Abstract
This chapter explores cultural conceptualisations of collective self-representation as phrases and expressions in Chinese that indicate collective self positioning emerge in social interaction. Twenty-five university-educated Chinese immigrants in Australia participated in focus group interviews. The linguistic constructions manifesting their collective self-representation contain several types of spatial metaphors which reveal the underlying conceptual structure pertaining to Chinese. Drawing on the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, it was found that meaningful representations of these conceptual structures encode cultural schemas in which cultural cognition plays a fundamental role. Two cultural schemas were identified: the Sino-centric worldview and the cultural exemplar role. The discussion, therefore, centres upon interpreting how the cultural image schema of the Sino-centric worldview and the cultural role schema of the cultural exemplar shape the participants’ conceptualisation of their identities as immigrant Chinese in the Australian-Chinese cross-cultural context. Findings drawn from the naturally occurring data on the representation and negotiation of the collective sense of self among Mandarin Chinese speakers serve as an empirical ground to support the view that the self is conceptualised in culturally specific ways and they contribute to the body of research that sits in the area of Cultural Linguistics.
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Notes
- 1.
Westerners have been depicted as foreign aggressors for Chinese people since the Opium War (1840–1860). This stance was further intensified in Maoist China. Derogatory terms, such as 鬼佬 guilao, meaning foreign devil, and terms denoting alienation, such as 老外 laowai, remain in use in contemporary China.
- 2.
The May Fourth Movement, also called Chinese Enlightenment or New Culture Movement, refers to the anti-Confucian revolt led by intellectuals and scholars in the mid-1910s and 1920s.
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Lu, Y. (2017). Cultural Conceptualisations of Collective Self-representation Among Chinese Immigrants. In: Sharifian, F. (eds) Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Cultural Linguistics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_5
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