mourner uses to accommodate the family to their loss. In
a typical Taiwanese funeral, a representative of the family reads a farewell speech
(jiādiàn wén) to present their emotions and to give thanks to the mourners, which is
another type of one-way verbal communication in a death ritual. Therefore, a
comprehensive consideration of the verbal exchanges in different formats in a ritual is
desirable. A standard, possibly highly formulaic, text or scripture read at a ritual may
also be an important subject of future research.
Note also that language is merely one of the modes of representation (be it
written or spoken), and there are certainly other modes of representation (such as
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visual), so a multimodal analysis of the various dimensions of a ritual, of which the
linguistic plays a core part, will be intellectually fruitful. At a funeral, for instance, the
language used by the participants is not the only concern; what matters may range from
the interior design (such as the display, color, and style) of the funeral hall, the
sequence of the various steps of the ceremony, and the body language of the mourners
(social distance, posture, etc.), to the physical arrangement of the assembly. Another
typical instance can be a burial, where the linguistic representation matters, among
numerous others, which may range from the absolute and relative orientation of the
coffin, the decoration of the burial site, or whether the corpse is cremated, to the design
and layout of the tomb and even the tombstone. Language matters as well as the other
elements of a ritual.
There can also be various research methods for studying language used at a
ritual. If the language sample to be studied is already in the written form, a corpus can
be built out of it and some keyword or statistical analysis can be conducted to turn up
patterns in the sample. The language sample to be studied can be in the spoken form, in
which case the researcher might need to record and transcribe the verbal exchanges. If
a multimodal analysis is planned, the researcher may need to videotape or to take
selective photo shots of the ritual. Depending on the research tradition of the
researcher’s field, different methods (or a combination of two or more methods) can be
employed.
One more direction that we see as prospective for the development of ritual
study is the idea of further testing the universality of metaphor. Kövecses (2010)
discusses the issue of universality and cultural variation of conceptual metaphors. Even
though research continues to include a greater variety of languages, it is not nearly
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reaching its completeness. As more and more scholars are getting involved in the
intercultural research, we are collecting more information. With the forecasts for
stronger globalization, this type of research will also contribute to preserving and
documenting of the cultural variations in diachrony, should the ritual get lost and the
language or its formulas fall out of use.
And finally, as the term pragmeme was addressed in the chapter, we see the
future of the ethnolinguistic studies in pursuing a more precise definition of the
pragmeme and identification of its elements that can be applied for the study of other
rituals, both religious and secular. A question that should be addressed further is how to
define and identify the elements of pragmemes when it comes to complex rites of
purification or coming of age existing in many religions? These and other questions are
only some of the future prospects for the research within the field of rituals and
ritualistic language, for linguistics, ethnographers, scholars of cognition, to name just a
few.
Contractions Used in the Glosses (Following
Leipzig Glossing Rules)
CL: classifier
LOC: locative marker
LK: linker
NEG: negator
PRT: particle
TENT: tentative aspect
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