Liulin Zhang 张榴琳 Home

Chinese Language · Cognitive Linguistics · Construction Grammar · Psycholinguistics · Language Pedagogy

“像学中文一样难！”

这句话在许多语言中成了谚语，大致相当于“难于上青天”。

确实这么难吗？倘若真的这么难，为何它能跨越空间跨越时间，
千年来为亿万人所使用？

还是说，它只是有点不同而已，和其他某些语言相比。

然而，纵使语言形式不同，所联系的社会文化背景不同，作为同一物种的人类，认知相通，语言成分表达的概念自然不会截然不同，语言成分的组合规律必然也会有相通之处。

从相通的认知出发，不同的部分，让它变成一篇篇故事，关乎文化、历史、地理……百科全书知识。

中文可以不再神秘。

Liulin Zhang 张榴琳

The relationship between language and cognition motivated me to explore this topic.

Utilizing corpus data and experimentation, my research is completely based on language use. In my study, human cognition is primarily approached via lexical semantics, the conceptual schemas underlying language constructions and the interaction between them. The focus of my exploration is on the Chinese Language. Based upon the contrast between Chinese and other languages, I try to bring to light some general characteristics of human conceptualization, as well as the special features of Chinese that need to be accounted for by extra-linguistic knowledge
including culture, geography, history, etc. In this process, the study
of Chinese characters plays an indispensible role in connecting the rich
varieties of Chinese, and serves to shed light on lexical semantics as well.
I also try to show that the teaching of Chinese can be aided through a better

understanding of both the general characteristics of human cognition
reflected in languages, and the special features found in Chinese.

MY LATEST RESEARCH

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This study is about the fundamental difference between Chinese and Indo-European languages. This difference is rooted in history, culture, and mindset. It is profound and extending to various disciplines including language teaching, natural language processing, etc. The special nature of the Chinese language also challenges some assumptions of general linguistics

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Word is commonly assumed to be the basic linguistic unit, but its definition has actually been controversial in Chinese. The Chinese language is documented in Chinese characters, with no spaces between words: for Chinese, the inherent and (relatively) stable unit is the Chinese character, but not word.