Abstract
Ruthrof's (2000) corporeal semantics, which rejects the syntactic & definitional emphases of mainstream linguistics & language philosophy, is argued to provide the best available theoretical tool to accommodate the construction of meaning in Chinese & in Chinese-English translation, particularly that of poetry & other written texts that require the reader to engage in extensive mental projection. It is claimed that language is an empty syntactic grid & that meaning is not governed by definition & is an event in the Heideggerian sense, not a relationship between language & an unmediated world. Chinese exemplifies the fundamental, inherent interpretive nature of language; meaning events occur when verbal signs are used by the reader to create an imaginative world in which he/she follows semantic pathways to possible meanings.