• Introducing applications of big data for Classical Chinese Poetry
• Using example of Tang and Song versification database
• Explaining use in poetry teaching and writing
• Highlighting interdisciplinary research potential in literature and philology

Much as there exist metrical constraints on poetic language based on properties like stress and vowel length, text-setting constraints in tone languages govern the ways in which tonal sequences can be married to musical melodies. Previous work suggests that two main principles are at play: a preference for similar settings—symmetries between the direction of melodic bigrams (rising, falling, level) and the corresponding sequence of tones in an accompanying text—and an avoidance of contrary settings—sequences where musical and tonal pitches move in opposite directions. Given these basic constraints, one may then ask how strictly they are enforced across languages and musical genres, as well as how to determine whether a given sequence of lexical tones should be judged as rising, falling, or level.

However, subsequent work has shown that assessing the proportions of similar and contrary settings is only part of the story. This is due in part to cross-cultural differences in how tonal text-setting constraints interact with musical considerations, but also because the considerable differences in the phonetics and phonology of the tone systems themselves which play a decisive role in determining which tonal sequences “count”. Moreover, it is becoming clear that the treatment of oblique settings—where either the tonal or melodic subsequence remains stationary—may differ considerably between languages.

Yet conducting meaningful cross-linguistic comparisons is challenging, because virtually any such comparison involves a change in both language and musical genre. To this end, this talk presents a comparative case study of tonal text-setting in Mandarin and Cantonese popular song, using a corpus in which language-specific texts have been set to the same musical melody. By holding the musical component constant, it becomes possible to better assess the extent to which observed variation in tone-tune alignment is a function of linguistic rather than musical differences. Consistent with previous studies, tone-tune correspondence in Cantonese is high, with few contrary and even fewer oblique settings, while in Mandarin, contrary and oblique settings are essentially as common as similar settings. These differences are shown to persist even when annotating for word and phrase boundaries, neutral tones, and contextually variable realization of tonal targets. I suggest these differences can be explained by reference to the distribution of tonal registers in the two languages: Cantonese tones inhabit a space of four equally distributed registers, whereas for the purposes of text-setting, most Mandarin tones belong to just one of two registers. This may explain at least in part why contrary and oblique settings are significantly more common in Mandarin popular song.

Speaker
Professor James KIRBY (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
James Kirby is Professor of Spoken Language Processing at the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing at the Ludwig-Maximilans-University in Munich, Germany. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2010 and spent 10 years in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh before moving to Munich in 2021. Since 2018 he has led the ERC-funded EVOTONE project on the emergence and evolution of linguistic tone. His research interests include sound change, computational and statistical methods, tone and register, language and music, and the languages of Southeast Asia.

A professional talk will be held in March by Mr. Xie Zhiwei. The topic is “Game Localization - What is it, how do you get in, and what's in it for you”. You may refer to the schedule below.
 

Moriscos were Iberian Muslims converted to Catholicism and their descendants. The Spanish monarchy, Inquisition, and clergy implemented many religious and political strategies to fully convert the Moriscos, who had mostly been baptised under coercion and were suspected of keeping their Islamic beliefs and practices in secret. The Moriscos were expelled from Spain in 1609–14, a decision justified with Islamophobic arguments depicting Moriscos as inherently incompatible with Catholicism because of their Muslim bloodlines. In this talk, I examine the kinds of spiritual, social, and legal conversions that were required of Moriscos throughout the sixteenth century. This research relates to my forthcoming book, Morisco Conversions: Belonging, Status, and Legal Action in Early Modern Valladolid, which explores how Moriscos in this Castilian city used legal action to defend their families, properties, and statuses in response to policies aimed at their conversion. I discuss the problem of Morisco conversion — their baptism, but also the policies of assimilation and control implemented to enforce the conversion of generations of Moriscos — and ask what it can teach us about forms of belonging and exclusion in early modern Spain.

Speaker
Dr. Stephanie M. CAVANAUGH
Sir John Elliott Junior Research Fellow in Spanish History
Exeter College, University of Oxford

Conducted online via ZOOM
(Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183) 
https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183

The Chinese Lunar New Year is a template for returns. These homecomings play out over a two-week period in which, on the national level, tens of millions of urban Chinese workers return to their rural home villages. In any given rural area, villagers and returnees experience these returns through a series of ritual and commensal occasions. This presentation investigates the moral dimensions of return during the Lunar New Year in one southeastern Chinese village, especially as expressed through rituals of commensality. These commensal occasions create boundaries, but also serve to incorporate a continuously widening group of people back within the fold of the village, framed as the “root” and “old home” of all returnees. After laying out the ethnographic context, the paper will examine several aspects of these rituals of return as moral projects.

Speaker
Professor Ellen OXFELD
Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College

Archaeological data can enrich world histories. This talk will introduce students to Mesoamerican archaeology, which includes the study of the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec cultures, among others, in what is now southern Mexico and Central America. The field covers a long time span and diverse topics, from the domestication of maize around 6700 BC to the Spanish colonization around AD 1520. Mesoamerica is also one of the few areas of world where a writing system developed, allowing scholars to read histories written by ancient Mesoamericans. As a case study, Dr. MacLellan will present research into the development of Maya society at the site of Ceibal, in Guatemala. At the beginning of the Preclassic period (c. 1000 BC - AD 300), the Maya lived in relatively egalitarian communities, but by the end, rulers had emerged. Dr. MacLellan is currently investigating early households at Ceibal to understand the major changes in social organization that occurred during the Preclassic period. She will share her latest findings and interpretations.

Speaker
Dr. Jessica MacLellan
Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Conducted online via ZOOM
(Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183) 
https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183

The history of science as a modern discipline was conceived in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time, the political and economic preponderance of Europe over the rest of the world called for an explanation through science and technology. Narratives on the history of science that owed their principal ideas to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers were nuanced and re-circulated. In the context of such assessments, Greek and Chinese science are supposed to have contributed to modern Western civilization but to have entered a state of decline prior to the rise of Western modernity. During the second half of the twentieth century such narratives begun to be judged as teleological and their validity was questioned. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the old narratives continue to circulate robustly, but there is also an effort to put together a different story. The lecture will examine how the medieval Greek (Byzantine) science (and especially astronomy) fared under such circumstances and draw some parallels with modern narratives on ancient, medieval, and modern Chinese science.

Speaker
Prof. Maria MAVROUDI
Departments of History and Classics
University of California, Berkeley

Conducted online via ZOOM
(Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183) 
https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183

Speaker :
Prof. Calvin Hui (College of William & Mary, US)

Discussant :
Prof. Jia Tan (CRS, CUHK)

Let's check out Prof. Lee JONES and Prof. Shahar HAMEIRI upcoming webinar at 16:00, on Mar 7 (Monday). The topic is Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China's Rise and they are going to share about the international relations and state transformation in China. It is conducted in English.

Due to the new social distancing measures introduced by the Hong Kong government, the webinar will conduct online.


 

“Why on earth do we marry nowadays if not for a happier life?” For many “middle-class” young women living in Tokyo and Shanghai today on whom this talk is centered, they entered marriage anticipating that there exists something called “marital happiness”. However, what does this “marital happiness” actually mean? More curiously, when I tried to find out the answer during my two-year fieldwork, what I heard and observed were mostly marital unhappiness. Why did most of my informants enter wedlock expecting happiness, yet their narratives often reveal quite otherwise? This talk thus seeks, through an ethnographic lens, to capture the simultaneous aspiration and anxiety “marital happiness” casts upon its pursuers in Shanghai and Tokyo. Instead of asking what marital happiness is and offering yet another fixed definition or code of it as many other works have done, the primary question this talk addresses is: what does “marital happiness” do?

Speaker
Dr. Lynn SUN
(Part-time Lecturer, Department of Anthropology and Centre for China Studies, CUHK)
Dr. Lynn Sun recently received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include psychological anthropology, anthropology of ethics, happiness, and intimate relationships in China and Japan. She is currently working on turning her doctoral research into a book manuscript while teaching courses on gender, intimacy, marriage and family at Centre for China Studies and the Department of Anthropology at CUHK.