ABSTRACT
The period from the publication of my first journal article, “The Tolerance of Redundant Information of Language”, in 1986 to the publication of the four monographs, Aesthetic Linguistics (1993), Pragmatics in Chinese Culture (1997), The Theory of Language Holography (2003), and this book, Language: The Last Homestead of Human Beings (2005), has lasted for eighteen years or so. But the time I first gained access to the literature of linguistics started earlier, approximately in 1982, i.e., three to four years before 1986. In other words, I have studied linguistics for about twenty-two years. As a researcher of linguistics, my work, I have to admit, has been a process with Heaven’s help and self-help as well. A scholar is similar to a pilgrim in that both of them are and have to be pious enough, but they are meanwhile different from each other in that a pilgrim had a sacred place as his destination before he started on the journey, while a scholar has to search again and again on the way before he finally comes to and identifies an object of research.
