11.18.2011

Some thought on my thesis

In the Chinese class for beginners, I always ask the students to remember one model-sentence "我今天在大学学习中文" based on the sentence structure "who when where do what." And then, one day I realized that these are in fact also the basic elements of human's logic, although according to Mr. Gramley (cf. a lecture in 2009), whether all linguistic groups (here I mean people who speak different languages) have the same logic remains still in debate. I believe these elements cannot be avoided when people think about an event or even how to make a speech, and I also reckon that there must be more than these forming one's thoughts. So in this case, how differently greetings are delivered or responded by native speakers of Chinese and English could also be analyzed along this line. On the one hand, these two groups may have differing logics, therefore they understand a speech distinctively; on the other hand, even though they share the same logic, affected by traditions, histories, ideologies, etc. they still judge, categorize or define these elemental concepts in different ways. Therefore, when I do the experimental part of my thesis, I could follow this line to analyze my data. 

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