Thomas Van Hoey

This paper focuses on lexical nominalization, clausal nominalization and complementation, and relativization in Isbukun Bunun (Formosan, Austronesian). Based on fieldwork in Taoyuan, Kaohsiung in Taiwan, it shows the similarities and dissimilarities between the three different linguistic phenomena. It is found that the Philippine focus system plays a very important role in all three phenomena and that some markers are shared between them.

This paper explores the use of corpus lingusitic methods to investigate the uniqueness of Eurovision Song Contest lyrics and what makes it so unique. To do so, a great deal background knowledge about the study is necessary and is discussed to understand its impact as a cultural phenomenon in Europe. A large corpus of all the song lyrics translated in English in the period 1956-2013 is constructed and compared to a reference corpus and findings in previous studies. Tools that are used for this purpose include AntConc, Sketch Engine and the semantic tagger Wmatrix. It is found that the ESC corpus differs considerably from contemporary pop song lyrics and in depth analyses of some highly frequent elements is carried out. The message the ESC wants to put forth is one of love, unity and life.

This paper, written for a course on lexical semantics, discusses the conceptualization of the lexical field 'weather' in Mandarin Chinese. First we construct a lexical field in the Structuralist sense, which is followed by a basic level analysis. Then the scope is broadened to a syntagmatic approach that is put into typological persepctive and placed against English Frames. After this, etymology of the basic levels is analyzed and finally the semasiological analysis is viewed in light of theories of conceptual metaphor/metonymy.

This paper is written for the University of Leuven course ‘Lexicology and Morphology’ (F0VG6a). It focuses mostly on lexicology and follows the application of four different linguistic streams to the Chinese word junzi, mostly translated as ‘Prince’, ‘gentleman’. The four streams are historicalphilological semantics, structuralist semantics, neostructuralist semantics and cognitive semantics.

Based on Dirk Geeraerts’s survey of these theories in his book Theories of Lexical Semantics, the paper addresses issues like semasiological versus onomasiological theories, individual versus systemic perspectives, and decontextualization versus recontextualization.

The study proposes that a full investigation into the meaning of a word should not be confined to a single theory, but needs a set of varying frameworks. Furthermore it is shown how a Chinese word can be analyzed through this set of more Western inspired set of theories.

This paper (written in Dutch) discusses an incident that happend on October 13th 2011 in Foshan, Guangdong. A three-year old todler, Wang Yue 王悦 (Yue Yue 悦悦) got run over twice, while 18 people passed by without helping. Eventually the toddler deceased one week later in the hospital. The world was shocked.
This paper aims to determine how negligence work in Chinese (PRC) law and focuses primarily on the case Yue Yue, viewed from the perspective of Chinese and foreign (Belgian) theories, so as to prevent cases of negligence in the future.

De aanleiding voor deze paper is het ongeluk dat op 13 oktober 2011 in Foshan, Guangdong voorviel. Daarbij werd een driejarige kleuter, Wang Yue 王悦 (Yue Yue 悦悦) tweemaal overreden en liepen achttien mensen haar voorbij zonder te helpen. Uiteindelijk overleed de kleuter een week later in het ziekenhuis. De wereld reageerde geschokt.
Deze paper tracht te achterhalen hoe schuldig verzuim werkt in China en focust hoofdzakelijk op de zaak Yue Yue en de Chinese en buitenlandse theorieën rond de oorzaken ervan en de oplossingen ervoor, opdat zulke zaken niet meer kunnen voorvallen. Er wordt verwacht dat er op termijn een uitgebreidere wetgeving komt rond schuldig verzuim.

This paper is a case study that explores the emergence of low-level constructional patterns of Premodern Chinese ideophones in the historical corpus of the Standard Histories (zhengshi 正史), using a corpus-driven methodology. It focuses on the digital procedures that are needed to handle a large amount of texts. As a case study, the emergence of post-ideophone mental space markers (ran  然, ru  如 and ruo  若) are studied in the four Three Histories (Shiji, Hanshu, Hou Hanshu, and Sanguo zhi). These mental space markers display considerable overlap with markers for second person pronouns and simile markers in Classical Chinese. Their motivation of their functionality as post-ideophone markers is studied from a Cognitive Grammar perspective. It is shown that a combination of these methodologies and frameworks provide a solid base for further research with a larger scope of texts, in order to establish a schematized network of linguistic phenomena that is related to the use of ideophones in Premodern Chinese.

Iconicity is a pervasive phenomenon in language that defies the Saussurean dictum of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, not only occurring in phenomena like sound symbolism and ideophones (e.g. Dingemanse 2012), gesture and sign language (e.g. Herlofsky 2005), but also syntax (e.g. Haiman 1985; Van Langendonck 2007). Iconicity is best viewed as a unified notion that manifests itself very differently in different circumstances, some being highly schematical or semiotically general, others related to lower-level cultural customs. Chinese data is particularly revealing in case of the latter because of its logographic nature, but also displays cross-linguistic characteristics in case of the former. In this paper we will use the semantic domain of meteorological expressions in Chinese, with data based on dictionaries like Handian (Handian 漢典 2004) and WordNet (Hsieh & Huang 2009), to illustrate the interplay of iconic patterns on the two different levels: general conception and culture/language specific. We chose ‘weather’ as a domain because it constitutes a highly salient phenomenon that occurs across different languages and cultures (Eriksen, Kittilä & Kolehmainen 2010) and because it provided both ‘normal vocabulary’ as well as ideophones. Thus we can address two main questions in the call for papers.

As for the first question, “whether iconicity is culture-specific or semiotically general”, Chinese displays general types of iconicity found in cross-linguistic typological research, e.g. serial verbs as an iconic mapping of logical-temporal order, or a quite large inventory of ideophones, with many high-iconic imagic (in Peirce’s terminology) mappings between form and meaning. However, their usage of characters as a writing system displays many iconic properties that are absent in e.g. Latin based scripts, as has been long acknowledged in the traditional character classification (liu shu 六書), which includes a category for iconic characters that combined with other characters become indexes. A lexical field analysis of weather expressions shows that the basic level items essentially stem from five different iconic semantic radicals: imagic ones like rain (雨), sun (日), thunder (畾), cloud (云); and an indexical one wind (風). It is curious that the phonological form of most weather expressions is symbolic, displaying almost no iconicity, while the writing system does, e.g. xue 雪 ‘snow’ has a ‘rain’ radical which indicates a form of precipitation.

The second question, “whether iconicity can be combined within or across modalities” can be discussed from the perspective of weather-related Chinese ideophones. On the one hand, with ‘modalities’ referring to the senses, they seem to display a high flexibility concerning cross-modal synaesthesia, e.g. xilihuala 唏哩嘩啦 ‘to rain abundantly’, which depicts both hearing and movement (cf. Van Hoey's (2016) spinning top model). This lexical item has an imagic motivation in its phonological form. On the other hand, when ‘modalities’ refers to spoken vs. written language, ideophones like linlin 淋淋 ‘soaked’ show a different kind of iconicity – indexal, as seen in the semantic radical water (氵). It is mainly this interplay between (virtual) referent, phonological form and written image that is of interest to the topic of iconicity, since sometimes everything is linked through the phenomenon, but in other cases only one of the spoken or written form.
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References:
Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(10). 654–672.
Eriksen, Pål, Seppo Kittilä & Leena Kolehmainen. 2010. Linguistics of weather: cross-linguistic patterns of meteorological expressions. Studies in Language 34(3). 565–601.
Haiman, John (ed.). 1985. Iconicity in syntax: proceedings of a Symposium on Iconicity in Syntax, Stanford, June 24 - [2]6, 1983. (Typological Studies in Language 6). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Handian 漢典. 2004. Handian 漢典 [Chinese dictionary]. http://www.zdic.net/.
Herlofsky, William J. 2005. Now you see it, now you don’t: Imagic diagrams in the spatial mapping of signed (JSL) discourse. In Costantino Maeder, Olga Fischer & William J. Herlofsky (eds.), Outside-in, inside-out, 323–348. (Iconicity in Language and Literature 4). Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub.
Hsieh Shukai 謝樹凱 & Huang Churen 黃居仁. 2009. Chinese WordNet (Zhongwen cihui wanglu 中文詞義網路). http://lope.linguistics.ntu.edu.tw/cwn/ .
Van Hoey, Thomas. 2016. Ideophones in Premodern Chinese: Revisiting Dingemanse’s implicational hierarchy (poster). Mimetics in Japanese and other languages in the world (日本語と世界諸言語のオノマトペ). Tachikawa: NINJAL.
Van Langendonck, Willy. 2007. Iconicity. In Dirk Geeraerts & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics, 394–418. (Oxford Handbooks). Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Dingemanse (2012) posited a cross-linguistic implicational hierarchy for the semantic domains of ideophones.
I try to give an updated version for both the cross-linguistic level (conceptual level) and the way it communicates with the language-particular level through the spinning top model.

Ideophones, defined by Dingemanse (2011; 2012) as phonologically and morpho-logically marked words that depict some form of sensory image, occur very frequently in Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) Middle Chinese poems. There is some work on the oldest variants as well as modern variants of Sinitic languages (cf. Sun 1999; Mok 2001; Bodomo 2006; De Sousa 2008; De Sousa 2011; Meng 2012; Wu 2014), but so far, there is no published encompassing study of ideophones in this stage in the historical development of Sinitic languages.

Given that the nature of the construction of ideophone is fixed and fossilized, they are good candidates for observing language diffusion. This paper aims to investigate the relation between the use of ideophones and the geographical characteristics of landscape, in a further attempt to pursue their possible diffusion paths across dynasties. Our main data of ideophones come from the 300 Tang poems (Tang shi san bai shou 唐詩三百首). From a variationist perspective it can be argued that the places from which the authors of these poems originated heavily influenced their use of language, especially in the domain of ideophones, which depict a sensory image and thus show a high iconicity link with the perspective they use to view the world. In this presentation, we present a case study of three ideophones that grossly share the same meaning and have a similar structure: mangmang茫茫 ‘vast; blurred’ vs. mangmang 芒芒 vs. cangmang蒼茫 ‘expansive looking’. The results show an interesting semantic correspondence between the usage of the studied ideophones in their usage and the geographical landscape. Furthermore, there is a tendency of diffusion from the North China to the Central China. There is also. This paper also applies geographical software like Google maps to visualize our findings (see Fig.1). This will increase our understanding of how ideophones in Middle Chinese work and how they were used and influenced contemporary language.

Nickelodeon's animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) and Avatar: Legend of Korra (LOK) have made a considerable impact since they have been released, more than a decade ago. One of the most fascinating elements is the world in which the story is set—it integrates both low-level elements from various Eastern as well as Western cultures. In this intertextual tapestry a huge correlative network is identified, which rests on the conceptual blending of PEOPLE and NATURE, similar to correlative networks in Chinese five-elemental theory and Western humourism. Similar cognitive blending processes are then identified for the hybrid animals in the series. A third example is the blending of modern elements into the previously established world of ATLA during LOK. These underlying blends and low-level intertextual blends are greatly responsible for the success of both series.