Levisen, Carsten & Waters, Sophia (Eds.) (2017). Cultural keywords in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277

Abstract:

Cultural key words are words around which whole discourses are organized. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognized ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural key word studies by exploring key words from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse.

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds.

Table of contents:

  1. How words do things with people (Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters)
  2. Nice as a cultural keyword: The semantics behind Australian discourses of sociality (Sophia Waters)
  3. Bogan as a keyword of contemporary Australia: Sociality and national discourse in Australian English (Roslyn Rowen)
  4. Social keywords in postcolonial Melanesian discourse: Kastom ‘traditional culture’ and tumbuna ‘ancestors’ (Carsten Levisen and Carol Priestley)
  5. Talking about livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse and cultural models (Magnus Hamann and Carsten Levisen)
  6. Visuality, identity and emotion: Rosa mexicano as a Mexican Spanish keyword (Karime Aragón)
  7. Subúrbio and suburbanos: Two cultural keywords in Brazilian discourse (Ana Paulla Braga Mattos)
  8. Cantonese ‘mong4’: A cultural keyword of ‘busy’ Hong Kong (Helen Hue Lam Leung)
  9. Kawaii discourse: The semantics of a Japanese cultural keyword and its social elaboration (Yuko Asano-Cavanagh)
  10. An invitation to keyword studies: Guidance for future research (Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters)

More information:

Each chapter has a separate entry, where more information is provided.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners