The linguistics of Chinese New Year: Linguistic and Cultural Practices

Chinese New Year is not just an important annual event to celebrate on the Chinese lunar calendar, it is intensely packed with traditional linguistic and cultural practices that are highly demonstrative of aspects of the Chinese culture. Come learn about the Chinese culture through some of these practices.

Dr Adrian TIEN is Sam Lam Associate Professor in Chinese Studies and Programme Director of MPhil Chinese Studies at the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, Trinity College Dublin. He is a linguist whose specialisation includes the relationship between Chinese language and culture. As a linguist focusing on aspects of Chinese linguistics, his teaching and research specialisations include semantics and cognitive linguistics, language and culture, cross-cultural communication, language acquisition, studies on Chinese-English or English-Chinese translation and aspects of Chinese sociolinguistics. He has appeared widely in international conferences, public lectures and seminar speaking on his research. As he is also a musicologist, a sought-after musician (pianist and carillonneur) and a prize-winner of several international music competitions, Prof. Tien has been investigating the various relationships between language and music, especially at the level of meaning and cognition. Along with numerous journal articles and book chapters he has written, Prof. Tien is the author of two books: The Semantics of Chinese Music: Analysing selected Chinese musical concepts (John Benjamins 2015) and Lexical Semantics of Children’s Mandarin Chinese during the First Four Years (Lincom 2011). Prof. Tien has been bestowed the title QTA (“Queen’s Trust Achiever”) on Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee as a young Australian achiever.