Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) -

a historical and comparative encyclopaedia of Chinese conceptual schemes

Christoph Harbsmeier et al., University of Oslo, 1988- 

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The Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) is an international collaborative project aimed to explore the conceptual schemes of the Chinese language. The project was conceived by Christoph Harbsmeier, its chief editor, and receives input by a large number of academic contributors worldwide. The content of TLS is preserved and presented in the form of a relational database.

TLS is designed throughout to make the classical Chinese evidence strictly comparable to that of other cultures, and to make possible meaningful analytic primary-evidence-based disagreement among non-sinologists on classical Chinese concepts and words. TLS is compiled in the hope that careful philosophical reflection on Chinese texts might serve to broaden the empirical basis for philosophical theories and generalisations on conceptual schemes. The contributors intend to improve the clarity and bite of declarations of difference between conceptual schemes by enlarging the basis of literally translated and analysed texts from widely (though never radically) different intellectual cultures, and to make precise criteria of translation for classical Chinese, mainly through a detailed description in English of systematic recurrent semantic relations between Chinese words, especially distinctive semantic features.

Key features:

• Focusing on distinctive semantic nuances, TLS serves as a synonym dictionary of classical Chinese.
• TLS systematically organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic and mereonomic hierarchies, thus showing up whole conceptual schemes or cognitive systems; these are taken to circumscribe the changing topology of Chinese mental space.
• TLS systematically registers a range of lexical relations like antonym, converse, epithet etc.; it thus aims to define conceptual space as a relational space.
• TLS is the first dictionary of Chinese which incorporates detailed syntactic analysis of (over 600 distinct kinds of) syntactic usage; it thus enables users to make a systematic study of such basic phenomena as the natural history of abstract nouns in China.
• TLS is a corpus-based dictionary which will record the history of rhetorical devices in texts and thus enables the study of such things as the natural history of irony in China.
• All analytic categories and procedures of analysis in TLS are flexible in the sense that they are continuously being revised and improved in the light of new observation and analysis.

   

  More information:
  http://tls.uni-hd.de/Lasso/TLS/ProjectDescription/general_introduction.lasso

  http://tls.uni-hd.de/Lasso/TLS/default.html