Zhuo Jing-Schmidt

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Oregon

The ubiquity of counterfactual thinking as an experiential universal is well established in social psychology, decision research and neuropsychology. It challenges both the premise and the conclusion of earlier studies on the linguistic relativity of Chinese counterfactuality, which focused on the cognitive effect of the assumed absence of counterf...

This chapter examines the Chinese Locative Existential Construction (LEC), a controversial grammatical construction in Chinese linguistics. Using corpus and prosodic evidence, we demonstrate that LEC is an information structurally marked construction that presents the entity expressed by the inverted subject as focus. We conclude with pedagogical i...

There is a growing body of scholarly evidence that media convergence blurs the boundary between media production and media consumption and obscures the lines between institutions and individuals. Media convergence in the context of China has garnered attention in communication studies and in cultural studies. However, there is a scarcity of researc...

Henry Jenkins posited that digital culture is convergence culture. This prognosis has since been intensely debated. Critiques of its romanticization of grassroots participation and objections to its neglect of the political economy of media convergence are particularly pertinent in the context of China where media is under state control despite the...

This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on Chinese sentence-final particles (SFPs) from sociolinguistic and discourse perspectives. I will discuss studies of this linguistic category in data-based empirical research as well as in descriptive grammars, and identify the main strands of theoretical underpinnings as well as methodological appr...

Despite extensive research efforts to explain the Mandarin Chinese particle le , confusion persists in the absence of a unitary theory and sufficient empirical evidence. This study provides a unitary account of le by adopting a usage-based constructionist approach, one that liberates grammatical aspect from, and is able to accommodate, lexical aspe...

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the...

This article is concerned with metonymy as a cognitive mechanism underlying our best and worst instincts. In particular, I consider two seemingly opposite processes of metonymy: (1) conceptual bypassing of sensory percepts, which leads to an intuitive leap to abstract insights and judgments and (2) conceptual oversimplification of a social category...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused an unprecedented public health crisis worldwide. Its intense politicization constantly made headlines, especially regarding the use of face masks as a safety precaution. However, the extent to which public opinion is polarized on wearing masks has remained anecdotal and the verbal representation of...

2021. Affective stance in constructional idioms: A usage-based constructionist approach to Mandarin [yòu X yòu Y], Journal of Pragmatics 177, 29-50. The Mandarin Chinese [yòu X yòu Y] is a semi-formulaic construction with two open slots X and Y, which admit a range of lexical input. Existing studies of this constructional idiom are incomplete due t...

This article examines Chinese manual motor metaphors involving manual object manipulation as the source domain. Specifically, we use corpus data to investigate two transitive constructions, [抓紧 zhuājĭn 'grab tightly, clutch' NP] and [把住 băzhù 'grasp firmly' NP], and a causative construction [把 bă NP 捧 pĕng COMPL] 'lift NP with deliberation'. In eac...

This presentation is about the ways the sensory experience of smell serves as a metaphor source domain across languages for abstract conceptualization.

This study investigates emerging usages in Chinese cyberspace of the numeral classifier méi that violate syntactic and semantic conventions of canonical grammar of modern Chinese. We treat these usages as constructional variants of the canonical classifier construction and show how they afford users of Weibo a device of social indexicality in the s...

This study investigates emerging usages in Chinese cyberspace of the numeral classifier méi that violate syntactic and semantic conventions of canonical grammar of modern Chinese. We treat these usages as constructional variants of the canonical classifier construction and show how they afford users of Weibo a device of social indexicality in the s...

This study addresses gender as a translation problem arising from typological differences between languages in gender marking. A case study was conducted on gender in six English translations of the Chinese classic Dao De Jing in which personal reference is gender-indefinite. I show how personal reference translation from Chinese into English, a pr...

The acquisition of nominal structures (NS) in early Chinese SLA has been shown to be patterned, reflecting the structural and hierarchical complexity of NS (Charters 2013). This study compares the usage patterns of Chinese nominal structures in the form of [X 的 NP] in advanced-level L1 American English (AE) and L1 German (GER) learners of Chinese....

Cursing is a universal and enduring human activity. As such it provides a window into human ethology, psychology, and culture. It is inherently related to taboo and its symbiotic other – euphemism. This chapter will begin with an overview of key scholarly insights on cursing, taboo, and euphemism, from psychology, anthropology, linguistics and rela...

Human societies change over time. When new ideas, new tools, new institutions, new knowledge, and new ways of life arise, they bring forth new words – neologisms. This chapter begins with an overview of research on the major waves of neologisms in the history of Chinese, followed by a review of recent work on the conventionalization measures of neo...

Translation is border crossing not only at the semantic-pragmatic level, but also at socio-indexical and political levels. When gender-neutral human reference in the original text is rendered in generic masculine forms in the target language, gendered meanings arise. I analyze German and English translations of classical Chinese texts with a focus...

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the place of discourse in the recent history of linguistics. Following this I will provide a synopsis of research on the interaction of discourse and grammar in Chinese, outlining studies concerned with the ways in which discourse shapes the structure, organization, and usage patterns of grammatical cons...

Language is a complex functional adaptive system (Beckner, Bybee, Christiansen, Croft, Ellis, Holland, Ke, Larsen-Freeman & Schoenemann 2009; Ellis 2015). Language learning is learning to use a complex system (Larsen-Freeman 2011). It is a multidimensional task involving social cognitive processes that interact both in time and space (MacWhinney 20...

Language is a complex functional adaptive system (Beckner, Bybee, Christiansen, Croft, Ellis, Holland, Ke, Larsen-Freeman & Schoenemann 2009; Ellis 2015). Language learning is learning to use a complex system (Larsen-Freeman 2011), which is a multidimensional task involving social cognitive processes that interact both in time and space (MacWhinney...

This article revisits the relativity debate about Chinese counterfactual reasoning in light of two sources of new evidence: (1) converging evidence of the ubiquity of counterfactual reasoning as a universal experience from decision research, social psychology, and neuropsychology, and (2) newly available corpus data from Chinese that, analyzed with...

This article describes emerging misogynistic labels involving the morpheme biăo ‘slut’ as a gendered personal suffix in the Chinese cyber lexicon. We analyze the morphological, semantic, and cognitive processes behind their coinage, and the way they are used across gender lines in Chinese social media as a community of discourse practice. Our findi...

This chapter provides an overview of the linguistic theoretical topics that have occupied the field of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL) in the last two decades. The goal of this overview is to identify the influences of discipline inquiry in linguistics that have shaped and are shaping the discourses in the field of TCSL, and the partic...

This article examines metaphor choice in China’s official anti-corruption discourse. Drawing on corpus data, we analyze the metaphors used by the Chinese Communist Party and its flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily, to frame the anti-corruption campaign and influence public perception. It is found that both embodied experience and cultural models...

This plenary speech explores counterfactual thought and language. It does so by drawing on converging insights from decision research, social psychology, neuropsychology of counterfactual thinking, and the pragmatics of counterfactual language. The functions of ordinary counterfactual expressions in English and Chinese indicate that counterfactual...

This article focuses on a basic issue in the scientific study of Chinese That is a principled way to identify and define basic issues and topics in the Chinese language sciences. Following the criteria proposal by Huang et al. (2018) in their 《Routledge Handbook in Chinese Applied Linguistics》(RHCAL), we claim that all relevant linguistic research...

This study investigates the diachronic development of Chinese disjunction, drawing implications both for principles of diachronic Construction Grammar, and for the linguistic typology of disjunction. Close examinations of data from historical corpora revealed non-linear, gradual constructional changes based on complex yet principled interactions of...

In an attempt to spurt ideas about ways of professionalizing CSL teaching as a field, this paper puts forward a usage-based con-structionist theoretical orientation for CSL teaching and teacher education. It shows how a theoretical orientation buttressed by empirically sound descriptive and acquisition models can help Chinese language teachers to d...

High-frequency grammatical constructions are multifunc-tional, and the different functions are associated with different construc-tional subtypes. How to stratify the constructional subtypes in a pedagog-ically meaningful way is a central concern in Chinese grammar instruction. Due to the lack of both theoretical foundation and empirical support, a...

Plenary speech at the First International Forum on Linguistics in Chinese Education May 8-10, UC, Davis

This paper investigates anti-graft metaphors in current Chinese political discourse. Under examination are official discourses from the 2013 anti-graft campaign in the Chinese and English versions of The People's Daily, a daily newspaper widely seen as the voice of the Chinese Communist Party. It is found that the choice of anti-graft metaphors is...

In this talk I will explore the contemporary Chinese cyber-lexicon and the emerging social categories and social antagonisms it represents. I will argue that the explosive change, deconstruction, renewal, re-creation, and borrowing of form and meaning characteristic of the ongoing lexical revolution are constitutive of the larger social transformat...

Two empirical studies – a verb elicitation experiment and a collostructional analysis – were conducted to investigate the Mandarin LVS construction with respect to the lexical semantics of the verb and its collocation with grammatical aspect. Converging evidence from both studies indicates strong schematicity and productivity in the verb category o...

Developing cultural competence in Chinese heritage and non-­‐heritage students: Different challenges, different approaches Zhuo Jing-­‐Schmidt University of Oregon ABSTRACT Based on qualitative analysis of a corpus of student e-­‐journals documenting their study abroad experiences in China, this study identified differential cultural challenges fac...

In everyday experience, people engage in causal reasoning not only in the real world, but also in possible worlds as alternatives to reality. More importantly, people spontaneously evaluate real events and outcomes with reference to mentally constructed alternatives that are contrary to a past or present fact but could have happened under a differe...

The exponential increase in the number of international students pursuing non-language degrees in China calls for the re-conceptualization of advanced Chinese language skills. The development of academic and cognitive skills in the Chinese language is essential to the successful acquisition of academic content in Chinese and for the completion of a...

This study attempts to explicate the cross-linguistically widespread uses of fear expressions that can be understood as serving pragmatic purposes, here dubbed the “apprehensive”, as in I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now. We argue that such uses instantiate “endophoric evidential” (Plungian, 2001) in the sense that the emotion of fear is recrui...

Contrastive analysis of Chinese and American maternal affective speech acts revealed significant differences in the quantity of child-directed positive and negative speech acts. There were also important qualitative differences in specific types of maternal affective input. Results are consistent with available knowledge of cross-cultural differenc...

This paper examines the usage patterns of two passive constructions, the emerging zao construction and the conventional bei construction, in Chinese media language where the distributional ratio of the zao construction to the bei construction is conspicuously higher than in other genres. The difference is especially dramatic in Internet news headli...

This paper explores the ways in which higher university-level Chinese students employ zero anaphora,a typologically salient feature of Chinese discourse structure.Three learner corpora were compiled,reflecting three language backgrounds of the students:China-born Chinese heritage language learners,US-born Chinese heritage language learners and fore...

In this chapter I show how languages can differ even in the construal of universal events such as eating, getting dressed, carrying and dying. Differences are identified in terms of perceptual properties of events and in value judgments. Drawing on these observations I argue for the relevance of Cognitive Linguistics to Foreign Language Teaching (F...

This paper addresses the development of construction-specific modal uses of hăo 'good' in Mandarin discourse. My focus is the cultural relevancy of the pathway of change: an expression of value judgment gives rise to deontic modality in recurring discourse contexts. Mandarin is contrasted with Germanic languages with regard to lexical sources of ch...

In this study, we provide a unitary account for three functionally complementary adverbs in Mandarin Chinese: hai, you and zai. Contrastive schematic meanings are proposed as core semantic input from which various pragmatic inferences are derived in context. A multifactorial analysis based on corpus data reveals collocation patterns both in terms o...

The Mandarin Chinese disposal constructions involving ba and jiang have been considered synonyms that differ only in terms of register. This paper reexamines the status of ba versus jiang in the light of spoken and written corpus data and new insights that have arisen from recent hypotheses concerning the meaning of the ba-construction. We postulat...

This paper provides a semantic-pragmatic analysis of the Mandarin nandao-interrogation. Instead of focusing on the truth-condition sense of its meaning, we explore the communicative intent motivating the use of this construction in contexts. The analysis of contextual cues allows us to recognize that the use of the nandao-interrogation serves to ma...

This paper explores metonymical and metaphorical expressions of verbal behaviour in Chinese. While metonymy features prominently in some of these expressions and metaphor in others, the entire dataset can be best viewed as spanning the metonymy-metaphor-continuum. That is, we observe a gradation of conceptual distance between the source and target...

The repeated confirmation of the hypothesis of a negativity bias in cognitive psychology invited an assumption that the general asymmetry in the auto-matic processing of a¤ective information should bear linguistic conse-quences, for language is inseparable from human cognition and emotion. This paper shows that the lexical semantics of emotive inte...

This volume is the product of a Columbia School Linguistics Conference held at Rutgers University in October 1999, where the plenary speaker was Ronald W. Langacker, a founder of Cognitive Linguistics. The goal of the book is to promote two kinds of dialogue. First, dialogue between Cognitive Grammar and the particular sign-based approach to langua...