Asc nsm-approach.net

(2022) Danish, German — Emotions

Fenyvesi, Katalin, Bick, Eckhard, & Geyer, Klaus. (2022). Sadness-related Expressions in Danish and German: A Corpus-assisted NSM-analysis. Scandinavian Studies in Language, 13(1), 249-273. Retrieved from https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/135080

Abstract

The study explores sadness-related expressions in two typologically closely related languages in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework. A systematic corpus enquiry revealed the syntactic patterns and helped to identify the most frequent head-nouns of a number of Danish and German sadness- related expressions. German traurig, for instance, has a distribution similar to that of Danish sørgelig with semiotic products and clauses as subjects. However, when used with human subjects, its distribution aligns with the Danish multi-word expression ked af det. Semantic consultations conducted about the use of the most salient sadness adjectives with some speakers of Danish and German revealed fine-grained differences between German traurig and trist and Danish ked af det and trist respectively. Thus, when used with a human headword, Danish trist is more trait-like while ked af det is more state- like. The concept of sadness-related emotions in Danish and German is discussed, followed by a methodological discussion about the combinability of a quantitative corpus approach, a qualitative semantic consultation approach and NSM explications. Corpus inquiry was used to chart the adjectives’ polysemy, and as a method for creating the NSM explications, consultation data were used.

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(2022) Danish, Kalaallisut — Environment

Maskova, Stephanie. A Semantic Analysis of Snow-related Words in Danish and Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic). Scandinavian Studies in Language, 13(1), 225-248. Retrieved from https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/135079

 

Abstract

This paper emerges from the vexed question whether the allegedly many “Eskimo” terms for snow document a linkage between language, culture, and cognition. Using the semantic explication technique of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach, the emic logics embedded in the Kalaallisut snow-related words aputit and nittaappoq and the Danish snow-related words sne and det sner are unfolded. Through a comparison of the findings, the paper discusses how the physical world is conceptualized in both culture-specific and transcultural ways. The explications are based on evidence from semantic consultations and text examples.

(2022) Environmental Semantics

Bromhead, Helen., & Levisen, Carsten. (2022). Environmental Semantics. Scandinavian Studies in Language, 13(1), 78–87. Retrieved from https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/135073

 

No abstract available

 

This article forms part of the handbook section of the Scandinavian Studies in Language Special Issue on Cognitive Cultural Semantics – A Nordic Guide to Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

(2022) Pedagogy

Sadow, Lauren., & Fernández, Susana. S. (2022) Pedagogical Pragmatics: Natural Semantic Metalanguage Applications to Language Learning and Teaching. Scandinavian Studies in Language, 13(1), 53-66. https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/135071

(2021) Danish – Syntax

Levisen, Carsten. (2021). The syntax of something: Evaluative affordances of noget in Danish construction grammar. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 44(1), 3-24.

DOI: 10.1017/S033258652000013X

Abstract

This paper explores ‘the evaluative noget construction’ in Danish. The construction consists of noget ‘something’ juxtaposed by a noun in an evaluative frame such as e.g. Det er noget pjat, ‘It’s nonsense’. With a starting point in cross-linguistic studies on SOMETHING, the paper moves on to explore core members of this evaluative class in Danish, providing a detailed semantic analysis of the construction’s core configurations. The affordance of noget ‘something’ to mean ‘something bad’ is a key to understanding the construction, and from this general premise the class of evaluatives take off in multiple negative direc- tions, providing a snapshot of the Danish linguaculture of evaluation. The paper argues for a Cultural Construction Grammar that can bring together the lexicogrammatical integrationism of construction grammar approaches with the linguacultural holism of the research in ethnosyntax. The goal is to provide high-definition analysis of complex, language-specific constructions in a simple, globally translatable metalanguage.

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(2018) Anglocentrism

Levisen, Carsten. (2018). Biases we live by: Anglocentrism in linguistics and cognitive sciences. Language Sciences, 76, 101173.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2018.05.010

 

Abstract

This paper explores “Anglocentrism” as a bias in contemporary linguistics and cognitive sciences. Anglo concepts dominate international discourse on language and cognition, but the influence that this Anglocentric metalinguistic discourse has on global knowledge production, research methods, and the theoretical framing of research questions is rarely debated. Three case studies on heavily “Anglicised” discursive domains are provided: (i) “the mind” – and the Anglicisation of global discourse of human personhood; (ii) “happiness” – and the Anglicisation of the global discourse of human values; (iii) “com- munity” – and the Anglicisation of the global discourse of human sociality. With cross- linguistic evidence from Europe (Danish), and the Pacific (Bislama), the paper denatural- ises the English words mind, happiness, and community and the cognitive models they stand for, demonstrating that these words are not “neutral” nor “innocent” metalinguistic descriptors. Rather, they are quintessential Anglo constructs, and as such they provide a lens on humanity that is biased towards an Anglo interpretation of the world. Finally, the paper explores the “bias” concept. Paradoxically, the bias concept is in itself a product of the Anglosphere, as as such a part of the problem. However, due to this word’s meta- discursive function, the paper argues that the bias concept can become a useful Trojan Horse, a concept through which we can fight Anglocentrism from within, and pave the way for a more adequate representation of human diversity in linguistics and cognitive sciences.

(2022) Minimal Languages

Diget, Ida Stevia. (2022) “The Minimal Language Approach: Foundations, Contributions, and Practice.” Scandinavian Studies in Language 13.1: 39-52. https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/135070

 

No abstract available

 

 

(2022) Scandinavian languages, Danish – NSM

Levisen, Carsten, Fernández, Susana S., and Hein, Jan (2022) Cognitive Cultural Semantics: A Nordic Guide to Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Scandinavian Studies in Language 13(1): 1–38. https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/135133.

No abstract available

 

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2019) Danish — Humour, interjections

Levisen, Carsten. (2019). Laughter interjections: Contributions to a lexical anthropology of humour (with special reference to Danish). Scandinavian Studies in Language, 10(1), 110-130.

 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v10i1.114674

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature on interjections by suggesting that ‘laughter interjections’ (words such English haha or hehe) make up an important type of interjections that has so far not been accounted for in cross-linguistic work on interjections. Secondly, it argues that laughter interjections are thick with cultural meaning, and that they can play an important role for an “emic turn” in humour studies. Third, it develops a case study on “Danish funniness” with a point of departure in the Danish paradigm of laughter interjections. The paper explores humourous discourse from the perspective of these culturally specific expressive words, and provides high definition analysis of two Danish laughter interjections tøhø and hæhæ, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage technique of explication. The general framework of the study is Lexical Anthropology, an approach to meaning analysis that combines insights from lexical semantics and linguistic anthropology.

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2022) English, molecules — Money

Goddard, Cliff, Wierzbicka, Anna & Farese, Gian Marco. (2022). The conceptual semantics of “money” and “money verbs”. Russian Journal of Linguistics 26(1) 7–20. https://doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-27193

Open Access

 

Abstract

The central purpose of this study is to apply the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of semantic-conceptual analysis to the word ‘money’ and to related “economic transaction” verbs, such as ‘buy’, ‘sell’ and ‘pay’, as used in everyday English. It proposes semantic explications for these words on the basis of conceptual analysis and a range of linguistic evidence and taking account of lexical polysemy. Even in its basic meaning (in a sentence like ‘there was some money on the table’), ‘money-1’ is shown to be surprisingly complex, comprising about 35 lines of semantic text and drawing on a number of semantic molecules (such as ‘country’, ‘number’, and ‘hands’), as well as a rich assortment of semantic primes. This ‘money-1’ meaning turns out to be a crucial semantic molecule in the composition of the verbs ‘buy’, ‘sell’, ‘pay’, and ‘(it) costs’. Each of these is treated in some detail, thereby bringing to light the complex semantic relationships between them and clarifying how this bears on their grammatical properties, such as argument structure. The concluding section considers how NSM semantic-conceptual analysis can help illuminate everyday economic thinking and also how it connects with Humanonics, an interdisciplinary project which aims to “re-humanise” economics.

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2021) NSM

Goddard, Cliff (2021). Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In Xu, W., & Taylor, J. R. (Eds.). The routledge handbook of cognitive linguistics. Taylor & Francis Group. p. 93–110

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2020) English, Portuguese, Polish – Comfort

Bułat-Silva, Zuzanna. (2020). Lexical-Semantic Analysis of ‘Comfort’: A Contrastive Perspective of English, European Portuguese, and Polish. In Dorothee Birke, Stella Butter (Eds.), Comfort in Contemporary Literature and Culture: The Challenges of a Concept. (21-42). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839449028-002

 

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between the concepts of comfort and sloth. While we intuitively assume a proportional correspondence between the two – more comfort results in more sloth and vice versa – I draw on the writings of American author Thomas Pynchon to elucidate why such a straightforward conclusion fails. In fact, Pynchon points to many possible modes of sloth in different cultural contexts, which I label »Writerly Sloth«, »Readerly Sloth«, »Watcherly Sloth«, and »Laugherly Sloth«, that all individually bring about a characteristic form of comfort and discomfort. Following Pynchon’s concise overview of the historical ramifications of the philosophy of sloth since Thomas Aquinus, I attempt to connect the poetics of slothfulness with specific events of US-American literature and politics from within their respective zeitgeists, such as the refusal to work during the heyday of Wall Street capitalism or watching TV in California in the 1960s.

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2021) An Anatomy of Chinese Offensive Words [BOOK]

Tien, Adrien, Carson, Lorna, & Jiang, Ning. (2021). An Anatomy of Chinese Offensive Words: A Lexical and Semantic Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Abstract

This book offers a precise and rigorous analysis of the meanings of offensive words in Chinese. Adopting a semantic and cultural approach, the authors demonstrate how offensive words can and should be systematically researched, documented and accounted for as a valid aspect of any language. The book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and students of sociolinguistics, language and culture, linguistic taboo, Chinese studies and Chinese linguistics.

 

From the Foreward

This book began life as an individual project undertaken by Professor Adrian Tien. After living in Australia and Singapore, Adrian moved to Ireland in 2015 to take up a new post at Trinity College Dublin, where he was recruited to direct the growing Chinese Studies programme in the university. Within three years of his arrival, Adrian tragically passed away following a short illness. Aware of the progress of this book project, we— Adrian’s colleague Professor Lorna Carson, and his former PhD student and research assistant Dr Ning Jiang—undertook to complete the manu- script as a way of honouring Adrian’s memory, our friendship and his academic legacy. The vision for this book belongs to Adrian, and any errors or shortcomings which follow remain the responsibility of his co-authors.

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2020) Australian English — Humour

Haugh, Michael, & Weinglass, Lara. (2020). “The Great Australian Pastime”: Pragmatic and Semantic Perspectives on Taking the Piss. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 75-94). Singapore: Springer.

Abstract

The claim that Australians place considerable value on not taking oneself too seriously lies at the heart of discourses on Anglo-Australian identity. While laughter and playful talk are ubiquitous across languages and cultures, Australians are claimed to pride themselves on being able to joke and laugh at themselves (and others) in almost any context, no matter how dire or serious the circumstances appear to be. One of the key practices that has often been noted is that of ‘taking the piss’, where the pretensions of others are (gleefully) punctured through cutting, mocking remarks. Yet despite its apparent importance for Australians, there has been surprisingly little empirical study of actual instances of it. This lacuna is arguably a consequence of the complexity of studying a phenomenon that is simultaneously semantic and pragmatic in character. Ethnopragmatics is one of the few extant approaches that is specifically designed to directly tackle this problem. In this approach, ‘semantic explications’, which address what a word or phrase means, provide the basis for proposing ‘cultural scripts’, which address what members of a culture are held to (normatively) do in social interaction and the cultural value placed on doing things in that way. In this chapter, we analyse data drawn from spoken corpora to address the question of whether “taking the piss” might be best approached as a kind of ‘semantic explication’ or as a ‘cultural script’, and what the consequences of framing it as one or other might be for research on the role of ‘humour’ more generally in social interaction amongst Australian speakers of English.

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(2021) Popular Geopolitics

Levisen, Carsten, & Fernández, Susana S. (2021). Words, People and Place: Linguistics Meets Popular Geopolitics. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics, 5(2021), 1–11

(Open Access)

Abstract

The language of everyday life is thick with geopolitical meaning. Everyday words, grammars, and stories are full of significant postulates about what the world is like. Habitual thinking about the world, its people and places, is guided by conceptual categories, created through, and supported by linguistic patterns and practices.

The language of everyday life allows many specific ways of conceptualizing and imagining people in places, but linguistics, the main discipline concerned with the study of the world’s languages, has not always seen and envisioned this link to geopolitics clearly. Due to the hesitant role of linguistics, the role of language(s) in geopolitical knowledge production has often been left to be studied by scholars of other disciplines. Stepping up to the challenge, we have in this volume invited linguists who work in many different areas and through different approaches to contribute to the emerging interdiscipline called ‘Popular Geopolitics’ (Saunders & Strukov 2018). The core idea behind this interdiscipline is that “geopolitical knowledges”, i.e. what people know and think about places (territories, cities, countries, etc.), and about people in these places (belonging, power relations, social cognition, etc.), is not only determined by the conceptualizations of diplomats, pundits, politicians, and political scientists, but just as much by everyday discourses and popular culture.

(2019) Danish — Humour

Levisen, Carsten. (2019). The Cultural Semantics of Untranslatables: Linguistic Worldview and the Danish Language of Laughter. In A. Glaz (Ed.), Languages – Cultures – Worldviews: Focus on Translation (pp. 319-346). Palgrave Macmillan. Palgrave studies studies in translating and interpreting

Abstract

Through an in-depth case study of humour concepts in Danish, the chapter develops a cultural-semantic analysis of the untranslatables of laughter, and provides a new account of the worldview engendered by such words. The Danish language of laughter is particularly rich in synaesthetic humour metaphor; the chapter sets out to explicate key categories within this class: sort humor ‘black, murky humour,’ plat humor ‘flat, plain humour,’ fed humor ‘fat humour,’ and tør humor ‘dry humour.’ The analysis is undertaken within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework of analysis and takes an explicitly translational approach to language, culture, and worldview. Providing a roadmap for how to navigate in the landscape of translatables and untranslables, the chapter contributes to both translational semantics and linguistic worldview studies.

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2016) Japanese — Politeness

Haugh, Michael. (2016). The role of English as a scientific metalanguage for research in pragmatics: Reflections on the metapragmatics of “politeness” in Japanese. East Asian Pragmatics, 1(1), 39–71.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.v1i1.27610

Abstract

Much of the theorisation undertaken in pragmatics has afforded English a privileged place, not only as the object of analysis but also as the means through which such theoretical discussions have been accomplished. Yet as a number of researchers have pointed out, the language in which the description, analysis, and theorisation of pragmatic phenomena is undertaken can have an influence on how the research object(s) in question are understood. In this article, the role of English as our scientific metalanguage in research on ‘politeness’ in Japanese is considered. It is argued that in order to start managing such challenges for research in pragmatics we need to go beyond the study of abstract or decontextualised meanings of words and move towards the analysis of emic concepts and emic practices. It is concluded that rather than abandoning notions such as ‘politeness’ in favour of seemingly less culturally imbued terms, what is needed instead is greater awareness of what the use of English as a scientific metalanguage both affords for researchers working in pragmatics, along with the challenges it can create for such work.

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(2020) English — Evaluational adjectives

Trnavac, Radoslava, & Taboada, Maite. (2020). Positive Appraisal in Online News Comments. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 185–206). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_10

Abstract

This chapter investigates the linguistic expression of positive evaluation in English and describes a preliminary typology of linguistic devices used for positive evaluation. Using corpus-assisted analysis, we classify some of the resources that play a role in the expression of positive evaluation into phenomena in the lexicogrammar and phenomena that belong in discourse semantics and compare those resources to the ones deployed for negative evaluation (see the work on negative evaluation in Taboada et al. in Corpus Pragmat, 1:57–76, 2017). This general classification of evaluative devices overlaps with the planes of expression in systemic functional linguistics. Our data comes from a collection of opinion articles and the comments associated with them (Kolhatkar et al., in the SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus: A corpus for the analysis of online news comments, under review). We use a set of 1000 comments previously annotated for Appraisal (Martin and White in The language of evaluation. Palgrave, New York, 2005), including labels of Attitude (Affect, Judgement, Appreciation) and polarity (positive, negative, neutral). The central component of the chapter is the analysis of the resources used by commenters to express positive evaluation. We explore whether they make use of rhetorical figures, following up on our work with Cliff Goddard on the use of rhetorical figures in the expression of negative evaluation (Taboada et al. in Corpus Pragmat, 1:57–76, 2017). We then analyse the semantics of evaluative adjectives using the natural semantic metalanguage approach and follow our previous work on templates that capture different types of adjectives and fall into five groups (Goddard et al., in Funct Lang 26, 2019). Although our corpus analysis is limited, and it includes only a specific type of data (online news comments), the phenomena that we discuss are present across different genres of texts. While our previous work has focused on how to express negative evaluation, this chapter seeks to honour Cliff Goddard and his positive influence by studying how positivity is realized in language.

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2019) Emotions

Ye, Zhengdao. (2019).The semantics of emotion: From theory to empirical analysis. Pritzker, Sonya.E., Fenigsen, Janina., & Wilce, James.M. (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367855093

Abstract

This chapter provides a systematic account of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion and “affective science,” especially how it addresses three methodological questions: (a) how emotional meaning can be explicated in terms that are psychologically real to people; (b) how culture-specific meanings can be convened authentically to another linguacultural community, so that important nuances in the conceptualizations of emotions can be appreciated by cultural outsiders; and (c) how commonalities and differences in human experiences can be identified and articulated? The chapter draws upon a wide selection of NSM work across many languages, including Bislama, English, Mbula (PNG), and Chinese.

 


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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