Ye, Zhengdao (2010). Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A lexical-conceptual analysis. In Wayne Christensen, Elizabeth Schier, & John Sutton (Eds.), ASCS09: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (pp. 375-383). Sydney: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.5096/ASCS200957. PDF (open access)
Slightly revised as:
Ye, Zhengdao (2012). Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A lexical-conceptual analysis. In Cathryn Donohue, Shunichi Ishihara, & William Steed (Eds.), Quantitative approaches to problems in linguistics: Studies in honour of Phil Rose (pp. 265-280), Munich: Lincom Europa.
There are many activities that humans cannot do without. Eating and drinking are two of them. But, do people conceptualize 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 conceptualization. In Mandarin Chinese, a lexical distinction is made between 吃 chī and 喝 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, explores the motivations behind their figurative meaning extensions, and uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to articulate the conceptualizations 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. However, this paper also illustrates that one perhaps should not underestimate the variations of conceptualization within one ethnic group.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
