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Publication Mapping the Body, Mapping the Future: the Medicalized Body in Taiwanese and Hong Kong Fiction and Film(2024-09) Robinson, SarahThis thesis analyses bodily and medical aesthetics and Taiwanese and Hong Kong literature and film form the 1990s and 2000s, with particular attention to the disruptions that the changing global economic order brought to bodily materiality within the territories. I engage with science fiction and horror, one genre closely associated with projected futures, and another associated with ghostly returns and commodified thrills, in order to track the connections between mapping the body and mapping the world. In my first chapter, I examine Membranes, a 1995 science fiction novella by queer Taiwanese writer and scholar Chi Ta-wei, alongside the post-martial law political and economic context in Taiwan and concerns about HIV/AIDS. Aspirational technologies that promise more, better life also map the geopolitically precarious Taiwan into a stable economic and political status, but suggest that this deferred thriving, both for queer people specifically and Taiwanese people more broadly, is a direct trade-off with projects that seek to imagine a radically different future. My second chapter analyzes two Hong Kong horror films, the Pang brothers’ The Eye (2002), and Fruit Chan’s Dumplings (2005). Chosen for their depiction of different forms of medical intervention, as well as for their association with the “Pan-Asian” Horror movement that hit its stride in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I argue that these films use medical treatments to restore the human body as a means of exploring different ways of cognitively and affectively mapping Hong Kong’s new position in the world system following the 1997 handover to mainland China. These two chapters together examine the political realities of global capitalism and the body as we materially experience it.Publication Language Attrition and Pragmatic Competence Transfer in Immigrant Children: A Case Study of Chinese Americans in the U.S.(2024-09) Xiao, ShengnanPrevious research has made significant strides in understanding children's language acquisition. However, the phenomenon of language attrition in children, particularly among bilingual children who are native Chinese speakers, remains largely unexplored. With increasing global migration and population mobility, many children who migrate during childhood lose the ability to communicate in their mother tongue within a few years. This underscores the importance of studying language attrition and the impact of newly acquired languages on the fading native language. Such research offers valuable insights into human cognition, language acquisition, and language theory. This study presents a case study of language attrition and transfer in two Chinese-English bilingual children after their move from China to the United States. The father of the subjects is a native Chinese speaker, and their mother is a native English speaker fluent in Chinese. The children spent their early childhood in China, where the dominant language at home and in society was Chinese. When the children were six (Jenny) and three and a half years old (Lisa), the family moved to the United States, making Chinese their minority language, limited to family communication. Using regularly updated internet videos, the researcher observes family conversations from six months before the move to the year following the move. Through discourse analysis and longitudinal comparisons, this study examines the language attrition and pragmatic transfer characteristics of the two children after their relocation. The analysis focuses on discourse proportion, fluency, lexical richness, syntactic accuracy, pragmatic competence, and communicative strategies in different languages. The findings are discussed in terms of the age of onset of input deficit, family and social factors, and affective factors such as language attitudes. Unlike prior studies that regularly test children's language after immigration, this research is grounded in observations of daily family interactions, allowing for a nuanced exploration of the language attrition process. Ultimately, the findings underscore the significance of the age at which language input is diminished and the crucial role of continued, intentional reinforcement of the native language in supporting bilingual development in immigrant children.Publication A Translation of Qiu Miaojin's "The Crocodile Diaries"(2013-02) Valencik, AlexandraQiu Miaojin is known for her unapologetically lesbian fiction and tragically short writing career. Her novels were among the first in Taiwan to deal outrightly with lesbian identity and the social dysphoria that can accompany same-sex desire in these societies. Published in 1994 and winning the China Times Award for Literature in 1995, The Crocodile Diaries is a portrait of Taiwanese lesbianism amid the tumultuous decade of the 1990s, during which time Taiwan experienced a powerful feminist movement and opening up of society due to the lifting of marital law in 1987.Publication The Phonological Features of Sino-Khitan and Its Relations to the Origin of Northern Mandarin(2012-09) Zhang, ManKhitan Language, as being used as an official language in Liao Dynasty during 10th to 12th century in Northern China contains some features of influence of Chinese Language. By studying the Sino-Khitan transcription, features of Sino-Khitan phonology can be found. These features include: Voiced initial consonants had been devoiced into voiceless aspirated for ping tone, voiceless unaspirated for non-ping tone; Chinese labial-dental initials had been differentiated from Chinese bilabial initials; Alveolar affricates does not exist in Khitan language but were borrowed from Chinese. Unaspirated [ts] was represented by new-invented YZ graph, while aspirated [tsʰ] was merged into [s] and represented by the same YZ graph as [s]; Nasal initial [ŋ] and finals with nasal coda [-ŋ] in Khitan language are borrowed from Chinese; Chinese final [ɨ] is a not a native sound in Khitan language and new YZ graph was specificly invented for this acquired sound. It is mostly used to transliterate zi-si (资思)rhyme of Middle Chinese. By comparing Sino-Khitan phonological features with that of Northern Mandarin, it is to be found that the two system share many phonological characteristics. However, Tangut language, which was used in northwestern China and its geographic area is currently belong to Northern Mandarin speaking area, has many different features in some essential perspectives. The relation between the Sino-Khitan and Chinese language is very close which suggests that the development of Khitan language may be one of the important steps of Northern Mandarin development.Publication Motivation of Chinese Language Learners: A Case Study in a Intermediate Chinese Class(2012-09) Yan, HongIn the field of second language acquisition (SLA), motivation of second language learners is of great importance to the research of the language, the learners and the learning situation. When "Chinese heritage students" (hereafter CHL students), and students learning Chinese as a foreign language (hereafter CFL students) study Chinese in the same classroom, their motivation of learning Chinese has drawn researchers’ attention. Drawing on theories on motivation of second language acquisition, this study explores how different factors influence Chinese language learners' motivation by qualitative case study. The results indicate that students' Chinese language and culture exposure explains their choice of learning Chinese in college and determines their basic learning goals (goal); that students' perceptions of their own language proficiency reflect the directions in which they would put more effort and their need for achievement (effort and want); and that the situational factors of the learning environment, such as the course, the teacher, and the groups, all influence students' learning motivation (attitude towards the activity). Based on the result that teachers can influence students' learning motivation through activities in the classroom, this study gives teachers and researchers some pedagogical implications about how to strengthen Chinese language learners' motivation in the learning environment.Publication A Diachronic and Synchronic Examination of the Disposal Construction in Min and Mandarin Chinese(2012-09) Chang, ChunchingThe process of language development is quite complex, it occurs under the interactions between diachronic derivation and synchronic derivation. This paper examines the development of Chinese language through the scope of disposal construction to provide evidence that diachronic and synchronic derivations could affect the development of a language simultaneously. From the progression of disposal prepositions in Mandarin based on historical documents, we can observe how diachronic derivation took place. Also, through diachronic derivation, it is safe to say that the earlier sentence structures can have an impact on later sentence structures. By comparing the disposal constructions between Mandarin and Min dialect, the syntactic characteristics and limitations present the possibility of synchronic derivation, which is the result of language contact. The findings of this paper demonstrates the features of language contact through the borrowing of disposal prepositions, and the similarities and differences between the syntax of disposal sentence structure of Mandarin and Min dialect.Publication The Artist as Creator: The Theory of Art in Du Fu's Poems about Paintings(2012-05) Edwards, James HDu Fu is one of China's most celebrated and influential poets. His poems about paintings are a highly innovative subset of poems rich with imagery and emotion. Received ideas about these poems fail to account for any role played in them by Du's aesthetic ideas. This study analyses Du's poems about paintings in order to bring to light Du's theory of art. Du's theory of art combines ancient Chinese ideas about aesthetics, literature and the nature of humanity's relationship to the universe. These traditional ideas serve as the foundation for a unique theory. Du's theory of art posits the painter as a higher being whose paintings have magical qualities as a result of his mastery of the craft of painting and the richness of his inner world.Publication Danmei Literature as Indicator of Social Change: A Sociocultural Analysis of Xiao Chun’s Collide(2012-05) Hamilton, Patrick lDuring the last two decades, Mainland China has seen a rise in the emergence of homosexually charged themes in popular underground literature via the spread of the “Danmei” novel. Mandarin for “indulge in beauty,” the term refers to works of fiction centering on graphic depictions of same-sex love between two central male characters. By the late nineties, an explosion of online Danmei forums proved to be a powerful tool in circumventing government censors, and authorship (mainly by young heterosexual women) skyrocketed. Xiao Chun’s Collide, first uploaded to the internet in 2006, swept through online message boards and reading forums to become one of the cornerstone pieces of the Danmei genre. Banned for its lascivious homosexual content, its rabid Internet consumption throughout China and Taiwan has contributed to (and, indeed, sheds light on) a wide array of observable changes occurring in the modern Chinese social landscape. This paper begins with a brief explanation of what little is known about the author of Collide, as well as an introduction to the background of the Danmei movement. Following these sections, a discussion of the sociocultural relevance of the Danmei movement will be presented with special attention paid to the significance of female-dominated authorship and readership, to the voyeurism associated with the genre, and to the relationship between Danmei literature and changing attitudes toward homosexuality. The remaining sections will provide notes from the translator and further remarks on Collide. The analysis will conclude with a full translation of the novel.Publication Xunzian Political Philosophy: Pioneering Pragmatism(2012-05) King, BrandonThe chapter “Regulations of a King” 王制 illustrates a new pragmatic form of governance through morality around five issues. First, the chapter practically discusses three modes of statecraft, detailing which mode of statecraft is most effective and why. Next, it discusses the importance of the existence of law fa 法. Third, it transforms the concept of ritual as a tool of governance and an extension of law. Fourth, it describes rewards and punishments as political tools to reinforce an educational and transformational program for moral quality. Finally, it discusses perhaps the most unique tool of governance, definitive judgment lei 類. Through the examination of these five issues in “Regulations of a King”, I intend to show that the chapter “Regulations of a King” illustrates a new pragmatic form of governance through morality by displaying a more practical style of rhetoric and political tools for effective administering of a state.Publication The Effects of Recasts and Explicit Feedback on Chinese Language Acquisition in the Task-based Classroom(2011-05) Yang, LeiTask-based language teaching has received increasing attention in second language acquisition research over the past decade (Révész, 2007). However, the target form comprises conveyance of meaning in task-based classroom to some degree. In the area of Chinese acquisition as a second language the role of recasts and explicit feedback has not been the subject of much investigation, as two types of technique to compensate learners’ attention on form. Few empirical studies have explored their short-term and long-term effects on Chinese language acquisition in task-based classroom. To test the conclusions of some research about corrective feedback in the area of SLA, the present study examined the effects of these two techniques respectively. The study employed an immediate-test and posttest design. The participants were 53 adult, beginning level Chinese language learners who study Chinese as a second language, naturally assigned to one of the two comparison groups and a control group. The comparison groups differed as to whether they received recasts or explicit feedback while completing communicative tasks. The control group also practiced the tasks; however, they received neither recasts nor explicit feedback from their instructors in the process and they participated in the testing sessions. Results analysis of collected data yielded three main findings. First, learners receiving explicit feedback immediately outperformed those who received recasts for certain structures. Second, learners receiving explicit feedback sometimes yielded some long-term advantages over those who did not receive any feedback, followed by the recast group even after a period of time. Third, the performance of the participants varied according to the complexity of the target forms. The results imply that explicit feedback and recasts can facilitate the production of certain target language forms in beginning Chinese communicative class. The effects of explicit feedback and recasts depend on the chosen forms. It is congruent with Long’s (1998) and Ellis’s (2007) speculation that the roles of various feedbacks differ according to different linguistic features. It also provides further evidence for Leeman’s (2000) conclusion that recasts may be differentially effective when the learnabililty of the target linguistic feature vary. Finally, the findings lend some support to the insight derived from Long that focus-on-form should be integrated into task-based language teaching (Long, 1996, 2000; Long & Robinson, 1998).Publication The Phonological Features and the Historical Strata of the Heyang Dialect(2011-02) Li, XiaoyingThe Heyang dialect has many distinct phonological features, which make it quite different from its adjacent dialects. The phonological features of the Heyang dialect are systematically studied, and the historical strata are revealed. Diverse historical strata exist in the current system of the Heyang dialect. In the Heyang dialect, there are phonological features which belong to the stratum of the Northwestern dialect during the Tang and Song dynasties. These features include: the Middle Chinese voiced obstruents are all aspitrated; the -ŋ ending is lost in the colloquial readings of Dang (宕) and Geng (梗) rhyme groups; the division III hekou syllables in Zhi (止) and Yu (遇) rhyme groups merge; and the division III and IV hekou finals of Xie (蟹) rhyme group are xiyin. The initials yi (疑) and wei (微) in the Heyang dialect are pronounced the same as they are in the Zhongyuan yinyun. The kaikou contrasted with the hekou finals in Guo (果) rhyme group when they combined with velar and glottal initials, the division I contrasted with division II finals of Xiao (效) rhyme group in the Heyang dialect. Those phonological phenomena belong to the historical stratum of the Zhongyuan yinyun. The Heyang dialect was further compared with the Meixian dialect, a representive of the Hakka dialect group. The two dialects share so many phonological characteristics. The relation between the two dialects is even closer than that between the Heyang dialect and Mandarin, in some essential aspects, which strongly suggests that the Heyang dialect may be rooted from the Zhongyuan dialects during the Tang and Song dynasty.Publication Expressions of Self in a Homeless World: Zhang Dai (1597-1680?) and His Writings in the Ming-Qing Transition Period(2010-09) Liu, WenjieThis essay analyzes Zhang Dai’s life and his major literary work, and argues that the expression of self is the core of his writings. By contextualizing Zhang Dai’s work in the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, this essay explains the hidden motives of Zhang Dai to justify, preserve and identify his self through literary practice, suggests that this explosion of self-expression is not only a literary response to the historical event of dynastic transition, but also a reflection of the cultural and literary trends of the 17th century. This essay also provides close readings and genre study to Zhang Dai’s poems, prose and biographical writings, and demonstrates how the expression of the writer’s self works in different types of literary genres.Publication Readings Of Chinese Poet Xue Tao(2010-09) Yu, LuXue Tao was one of the Tang Dynasty's best-known female poets. Her poems are beautiful and of her own style, but there have only been a few of studies on them. This study comprises nine close readings of her thirteen poems most of which can be defined as yongwu poems, as well as a conclusion which summarizes the main characteristics in these poems. The methodology of this research is based on the theory of New Criticism and combined with sinology. Every poem is studied as an independent entity, but its allusions and images are examined in the history of Chinese poetry. This study attempts to deepen the study of Xue Tao’s poetry and readers’ understanding of it.Publication Teaching Character Formation Rationales with a Computer-Assisted Courseware(2010-02) Feng, BoTEACHING CHARACTER FORMATION RATIONALES WITH A COMPUTER-ASSISTED COURSEWARE FEBRURARY 2010 BO FENG, B.A., GUANGZHOU INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES M.A., EASTERN ILLILOIS UNIVERSITY M.F.A, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Zhongwei Shen This research conducts a literature survey in the areas of Chinese character error analysis; SLA theories in interlanguage and transfer; systemic characteristics of the Chinese writing system; as well as psycholinguist researches in Chinese character acquisition. CFL learners face critical issues in character acquisition, such as confusions caused by the lack of phonetic awareness, semantic awareness, and contextual interferences. In order to assist CFL learners cope with these issues effectively, it is necessary to develop a computer-assisted courseware utilizing multimedia and web technologies to turn character formation rationales into advance organizers which can be used by CFL learners to restructure newly acquired knowledge and skills. The courseware emphasizes enhancing phonetic awareness, while giving sufficient coverage for semantic awareness and preliminary concepts of spatial configuration of character components.Publication A Record of the Defense of Xiangyang's City Wall, 1206-1207(2009) Avery, Julie JThis thesis presents an original annotated translation of Xiangyang shou cheng lu 襄陽守城錄 [A Record of the Defense of Xiangyang’s City Wall] written by Zhao Wannian (ca. 1169-1210) in 1207. In this record, Zhao, a low ranking official in the Song army, describes the events of a two and half month siege imposed upon the city of Xiangyang by invading Jin troops. Currently the only other full translation of this text that is available is in German by Herbert Franke and can be found in Studien und Texte zur Kriegsgeschichte der südlichen Sungzeit that was published in 1987. In addition to my translation, an overview of this event in the war between Song and Jin (1206-1208) as well as an overview of Xiangyang’s strategic geographic location is included in the introduction. A copy of the Yue ya tang edition of the text is provided in the appendices, along with an index of names which appear in the text, an explanation of the translation of titles, a glossary of weapons, a glossary of place names, and supplementary maps and photographs.Publication The Cfl Students’ Perspective of the Chinese Ambiguous Sentences(2009) Song, Ting JuanMy goal of studying Chinese ambiguous sentence is to increase CFL students’ awareness about Chinese grammar as well as Chinese culture. In order to promote the CFL students’ learning enthusiasm, speed up their learning process, and assist them to meet society’s challenges, I have designed two sets of questionnaires, spent two semesters in collecting, studying, analyzing, and explaining my data. In the meanwhile, I read many related articles and books which enriched my Chinese linguistic knowledge, deepened my understanding of the reciprical reaction among Chinese linguistic issues and its culture. I was also inspired to generate some typical Chinese sentence structures. These structures could help the CFL students to produce Chinese sentences not only linguistically accurate but also culturally appropriate.Publication Formation Of The Xikun Style Poetry(2009) Qian, JinPublication The Pursuit and Dispelling of Holy Heterosexual Love: from "Love Must Not Be Forgotten" to Wu Zi(2009) Li, LiMy thesis is going to include three sections as follows: 1.A brief biography of Zhang Jie 张洁 (1937 - ). Zhang Jie began to publish in the post-Cultural Revolution era, and became well-known in the early 1980s for her fictional depiction of the problems of the urban intellectual women attempting to resolve conflicts between love and career, love and marriage, and ideals and reality. The main part of this section is going to be the deep influence of her eventful fatherless life experience, traditional Chinese culture, as well as that of former Russian literary masters, especially Chekhov and Tolstoy, on her literary creation, characterized by a high sense of morality, spirituality, and social responsibility as well. First, when Zhang Jie was only 100 days old, her father abandoned her and her mother. Lack of paternal love leads to her long-cherished hidden desire for an immaculate father in shining armor, characterized by a combination of integrity and benevolence, a lofty spiritual state of mind/mental outlook and high-ranking position. Moreover, the failure of her first marriage reinforced her longing and worship for father-like males, who become the ideal husband in her novels. That is why Zhang Jie prefers the marriage pattern of so-called lao-fu shao-qi 老夫少妻 [older husband, younger wife]. Second, Zhang Jie’s creation of her love-marriage stories have been extremely influenced by traditional Chinese culture. The Chinese traditional novels dealing with sensual love roughly fall into two categories. One, from the physical perspective, depicts the sensual rivalry with Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 as its representative; the other tend to present spiritual entanglement, such as the love between Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 and Lin Daiyu林黛玉 in Hong-lou Meng 红楼梦. These two kinds of love have been incompatible just like fire and water. The former has been held in contempt by scholars, while the latter has been admired by them, to which the love depicted by Zhang Jie belongs. For one thing, Zhang Jie is widely read in literature; for another, she overvalues her own choices and emotions, which results in her easily being plunged into her past life experiences. Finally, Zhang Jie’s emphasis on the spiritual aspect of sensual love results from the enormous influence of the former Russian literary masters, especially Chekhov. The geographical location of Russian, which crosses the Asian-European continent, causes the Russian literature to be tinged with Asian literature, and also produces some similarities between the Russian and Chinese nations in cultural values, such as an emphasis on morality. During her childhood, Zhang Jie read many Russian literary works in Chinese. Among those Russian literary masters, Chekhov has been her spiritual mentor and leader of her literary creation. We can say that the major motif of Zhang Jie’s novels, pursuit of the all-round emancipation of human beings’ spirit, is a direct successor of the main theme of Chekhov’s works – Man is supposed to live a dignified life. 2. Zhang Jie’s changing perspectives on love, specifically, sensual love and maternal love. This section mainly focuses on the theme of love. I will examine Zhang Jie’s major writings where the dominant characters are females. They are “Love”, The Ark, Emerald (Zumulu祖母绿, 1984), Gone Is The Person Who Loved Me Most (Shijieshang zui teng wo de nage ren qu le世界上最疼我的那个人去了, 1994), and Without A Word (Wu Zi无字, 1998) – the sixth Mao Dun Literary Prize Winning (2005) masterpiece, with which Zhang Jie is most satisfied. The assemblage of the above-mentioned works thus brings into focus on Zhang Jie with her consistent view of ideal femininity and masculinity, her change of perspective on sensual love and parental love (in her case maternal love), her unbreakable and increasingly strong mother-daughter bond, as well as her own emotional and literary growth and maturity through her creation of a colorful gallery of female images. To be exact, Zhang Jie, in her love/female texts, has expressed her persistent pursuit of the holy, near religious, heterosexual love in “Love” and Emerald, her disillusionment in heterosexual love in The Ark, her despair in heterosexual love in Gone Is The Person Who Loved Me Most, and her detachment from heterosexual love in Wu Zi. Differently put, Zhang Jie’s above-mentioned works with middle-aged women intellectuals as their heroines show her view on women from a female’s perspective and demonstrate the course of her process of searching for or looking up to ideal men, to ridiculing or looking down upon men, and to objectively evaluating or looking squarely at men while dissecting the negative traits of women, including jealousy, gossipiness, and lack of solidarity among themselves. This section is going to include four subtitles, i.e., Pursuit and persistence of holy love in “Love” and Emerald, The disillusionment in love in The Ark, The despair in love in Gone Is the Person Who Loved Me Most, and The detachment from heterosexual love in Wu Zi accordingly. 3. The main part - translation of part of Vol.1 of her three-volume masterpiece entitled Wu Zi.Publication A study of the standardization of Chinese writing/(2008) Wang, YingPublication Purity, modernity, and pessimism(2000) Tao, Rui