This thesis attempts to identify some key aspects of Chinese indigenous psychologies as reflected in the Chinese language and to investigate their meanings from a culture-internal perspective. It focuses on Chinese categorisations and conceptualisations in relation to social organisation, emotional experience, memory, and the relationship between bodily experience and the conceptual structure. The theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is employed for meaning analysis so that the ways of thinking, knowing, feeling and behaviour that are fundamental to the Chinese way of life can be made easily accessible to cultural outsiders. This study will make an empirical and conceptual contribution not only to the growing field of the study of Chinese indigenous psychologies, but also to the study of commonality and diversity of human experience in general.

Book chapters
In press a. Why the inscrutable Chinese face? Emotionality and facial expression in Chinese. In Cliff Goddard (ed.), Ethnopragmatics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
In press b. Why are there two ‘joy-like’ emotions in Chinese: From semantic theory to empirical findings. In Paolo Santangelo (ed.), Emotions in Chinese Civilisations: Questions and Themes. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
In press c. Returning to my mother tongue. In Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), Translating Lives: Australian Stories of Language Migration. Queensland University Press.
2001. An inquiry into “sadness” in Chinese. In: Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 359-404.
Refereed Journal Articles
2005. Reflections on the new Introduction of Anna Wierzbicka’s Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (2nd, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). RASK, 22: 111-122.

2004a. The Chinese folk model of facial expressions: a linguistic perspective. Culture & Psychology, 10(2): 195-222.
2004b. When “empty words’ are not empty: examples from the semantic analyses of some ‘emotional adverbs’ in Mandarin Chinese. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 24(2): 139-161.
2004c. Categorization of Chinese interpersonal relationships and the cultural logic of Chinese social interaction: an indigenous perspective. Intercultural Pragmatics (Special issue on ‘Cultural Scripts’, guest edited by Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka), 1(2): 211-230.
2004d. ‘La Double Vie de Veronica’: reflections on my life as a Chinese migrant in Australia. Life Writing 1(1): 133-146. (Reprinted from Mots Pluriels, 2003, 23)
2003. ‘La Double Vie de Veronica’: reflection on my life as a Chinese migrant in Australia. Mots Pluriels (Special issue on ‘Translated Lives: Autobiography Between Languages and Cultures’, guest edited by Mary Besemeres and Maureen Perkins), 23.
2002. Different modes of describing emotions in Chinese: bodily changes, sensations, and bodily images. Pragmatics and Cognition (special issues on ‘The Body in the Description of Emotion’, guest edited by Nick Enfield and Anna Wierzbicka), 10(1/2): 307-339.
2001. Los sentimientos morales de la ‘tristeza’ china. Isegoría (Special issue on ‘Ethics and Moral Sentiments’), 25: 201-222. (Translated by Silvia K. Yankelevich).
Refereed Conference Proceedings
Ye, Zhengdao. 2002. ‘I’m not a ghost’: Semantic analysis of some ‘emotional adverbs’ in Mandarin Chinese. Proceedings of the 2002 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, Linguistics Department, The University of New South Wales.
Submitted work
Taste as a gateway to Chinese cognition. In Andrea Schalley and Drew Khlentzos (eds.), Mental States: Language and Cognitive Structure.
Memorization, learning, and cultural cognition: the notion of bei (‘auditory memorizing’) in the written Chinese tradition. In Mengistu Amberber (ed.), The Language of Memory: A Crosslinguistic Perspective.
Work in Chinese
2004. On Thesaurus Linguae Sericae [in Chinese]. Hànxúe Yanjiu Tongxùn, 23(3): 23-28.
1997 ‘Wu’ zhong wèihé yàoyou ‘yu’ [Why did the character for ‘dance’ have ‘feather’ in it?]. Yáowénjiáozì, 6: 14-15.
2002 Notes on the International Conference on Emotions and the Analysis of Historical Sources in China [in Chinese]. Hànxúe Yanjiu Tongxùn, 21(2): 41-50