Los sentimientos morales de la «tristeza» china. Una ilustración del acercamiento del Metalenguaje Semántico Natural (MSN) al análisis de algunas emociones chinas «básicas»

This study undertakes, under the framework of Natural Semantic Metlanguage (NSM) developed by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues, a detailed contrastive and comparative semantic analysis of a pair of emotions concepts: bei and ai (often glossed interchangeably as sadness, sorrow, and grief), which are considered to be basic emotions in traditional Chinese philosophical texts. It illustrates that (a) they are by no means interchangeable, nor are they equivalent of the Western idea of sadness, (b) they are artifacts of the Chinese culture, shaped by Chinese people’s social and moral experiences, and their view of life and the universe. Essentially, bei encompasses a fatalistic view, and ai is a moral emotion. This leads the author to challenge the claims of universality based on the view entrenched in the English language, and urges researchers to pay attention to the analytical framework employed in the search for universal aspects of human emotions.Este estudio emprende, desde el marco del Metalenguaje Semántico Natural (MSN) desarrollado por Wierzbicka y algunos colegas, un detallado análisis semántico contrastivo y comparativo de dos conceptos de emoción: bei y ai (a menudo glosados de manera intercambiable como tristeza, pena y dolor), que son considerados como emociones básicas en los textos filosóficos chinos tradicionales. En él se demuestra que: a) de ninguna manera son intercambiables, ni equivalentes a la idea occidental de tristeza, b) son artefactos de la cultura china, conformados por las experiencias morales y sociales del pueblo chino y su visión de la vida y del universo. En esencia, bei comporta una visión fatalista y ai es una emoción moral. Esto lleva a la autora a poner en duda el postulado de universalidad basado en la visión arraigada en la lengua inglesa, y llama a los investigadores a prestar atención al marco analítico empleado en la búsqueda de aspectos universales de las emociones humanas

PINE: Universal Deep Embedding for Graph Nodes via Partial Permutation Invariant Set Functions

Graph node embedding aims at learning a vector representation for all nodes given a graph. It is a central problem in many machine learning tasks (e.g., node classification, recommendation, community detection). The key problem in graph node embedding lies in how to define the dependence to neighbors. Existing approaches specify (either explicitly or implicitly) certain dependencies on neighbors, which may lead to loss of subtle but important structural information within the graph and other dependencies among neighbors. This intrigues us to ask the question: can we design a model to give the maximal flexibility of dependencies to each node's neighborhood. In this paper, we propose a novel graph node embedding (named PINE) via a novel notion of partial permutation invariant set function, to capture any possible dependence. Our method 1) can learn an arbitrary form of the representation function from the neighborhood, withour losing any potential dependence structures, and 2) is applicable to both homogeneous and heterogeneous graph embedding, the latter of which is challenged by the diversity of node types. Furthermore, we provide theoretical guarantee for the representation capability of our method for general homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs. Empirical evaluation results on benchmark data sets show that our proposed PINE method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on producing node vectors for various learning tasks of both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1805.1118

Eating and Drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A Lexical-Conceptual Analysis

Abstract There are many activities that humans cannot do without. Eating and drinking are two of them. But, do people conceptualise these 'basic' human activities in the same way? This paper provides a Chinese perspective from two varieties of Sinitic languages-Mandarin Chinese and Shanghai Wu, which is spoken in the Shanghai metropolitan area by approximately 14 million native speakers. Both of these forms of Chinese suggest two different ways of conceptualisation. In Mandarin Chinese, a lexical distinction is made between chī and hē, comparable to eat and drink in English (but not exactly the same); whereas in Shanghai Wu one single lexical item čhyq is used to describe any activity involving ingestion. The paper conducts a detailed contrastive semantic analysis of these concepts in question, explores the motivations behind their figurative meaning extensions, and uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to articulate the conceptulisations reflected in these concepts. The findings of this paper are consistent with those emerging from crosslinguistic investigation of less familiar languages in recent times, in that there are variations in linguistic coding of eating and drinking (e.g. Newman, 2009b). However, this paper also illustrates that one perhaps should not underestimate the variations of conceptualisation within one ethnic group

Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A Lexical-Conceptual analysis

There are many activities that humans cannot do without. Eating and drinking are two of them. But, do people conceptualise these �basic� human activities in the same way? This paper provides a Chinese perspective from two varieties of Sinitic languages�Mandarin Chinese and Shanghai Wu, which is spoken in the Shanghai metropolitan area by approximately 14 million native speakers. Both of these forms of Chinese suggest two different ways of conceptualisation. In Mandarin Chinese, a lexical distinction is made between chī and hē, comparable to eat and drink in English (but not exactly the same); whereas in Shanghai Wu one single lexical item čhyq is used to describe any activity involving ingestion. The paper conducts a detailed contrastive semantic analysis of these concepts in question, explores the motivations behind their figurative meaning extensions, and uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to articulate the conceptulisations reflected in these concepts. The findings of this paper are consistent with those emerging from crosslinguistic investigation of less familiar languages in recent times, in that there are variations in linguistic coding of eating and drinking (e.g. Newman, 2009b). However, this paper also illustrates that one perhaps should not underestimate the variations of conceptualisation within one ethnic group

The politeness bias and the society of strangers

This paper argues that politeness, a notion central to many theories of social interaction and pragmatics, is fundamentally biased towards models of social interaction based on the ‘society of strangers’ (as opposed to the ‘society of intimates’; cf. Givón, 2005), consistent with the values and cultural ethos of Anglophone societies. It illustrates this by comparing Anglophone communicative styles to Chinese interactional style characteristic of the ‘society of intimates’, and by tracing its roots to eighteenth-century Britain, often referred to as the ‘age of politeness’ (e.g. Klein, 2002). It makes two points. First, the communicative style of undifferentiated social relations reflected in the politeness concept has left unexplored an important dimension of social relation categories in the study of human social interaction. Second, to break the spell of the politeness biases, it is important to examine native terms and concepts which are key to unlocking the interactional patterns and styles within a speech community. By offering a review of seminal critiques of the politeness theory written from the perspective of Japanese and Chinese, and by providing a Chinese perspective on the interplay between social categorisation and social interaction, this study is firmly placed in the emic tradition of East Asian pragmatics

The semantics of nouns

This volume brings together the latest research on the semantics of nouns in both familiar and less well-documented languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, the Papuan language Koromu, the Dravidian language Solega, and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara from Australia. Chapters offer systematic and detailed analyses of scores of individual nouns across a range of conceptual domains, including 'people', 'places', and 'living things', with each analysis fully grounded in a unified methodological framework. They not only cover central theoretical issues specific to the analysis of the domain in question, but also empirically investigate the different types of meaning relations that hold between nouns, such as meronymy, hyponymy, taxonomy, and antonymy

The semantics of 'migrant', 'immigrant' and 'refugee': a cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract: This paper investigates the meanings of words that denote people who change, either voluntarily or involuntarily, places where they live. More specifically, it contrasts the meanings of ‘migrants’, ‘immigrant’, ‘illegal immigrant’ in varieties of English (e.g. Australian, British, and American), by using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (e.g. Wierzbicka 1972, 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014)and provides a cross-linguistic perspective by discussing the major meaning differences between yímí (‘emigrant/immigrant’) and nánmín (‘refugee’) in Chinese and their counterparts in English. Drawing on insights of NSM work on nouns for people (e.g. Wierzbicka 1986; Ye 2017c), this paper also discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of the study, particularly the role of lexico-conceptual analysis in understanding a speech community’s conceptualization of themselves and the Other