Xuan WANG　Senior Assistant Professor

Fields	Linguistics
Researcher’s Data

I have focused on corpus linguistics, and conducted investigations on metaphorical expressions specifically.

In everyday life, when people are trying to communicate their feelings and thoughts to others in a simple way, they rely on not only literal but also metaphorical expressions.

For example, to describe being depressed, one would say “a blue Monday” in English, “blue depression” in Chinese, or “black depression” in Japanese. The prosaic word “depression” comes to convey deep emotions and express dynamic vividness when modified by colors like ‘blue’ and ‘black.’

Humans are emotional creatures. And just as people have emotions, the colors can showcase feelings such as “cloudily gloomy” or “depressingly dull.”

Any individual can become a subject of linguistic research. Feelings of accomplishment and joy when discovering some hidden tendency in language usage are intoxicating.

In the future, in addition to Japanese, I would like to study the linguistics of Chinese, which is my mother tongue. Hopefully, my research will contribute to Chinese language education.