Prof. Dr. Carlotta Sparvoli

“As for the world, keep your feet firm on the ground. As for the study, keep your eyes wide open. 立定脚跟外世。放開眼孔讀書會”. Calligraphy by Lü Shuxiang, inspired by a passage from the Wéilú yèhuà 圍爐夜話 (Fireside chat) by Wang Yongbin 王永彬 (1792- 1869).
My contribution to the project focuses on the investigations in General Linguistics published in China between 1924 and 1948. My overarching aim is to show that such linguistic tradition: (i) cannot be confined to a Chinese language-specific discourse but had the depth and vastness of the best General Linguistics tradition; (ii) was able to reinterpret and innovatively reanalyse the basic tenets coming from the Western avant-garde of the time.
My research started with the contextualisation of the different environments that characterised the emergence of general linguistics in the West and China. In the West, the foundation of General Linguistics marks the confluence of diverse pathways deriving from the semantics of the French tradition and the comparative approach that emerged in Indo-European studies of the German tradition. At the beginning of the 1920s, this new orientation became visible on the two Atlantic shores. In the United States, it took the forms of the reflection on the linguistic types and grammatical forms advanced by Edward Sapir (1884-1939); in Europe, it developed on the one hand with the constitution of the concepts of the linguistic sign, on the other in the elaboration of grammatical vs notional categories, as in the case of the Danish Otto Jespersen (1860-1943). This movement was characterized by a sort of aversion towards descriptive grammar based on parts of speech and by an inventive fever in the coining of specialized terminology, aimed at highlighting the logical rather than grammatical aspects, moving from thought to the language, as proposed by Ferdinand Brunot (1860-1938).
This “aversion” for traditional grammatical classifications was also shared in the side of General Linguistics established in China before 1949. Scholars such as Li Jinxi 黎锦熙 (1890-1978), Gao Mingkai 高名凯 (1911-1965) and, in particular, Lü Shuxiang 叔湘 (1904-1998) and Wang Li 王力 (1900-1986), welcomed and reworked the most innovative Western theories, giving shape to an original model which, in many ways, anticipates different contemporary studies.
In this cultural climate of exchange, a vast tradition of research took shape within which the salient contents of the Western avant-gardes (such as Jespersen’s rank theory, cípĭnshuō 词品说) were filtered, reworked, and developed through the lens of Chinese traditional thought and based on the language-specific morphosyntactic traits of Chinese.
Given the breadth, depth and modernity of the reflection conducted within this linguistic tradition, my research has a threefold objective:
1) Shed light on the anticipatory nature of the models formulated in Chinese investigations.
2) Disentangle the themes coming from the Western avant-garde from those stemming from the Chinese autochthonous thought.
3) Highlight the Chinese reinterpretation and expansion on Jespersen’s notional moods and theory of quantification.
carlotta.sparvoli@unive.it | Click here to visit Carlotta Sparvoli’s professional website |
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Editor (6. Oktober 2021). Prof. Dr. Carlotta Sparvoli. Chinawissen vernetzt / Sinologia in rete / Savoirs sur la Chine en réseau. Abgerufen am 14. Juni 2025 von https://sinonet.hypotheses.org/183