Purpose of the research

This research project intends to collect and combine fragments of the so-called mental structure in Ming and Qing China, resorting to literary criticism, psycholinguistics, psychology, anthropological history. This approach offers new interpretative patterns in re-reading documents that have already been studied, and also allows for materials that have until now been regarded as territory of other disciplines, to be considered as historical sources such as philosophy or literature, and even moral writings. The census of such terms allows to single out verbal and nonverbal, allusive and overt relations among communicative codes, and links among emotions within the symbolic and social systems, as well as interactions between emotional meanings and value systems. Therefore this kind of glossary may be a useful instrument for any historical and literary analysis. Besides that, however, the information collected may be useful also for lexicographical purposes, like any diachronic analysis and definition of changes, expansion and reduction of semantic fields of each term, studies on the evolution of lexicon, the occurrence of certain words, etc.

The Glossary is not necessarily comprehensive of all the literary production of the period, but it is obvious that the more material is examined and more reliable it is. In order to allow a progressive development of the work, the scope of this Glossary is initially restricted to single representative sources, which will be easily combined and compared, growing with the new data added by the successive analyses.