SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER MARKER AND MANDARIN CHINESE AFFIXOID

This study focuses on the recent morphological development -jie ‘sister’ in Mandarin Chinese. For example, in zhùpǎo-jiě 助跑姐 ‘a woman who ran up to pretend something’ -jie is an affixoid. Our data are taken from Taiwan News Smart Web (2019) and are examined within a semantic and morphological framework. The goal of the study is to investigate the semantic and morphological attributes of [X + jie] nominals and to find out social development the nominals revealed. The findings show that, semantically, [X + jie] refers to the outer appearance, emotion, and behavior of the targeted female. Morphologically, the nominals could be in sentential form and undergo omission, reversion, modification, etc. before reaching suffixation formatting with the affixoid. The high productivity of the gender marker -jie brings the social development of this Chinese speaking society to light. [X + jie] nominals demonstrate social activity, cultural organization, political event, and language contact in Taiwan

The Linguistic Frame and Semantic Roles: plant fixed expressions in Chinese and English

This study presents plant fixed expressions in Mandarin Chinese and in English. We present the compositionality of core meanings of tea, melon, and apple and propose that to understand PFEs needs the understanding of a linguistic plant frame. This study supports the assumption of cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991) through the analysis of plant fixed expressions, and resumes Pustejovsky’s (1993, 1995) mechanism of type coercion from a syntactic coercion to a broader package-semantic operation. Este estudio presenta expresiones hechas de plantas en chino mandarín y en inglés. Presentamos la composicionalidad de los significados centrales de té, melón y manzana y proponemos que para entender dichas expresiones de plantas se necesita entender el marco lingüístico planta. Este estudio se apoya en los presupuestos de la gramática cognitiva (Langacker 1987, 1991) a través del análisis de expresiones hechas de plantas, y resume los mecanismos de Pustejovsky (1993, 1995) desde la coerción de tipo hasta una operación más amplia de paquete semántico

German super and intensifiers in social communication

This study examines the intensifier super in German with data taken from Das Wortauskunftssystem zur deutschen Sprache in Geschichte und Gegenwart (DWDS, Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Geyken 2020). We inspect the morphosyntactic and semantic development of super, and aim to explore its delexicalization tendency. In closing, the development of intensifiers in social communication is presented. The results show that German super enjoys morphosyntactic flexibility. The meaning of this versatile intensifier shifts freely among various magnitudes of intensification, from 'more than', 'very', to 'top most', and even has gone lower than the reference point to mean 'actually not good'. German super has advanced itself in terms of linguistic performance and is gradually losing its role as an intensifier. A diachronic inspection of the use of German super attests linguistic revival in that from a rarely used intensifier, super escalates its use in the last decades in German society. Outer world influences have put super through lexical competitions. Reports on general intensifiers reveal the inner linguistic motivation of change that intensifiers own, and sociolinguistic factors such as gender, age and education background all contribute to the variability of intensifiers in social communication

Humor in Slogans: Van Helsing Effect in Second Language Learning

The present paper further extends the studies of Eisend (2009), Takahashi and Inoue (2009), and Kohn, et al. (2011), and applies Krishnan & Chakravarti’s (2003) experiment design to examine: 1) whether humor in slogans enhances L2 learners’ memory of the promoted items in advertisements; 2) will Vampire Effect occur in humorous slogans and distract L2 learners’ focus so much that they cannot pay attention to the importance of the promoted item itself? And, 3) is gender a distinguishing feature in terms of the acceptance and sensitivity to the humor in slogans? One pretest, two experiments and one post-test were conducted in this study. In the experiments, the participants’ immediate responses to the questions and their memory of the promoted products and candidates were vital. A follow up face-to-face interview was then conducted. It was found that L2 learners’ familiarity with the promoted items was more important than the level of humor in the slogans. That is, instead of the Vampire Effect, in which the degree of funniness is so high that it overwhelms the significance of the item promoted, the Van Helsing Effect, in which L2 learners’ previous experience is more influential in the process of recognizing the slogans and the promoted items, appears

Emotion and culture of eye-metaphors in Mandarin, Spanish and German

This study attempts to give a cognitive semantic study of eye expressions (EEs) in Chinese, Spanish and German. The majority of the data are collected from corpora and dictionaries. The research questions are: (1) Is the BODY IS STATIC hypothesis proposed by Hsieh and Lu (2012) valid? (2) Do the verbs in EEs showing emotions suggest something? And, (3) what cultural aspects do the EEs in three languages involve? The results show that the analysis of semantic molecules and tenors of the EEs confirm the validity of BODY IS STATIC hypothesis. The verbs of the EEs play an important role in expressing emotion. The verbs that are inherited for other body parts, such as for hand, mouth, are extended to the sight domain and assist such emotion communication effectively. Bodily experiences work in linguistic as a whole as well. Finally, cultural aspects of social behavior and social communication in the specific social groups are shown. They are all revealed through a cross-cultural linguistic comparison

Fictive Motion in Chinese and English Tourist Guidebooks

This study focuses on the usage of fictive motion in tourist guidebooks. The analysis for the study draws on the theories of image schema and metaphorical extension (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987 & 1989). Fictive motion is often used to depict the features of natural scenery and the movement of time. We concentrate on the spatial description of fictive motion with data taken from official tourist guidebooks for seven National Parks in Taiwan. Both the narrations in Chinese and in English versions are analyzed. From the comparison, we attempt to assist tourist comprehension of the narratives in tourist guidebooks. The research results indicate that fictive motion description is often used in the depiction of linear movement or for the location of scenic spots, as for example with The river starts from the mountain in English and yan2 shi2 huan2 rao4 si4 zhou1 ‘the rock surrounded’ in Chinese. There are varied applications of fictive motion in Chinese and English, but fictive motion in both languages also shares common characteristics in spatial description.Key words: Fictive motion; Tourist guidebooks; Image schema; Metaphorical extension; Spatial descriptio

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms