Chinese Cultural Keywords

This chapter examines the idea of cultural keywords conceived as symbolic focal points which lexicalize salient values, attitudes, and concerns in Chinese language and culture. After a brief review of the origins of the idea in British cultural studies and its manifestations in philological, anthropological, and psychological research, it introduces a linguistic approach to the study of cultural keywords, known as the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to meaning, offering arguments in favor of employing it to render and represent culturally specific meanings in a non-ethnocentric fashion, with two case studies of Chinese cultural keywords. They pertain to the domains of Chinese emotions (the word xīngfú 幸福 “happiness”) and sociality (the word rènao 热闹 “lively; hot and noisy”). While highlighting various aspects of Chinese culture, the presented analyses of Chinese cultural keywords are couched within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework situating them within a developing field of cultural keyword studies.