중국어 '玉' 의미의 문화언어학적 고찰

초록

This study adopts a cultural-linguistic perspective to examine how the cultural symbolism embedded in yu (玉, “jade”) has been encoded in language from antiquity to the present. The analysis shows that in Chinese culture yu has historically functioned as a cultural sign in domains such as ritual and propriety, royal authority and the imperial household, Daoist and immortal realms, moral and aesthetic discourse, and natural/ celestial symbolism, and on this basis has undergone multiple trajectories of semantic expansion. These extensions are motivated by conceptual metaphor—for example, PRECIOUSNESS/ CHARACTER/BEAUTY IS JADE—and by conceptual metonymies including POSSESSION → OWNER, MATERIAL → PRODUCT, ATTRIBUTE → APPELLATION, and MEANS → RESULT. This value schema is inherited in modern Chinese as positive evaluative meanings (preciousness, nobility, beauty, luxury) and as a color name. Moreover, yu is used metaphorically to denote the ideal person, premium commodities, and scholarly attainment, and in contemporary online discourse in particular it is recontextualized as in-game currency, as a term for the addressee’s face and body, and as a resource for polite expression.

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