| Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon is the earliest extant Chinese medical text which has been regarded as the foundamentally doctrinal source for traditional Chinese medicine and exerts a profound role in Chinese body philosophy,history as well as other cultural areas because of the multi-disciplinary knowledge.An ancient body symbolic structure has been constructed in the work,which shows how Chinese ancestors understood the physiology,pathology,diagnostics,therapy and healthkeeping,and how they expressed their cognition.Having been confined to the medical field,the previous researches on Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon focused on the interpretation of medical text and clinical practice,the research horizon is relatively narrow.Semiotics is the study of meaning-making of signs which provides a common theoretical and methodological framework for the cross-disciplinary research.The application of philosophical semiotics to the complicated symbolic structure of body in Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon is a new access to understanding its cultural significance and boosts the semiotic communication between China and western countries.From the perspectives of syntaxtics,semantics and pragmatics of semiotics proposed by Charles C.Morris,the dissertation analyses the meaning-making mechanism of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.It aims to propose a semiotic theory on the communication of Chinese traditional cultural classics and provide some new insights into some controversial issues and the meaning-generating of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon in contempary cultural context.The dissertation consists of introduction,six chapters and epilogue.The introduction covers research background,significance,research overview,inadequacy of current researches,research framework,research innovations and difficulties as well.Chapter One focuses on the historical background of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.It involves its name origin,completion time,medical theories,academic thoughts and version circulation as well as research history.Chapter Two illustrates the key semiotic concepts in Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.It analyses how these signs such as Qi,Yin-yang and Wuxing were made in terms of syntax and upgraded to meta-signs,how they were operated to express the medicinal meaning in the text of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.Chapter Three concentrates on the sign types in Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.It discusses the motivatedness of body sign in the context of index sign and analyzes the interpretation code of symptom as index sign in Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.Comparisons have been made based on symptom interpretation between Chinese medicine and western medicineChapter Four investigates the metaphorical thinking in Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.It explores metaphor types,functions,its meaning-generating mechanism as well as its hidden philosophical idea.It also involves the interpretation of Chinese medicine prescription text from the perspectives of syntagm and paradigm and the rationality of apprenticeship education mode for Chinese medicine practioners.Chapter Five considers the cultural meaning of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon.It analyses how the textual meaning is understood in terms of paratext and interpretive community and how traditional Chinese medicine culture is constructed and passed on with modeling theory and autopoiesis which is the theory of deep structure of traditional culture.Chapter Six centers on the semiotic interpretation on contemporary Chinese medicine culture issues.It explores the semiotic origin of the controversy between Chinese and Western medicine and proposes the semiotic approaches to the controversy and the meaning-generating of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon in the context of contemporary culture.The epilogue summarizes the academic value of semiotics and its role on medical practice as well as some implications.The thesis interprets ancient Chinese body culture in the context of philosophical semiotics.Two innovative points are included in the research.One is the innovation of research perspective.The dissertation explores the mechanism of meaning-making and interpretation of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon in terms of syntaxtics,semantics and pragmatics,and discloses the implied cultural characteristics as well as the historical process.With semiotics as methodology applied to the study of Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon as a symbol of ancient Chinese cultural classics,it gains new meaning in contemporary society.The other point is the theoretical innovation.A new perspective has been adopted to reexamine the traditional Chinese medicine culture and clarify the logic of construction and the semiotic mechanism of national culture communication.In term of this,the theory of autopoiesis on national culture has been put forward,which displays Chinese researchers? efforts in the development of international semiotics. |
