Abstract
A diachronic study, on the diachronic development of the essential conceptual discourse of the Chinese equestrian culture". Taking the key concepts of "Yu" (to drive, control) and "Shu" (art, technique) as its two central pivot points and keywords, A specialized four-phase diachronic corpus of ∼600,000 characters, from the end of the Qing (1895) to 2020, was constructed and then analyzed. It revealed a fundamental paradigm shift - from "Yu", which expressed the stand-ardized scientific and humane training philosophies, gradually displaced the historically dominant concept of "Yu", which emphasized control and utility for warfare and production. Such a semantic change exemplifies the transition of equestrianism from an instrumental procedure of ’driving" into an artistic and symbiotic "skill". The analysis has argued that far-reaching restructurings in social functions, cultural notions, educational concepts, and ethical perceptions of the relation between human and non-human animal constitute the ground for this change. The study offers theoretical contributions and empirical evidence for sociolinguistics, cultural communication studies, and the history of specialized terminology. Further, it provides a replicable methodology for the study of conceptual evolution of other technical and professional domains, through the integration of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.
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How to cite this paper
A Study of the Semantic Development of Fundamental Terms in Chinese Equestrianism: From Yu to Shu—Based on a Multi-phase Diachronic Corpus
How to cite this paper: Pan Zhang, Jing Xin. (2025). A Study of the Semantic Development of Fundamental Terms in Chinese Equestrianism: From Yu to Shu—Based on a Multi-phase Diachronic Corpus. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 1(5), 919-923.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.029