Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A Lexical-Conceptual analysis

There are many activities that humans cannot do without. Eating and drinking are two of them. But, do people conceptualise these ‘basic’ human activities in the same way? This paper provides a Chinese perspective from two varieties of Sinitic languages—Mandarin Chinese and Shanghai Wu, which is spoken in the Shanghai metropolitan area by approximately 14 million native speakers. Both of these forms of Chinese suggest two different ways of conceptualisation. In Mandarin Chinese, a lexical distinction is made between chī and hē, comparable to eat and drink in English (but not exactly the same); whereas in Shanghai Wu one single lexical item čhyq is used to describe any activity involving ingestion. The paper conducts a detailed contrastive semantic analysis of these concepts in question, explores the motivations behind their figurative meaning extensions, and uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to articulate the conceptulisations reflected in these concepts. The findings of this paper are consistent with those emerging from crosslinguistic investigation of less familiar languages in recent times, in that there are variations in linguistic coding of eating and drinking (e.g. Newman, 2009b). However, this paper also illustrates that one perhaps should not underestimate the variations of conceptualisation within one ethnic group.