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1、Lecture 5 the Chinese Cultural Spirit in Chinese language, Literature and Art本专题旨在使学生对中国文化精神生产中中国人文精神与语言、文学和艺术的关系有一个较全面的认识。通过中西文化比较把握中国传统文化的独特性。学生要通过对比对中国精神文化宏观特征有较详解得了解：人文传统与科学精神、群体认同与个人本位、天人合一与物我二分、关注此岸与关注彼岸等等。本专题包括中西语言、思维比较，如意合语言与形合语言、场依附性语言与场独立性语言、悟性思维与理性思维、模糊思维与明细思维、直觉思维与逻辑思维、实践理性与思辨理性等等。本专题通过中
2、西文学艺术宏观比较，引导学生发现中国美学观念在艺术表现倾向的不同及文化意蕴上的差异，如中国神化与希腊神话、写意与写实、心物感应与模仿现实、重意境的抒情传统与重叙事的史诗传统、重视团圆和谐的审美与张扬奔放冲突的审美等等。I. LanguageEvery very language has its special way to perceive the objective world and dissect the world differently. Therefore, a language can be taken as a mirror of the culture that demons
3、trates the character of the people who use the language. In many ways, Chinese are quite different from other languages in the way of combining form and meaning. But most of the Chinese people do not really see themselves clearly in the mirror as they do not consciously compare their language with o
4、thers. Lets take Western languages as a comparative reference. We will focus on English as an epitome ipitmi; e- of the Western language as it is the most popularly spoken Western tongue in the world at present time and embodies most the necessary elements for discussion.Chinese LanguageThere are at
5、 least two perspectives to look at languages, linguistic perspective and cultural perspective. From the surface, we find that Western languages have a shared feature, that is, a great number of inflectional variations to indicate time, aspect, gender, number and case of words, as well as structural
6、relationships in word combination. Therefore, Western linguists take form as their central concern. In contrast, Chinese lacks inflectional variations which show clear grammatical categories and relations. A Chinese linguist and translator L Shuxiang(1988) once humorously remarked, We Chinese people
7、 have no admiration for the intertwined grammar. We find it extremely in- convenient to have these pigtails on our head; A bald head is much better. A bald head is much better means that the Han are accustomed to word combination based on meaning, but not those based on inflectional form. Therefore,
8、 Chinese grammatical analysis should not start from form, but should take the expression of meaning as the point of departure. In other word, to observe from cultural perspective is more helpful to reveal the nature of Chinese language.Chinese language is different from the Western Languages in many
9、 aspects. This can be traced to its cultural roots such as world views, mode of thinking, aesthetic habits, etc. Gu Hongming explained, As the Chinese lives a life of the heart, the Chinese language, I say, is also a language of the heart. It is a well-known fact that children and uneducated persons
10、 among foreigners in China learn Chinese very easily, much more so than grown-up and educated persons. What is the reason of this? He explains that children and uneducated persons think and speak with the language of the heart while educated men, especially men with the modern intellectual education
11、 of Europe, think and speak with the language of the head and intellect. They cannot learn it well because they are too intelligently and scientifically educated. But Gu Hongming also admitted that Chinese is also a difficult language to learn, especially when a learner wants to master classical Chi
12、nese written language. Chinese language is a monosyllabic language in nature, though it started obvious disyllabic trend in the beginning of the last century. Chinese text with dominant disyllabic words can be reduced to one full of monosyllabic words when necessary. The monosyllabic feature of Chin
13、ese is a critical factor that influences the development of certain peculiarities of Chinese literary style, such as Chinese poetry, traditional Chinese opera, and others. Lin Yutang said, By comparison with the Western languages it is possible to trace how much of the peculiarities of Chinese thoug
14、ht and literature are due simply to their possession of a so-called monosyllabic language. What made him hold such a point of view? He observed the independent reality of written language based on the monosyllabic words, not having to obey the laws of any spoken language, and in time, it had its own
15、 laws of structure and a store of idiom which accumulated by literary accidents of different dynasties(such as the essays of pre-Qin period, Han FuThe writing of Pian Wen requires using antithesis, allusion, flowery words and so on, Tang poetry, Song ci a type of classical Chinese poetry, originatin
16、g in the Tang Dynasty and fully developed in the Song Dynasty, Originally ci were written to be sung to a specific tune of that title, with set rhythm, rhyme, and tempo. However, over time the actual tunes seem to have disappeared (similarly to the case of the English ballads, opera verses of Yuan D
17、ynasty, Yuan dramas notable qu form was set to music). Traditional Chinese literature and culture is based on Classical Chinese. Even modern Chinese people cannot completely part with classical Chinese because it has the root or spirit of Chinese language and culture. Chinese is much Westernized sin
18、ce the New Culture Movement started in 1910s when written vernacular Chinese was promoted, but it still maintains its distinctive features in contrast with Western languages. Regardless of the Westernization and borrowing of modern terms from other countries such as Japan, Chinese language stands in
19、 contrast with Western languages. Lets discuss some of the features: 1. Form-govern-spirit language vs. Spirit-govern-form LanguageWhen we say that Chinese is characterized by meaning perception, we mean that the comprehension or production of Chinese does not depend on objective inflectional marker
20、s for structural definition; it lacks objectivity. For instance, in English, there should be a verb in a sentence and there must be an agreement of subject with the predicate. The predicate is just like a pivot of a scale. The subject and predicate forms a framework of the sentence so that other ele
21、ments may be added to it as subordinates. English offer more possibilities to choose inanimate subjects while in the same circumstances, Chinese tends to take animate agents as subjects ( as in the sentence the remembrance of these will add zest to his life. By contrast, Chinese speakers would say,
22、Whenever recalling these, he more feels in his life pleasant and enthusiastic or Herecalling these add hislifes zest ). Even an action phrase in the sentence begins with the doer though it may not appear. In fact, Chinese subject is the topic followed by comments，not corresponding to the predicate v
23、erb in the way English subject does. Besides, there is no necessity of formal markers as the sentence boundary. Sentence marking is determined by meaning fulfillment. Spirit manipulates meaning and meaning determines the choice of form. Different readers may give different punctuations to the follow
24、ing utterance:下雨天留客天留人不留。 (下雨，天留客，天留人不留！/下雨天，留客，天留，人不留！/下雨天，留客天，留人不？留！/下雨天，留客天，留人？不留？） Hence the recognition of punctuations and structures depends more on personal perception and judgment. This spirit oriented method structural organization and comprehension indicates that Chinese grammar needs act
25、ive participation of the listener or speaker. If the listener, the speaker or the situation and context have changed, the meaning of the utterance will certainly change. There are a lot more omissions in Chinese narrative language and poetic works which depends on personal perception for comprehensi
26、on. Chinese is a language that highlights human subjectivity. It is also called man-governed language in contrast with the law-governed language/ rule-governed language /. The flowing features of Chinese phrase-chunks cannot successfully fit into the frame of Western rigid grammatical theory because
27、 it uses spirit-centered method to organize its sentences. The structure of each chunk is in fact very simple, but the spirit in the language can manipulate the complex on the basis of the human initiative in sentence construction. Chinese people skillfully make use of the basic units to form varied
28、 patterns and styles. The core and essence of the grammatical spirit is dialectically combining simplicity and complexity, dynamism and regularity. There are fixed laws and flexible laws, invariable laws and variable laws. But the laws on the whole are under the control of the person. Just as Zhang
29、Xuecheng says There is no fixed grammatical pattern; grammatical rules are established when the writing is completed. Rules in the description of a person accommodate a person; rules in the narration of an event comply with the event. There is certainty among uncertainty. （屡战屡败/屡败屡战）This we call it
30、iconicity. That is, Chinese imitates events in reality according natural logic. The arrangement of words goes along with the natural truth obtained though the perception of the speaker. It is clear that, in Chinese, the most essential and prominent factor is not the form, but the spirit. If it is tr
31、ue that in Western grammars form governs spirit(以形摄神) ,then in Chinese grammar spirit governs form(以神摄形). 2. Focused View vs. Distributed ViewAs mentioned above, Western inflectional languages organize a sentence around a finite verb. This finite verb acts as a pivot or focal point. Other sentence c
32、onstituents are arranged around the focus according to their relationships to the verb which is in agreement with the subject in person and number. If other verbs appear in the sentence, they must take non-finite forms so as to be distinguished from the predicate verb. Such organization reflects the
33、 Western mode of thinkingFocused View. This view can also be seen in traditional such as The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio and Last Super by Leonardo Da Vinci .In contrast, Chinese sentence organization and comprehension cannot be characterized by the focused view, but by distributed view, th
34、us yielding a unique sentence pattern of flowing phrase-chunks. It is very much like the visual perspective of Chinese painting such as the scroll painting Qingming Shanghe Tu (Riverside Scene at Pure Brightness Festival). The viewpoints of the painter keeps changing as he takes his steps forward. U
35、nrestricted by the natural visual field, the painter can portray in one picture the scenes only in different visual fields. This mode of thinking characterized by changing viewpoints is fully expressed in Chinese sentence structure. Besides, the changing view points can be expressed with coordinativ
36、e clauses or sentences, or even with different words presenting different images or scenes. This word sequence can be typically found in Chinese verses in which images are arranged in mosaic way, such as 鸡声茅店月，人迹板桥霜and 枯藤老树昏鸦，小桥流水人家，古道西风瘦马，断肠人在天涯。 Images are presented one after another without any c
37、onnective. Instead, in order to express ideas, it arranges phrase-chunks with changing viewpoints: the chunk arrangement flows, description proceeds from beginning to end; narration is intermingled with comment; the effect follows the cause; what happens first precedes what happens latter; the whole
38、 comes before the part; the condition is put before the result, so on and so forth. Chinese sentences do not have such control centers as sentences of Western languages. Instead, they flow in a dynamic manner. There is no disorder or disorganization even though there are no connectives or form marke
39、rs. It is distributed in form but focused in spirit. 3. Subject-Predicate Language vs. Topic-Comment LanguageCharles Hocket, an American structuralist linguist once pointed out that Chinese sentence pattern is just like Chinese boxes. This is a vivid description of the topic-comment sentence structu
40、re of the language. Chinese boxes are a set of boxes of graduated size, each fitting inside the next larger box, similar to the Russian matryoshka doll.In literature a Chinese box structure refers to a frame narrativenrtiv, a novel or drama that is told in the form of a narrative inside a narrative
41、(and so on), giving views from different perspectives, such as Chinese story-telling scripts in Song and Yuan Dynasties, with the Dreams of Red Mansion as Typical. Chinese language also carries such characteristic. For instance, 这件事我的脑子里一点印象也没有了（This matter in my head no impression/ No Impression is
42、 left on my mind about the matter）,is the typical Chinese-box pattern in which a topic is embedded in another topic. You can put almost any phrase in the front followed by comments. The front part is the topic of the comments. Verb(s) is not necessary in the Chinese sentence. A Chinese sentence does
43、 not take one particular verb as its focal point. In contrast, English pattern is focused around a subject-verb frame with others as its subordinate elements and the subject should be in agreement with the verb in pronoun, number, time, tense.4. Hypotactic vs. ParatacticThe Han people think highly o
44、f inspiration. They tend to appeal to intuitive understanding when they think about complicated things. The Chinese adopt a thought pattern of intuition and understanding while English people adopt a thought pattern of logic and reason. These tendencies have strong impact on each language. English n
45、eeds more connectives to organize the sentence elements while Chinese use much less of them. This rhetoric can be clearly observed in the classical Chinese essays and works on literary criticism, such as The literary Mind and The Carving of Dragon (Wen Xin Diao Long). These are brimmed with writings
46、, similes, metaphors, analogies, parallelisms which shows the preponderance of horizontal thinking. In the construction of sentences, Chinese people use less connective words because they believe in the comprehension of the listeners or readers. English narrative pattern follows a spatial order in w
47、hich things are described in logical way. Therefore the sentence pattern is like a building or a tree. Chinese narrative approach follows a chronological order in which things are expressed in a natural way. Therefore the sentence pattern is like a stream or a bamboo.（e.g. 从前有座山 。山里有个庙，庙里有个老和尚，老和尚给小
48、和尚讲故事。从前有座山; Compare: This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built） 5. Xu and ShiChinese tends to use as few words to express as much as possible. This is different from omission because the implicit element (which is supposed to ex
49、ist) cannot be filled up without destroying the smoothness and naturalness of the text. In Chinese sentences, there contains some elements that, to some extent, are solid, tangible, exact and complete. Therefore, they carries the nature of Shi. But there are still elements that are implicit, illusive, intangible, fuzzy, obscure in meaning. Therefore, they carries the nature of Xu. For example, 通过学习是我提高了认识Though study, (study) made me deepen my understanding. Many do not take it as grammat
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