The Chinese HEART in a Cognitive Perspective: Culture, Body, and Language (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics)

This book is a cognitive semantic study of the Chinese conceptualization of the heart, traditionally seen as the central faculty of cognition. The concept of HEART, encoded in the word xin, lies at the core of Chinese thought and medicine, and its importance to Chinese culture is extensively manifested in the Chinese language. The study explores this important concept and its cultural models along both diachronic and synchronic dimensions and with a cross-cultural perspective.