| Abstract: | Ancient Chinese metaphysics, as recorded some 4000 years ago in I Ching, the Book of Changes, expresses three fundamental characteristics of human thinking: (1) bipolar organization of the dimensions of cognitions; (2) attributions of positive polarity to the Yang pole and negative to the Yin; (3) parallelism in the orientation of the dimensions in terms of underlying Positiveness/Negativeness. In this paper, eight postulates governing the dynamics of interactions among cognitions are presented, utilizing both linguistic and psychological evidence. These postulates are used to predict the performance of native speakers of 12 languages – American English, Belgian Flemish, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Iranian Farsi, Hindi, Malaysian, Thai and Japanese - on a simple cognitive task: the insertion of their equivalents of and vs. but in the conjunction of pairs of familiar adjectives, X is ADJ1 — ADJ2 (e.g., X is tail BUT weak). The comparably measured affective meanings of the pairs of adjectives were found to predict the differential usage of and vs. but equivalents with high precision - in a frame which, linguistically speaking, will accept either conjunction - and these results displayed very high consistency across all 12 languages sampled. Yang and Yin appear to be universals of human cognizing and sentencing. |
