Publications

An Anatomy of Chinese Offensive Words: A Lexical and Semantic Analysis  offers a precise and rigorous analysis of the meanings of offensive words in Chinese. Adopting a semantic and cultural approach, Adrian Tien, Lorna Carson and Ning Jiang demonstrate how offensive words can and should be systematically researched, documented and accounted for as a valid aspect of any language. The book's webpage is here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-63475-9

In Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization, Peter Hamilton re-examines Hong Kong as a key node in both the expansion of postwar US-led global capitalism and the revival of Sino-US trade since the 1970s. Drawing on Chinese and English languages sources from Hong Kong, China, the United States, and the United Kingdom, he argues that Hong Kong went from the proverbial rags to riches, not as a ‘tiger’ economy or a British colony, but because its elite Chinese capitalists and academics developed instrumental commercial and educational networks with the United States as it claimed global leadership. In turn, as Deng Xiaoping accelerated China’s reforms from 1978, Hong Kong’s US-educated elites became uniquely positioned to shepherd the mainland’s re-entry into global capitalism and emergence as a top US trading partner. The book’s webpage is here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/made-in-hong-kong/9780231184854

The Chinese Language and Culture short course introduces Junior Cycle students in Irish post-primary schools to the language and culture of China over 100 contact hours. The short course is designed to provide students with basic key skills in order to equip them with a learning base for future Chinese studies. It includes cultural aspects which are integral to successful communication in Chinese. This evaluation report describes the findings of a small-scale study carried out by researchers from TCD and Post-Primary Languages Ireland. The research team visited eleven classrooms in nine schools across Ireland. The report is free to download (Junior Cycle short course in Chinese language and culture report 2019).

This new volume by TCAS historian Dr Isabella Jackson provides a new understanding of colonialism in China through a fresh examination of Shanghai's International Settlement. This was the site of key developments of the Republican period: economic growth, rising Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese conflict. Managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (1854–1943), the International Settlement was beyond the control of the Chinese and foreign imperial governments. Jackson defines Shanghai's unique, hybrid form of colonial urban governance as transnational colonialism. The Council was both colonial in its structures and subject to colonial influence, especially from the British empire, yet autonomous in its activities and transnational in its personnel. This is the first in-depth study of how this unique body functioned on the local, national and international stages, revealing the Council's impact on the daily lives of the city's residents and its contribution to the conflicts of the period, with implications for the fields of modern Chinese and colonial history.

Music is a widely enjoyed human experience. It is, therefore, natural that we have wanted to describe, document, analyse and, somehow, grasp it in language. This book surveys a representative selection of musical concepts in Chinese language, i.e. words that describe, or refer to, aspects of Chinese music. Important as these musical concepts are in the language, they have been in wide circulation since ancient times without being subjected to any serious semantic analysis. In this recently published volume by Prof. Adrian Tien (John Benjamins, 2015, 303 pp.), a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used to formulate semantically and cognitively rigorous explications. Readers will be able to better understand not only these musical concepts but also significant aspects of the Chinese culture which many of these musical concepts represent. This volume contributes to the fields of cognitive linguistics, semantics, music, musicology and Chinese studies, offering readers a fresh account of Chinese ways of thinking, not least Chinese ways of viewing or appreciating music. This volume represents trailblazing research on the relationship between language, culture and cognition.