Lexical strategies for encoding Chinese dish names
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In this study, I address the lexical strategies for encoding Chinese dish names in Chinese and a typologically distant language (which is Czech) from a cognitive semantic point of view, with emphasis on the use of conceptual mechanisms such as metaphor, metonymy and image-schemas. The study will be methodologically based on the use of multiple parallel texts, comparing Chinese with a distant language using different versions of menus from sampled Chinese restaurants in Czechia. The main findings to be presented include: firstly, some metonymy-based expressions in Chinese (such as ?? shuang-dong and ??? luóhan zhai) simply cannot get through, or barely gets through, to the Czech language; secondly, some homophony-based Chinese dish names (such as ??? pútí rou) do not get through to the Czech language at all; thirdly, some figurative Chinese dish names are highly obscure and when they do get across to the Czech menus, they keep their highly abstract and figurative nature (such as ?? san-xian, ?? wu-xiang, ?? ba-bao, and ??? quán jia fú); fourthly, in rare cases, Chinese-specific creativity may get through to the target language (or by accident “leak” to the target language, so to speak) from the source language (such as the case of ??? shíjin yú), resulting in a highly poetic (though completely inaccurate) construal of the dish. With the above findings, I discuss the language-specificity of the Chinese linguistic tool against the framework of Radical Construction Grammar and the methodological advantage of studying renditions of Chinese dish names in various random languages following a Multi-ParT approach, in the backdrop of the socio-cultural turn of Cognitive Linguistics. |