Genre as social indexicality: A cross-cultural analysis of English and Chinese love poems
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H. G. Ying
Abstract
This article presents a cross-cultural analysis of English and Chinese love poems. While the English poems are characteristically expository, topic-centered, direct, passionate, abstract, elaborate, infinite, philosophical, religious, reader-based, and repetitive, the Chinese poems are descriptive, correlative, indirect, subtle, concrete, simple, visual, metaphorical, non-religious, writer-based, and non-repetitive. The social and cultural factors accounting for the English poems include (a) a high value on individuality, self-expression, and imagination, (b) Aristotle's rhetorical principle: “State your case and prove it,” and (c) the role of Christianity in the life of western people. The Chinese poems find social and cultural explanations in (a) doctrines of Confucius that deny the importance of individuality and self expression, (b) the rhetorical principle Yi2(“use”) Jing3(“things”) Su2(“express”) Qing1(“feelings”) (i.e., “to express one's feelings in terms of natural things”), (c) the rhetorical tradition of being non-repetitive, and (d) the goal of a man's life that centers on the attainment of official rank rather than belief in religion.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- The sense of the interface: Applying semiotics to HCI research
- Sign, mind, time, space: Contradictory complementary coalescence
- Meanings of communication: Comparative terminological studies of a cultural concept and its variations in the multilingual society of India
- Troubles with trichotomies: Reflections on the utility of Peirce's sign trichotomies for social analysis
- Paleolithic finger flutings as efficient communication: Applying Zipf's Law to two panels in Rouffignac Cave, France
- The pragmatic maxim of the mature Peirce regarding its special normative function
- The writing on the screen: A meditation on the Virginia Tech shooting spree: Age-appropriate use of violent first-person computer games
- Genre as social indexicality: A cross-cultural analysis of English and Chinese love poems
