Browsing results for Cultural key words
Published on September 6, 2018. Last updated on September 6, 2018.
Moisejeva, Natalija (2017). The semantic analysis of the English cultural key word ‘right’ and its equivalents in Italian and Lithuanian. S.l.: LAP (Lambert Academic Publishing).
The present research paper aims at providing an insight into the nature of the English cultural key word right and its expression in Italian and Lithuanian as well as into the various cultural scripts underlying this concept. The analysis is based on the theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and theories of Cultural Key Words and Cultural Scripts elaborated by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard in the 1990s. They claim that, apart from common words that are clear to everyone, there exist certain culture-specific concepts fully understandable only to the representatives of a specific culture. The main attention of this study is, therefore, focused on revealing the meaning groups underlying the English word right and their expression in Italian and Lithuanian, as well as on formulating cultural scripts underlying each meaning group using semantic primes from the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The source of the findings is the original version of George Orwell’s 1984 as well as its two translations.
A 2010 article with a similar title, by the same author but more limited in its scope, does not contain any NSM explications. That earlier article is available online [PDF (open access)].
Tags: (E) right
Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Rowen, Roslyn (2017). Bogan as a keyword of contemporary Australia: Sociality and national discourse in Australian English. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 55-82). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.03row
This chapter studies the word bogan as a cultural key word of contemporary Australian public discourse. The word bogan is specific to Australian English, with its closest counterpart in other Englishes being chav in British English and white trash or redneck in American English. Through a semantic analysis of the word, this chapter demonstrates that the social category of “bogans” remains a negative concept, denoting a certain group of people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who are car-loving, prone to violence and have a certain bogan outlook on life. However, the chapter also shows that in contemporary Australian discourse this originally negative concept can be transformed into a way of self-identification, and as a way of positively embracing Australian nationalism. This analysis is supported by studies in the ethnopragmatics and historical pragmatics of Australian English, which show a general tendency to value the “shared ordinariness” of people and to discursively “heroise” the little man, and the semi-criminal person. Applying the NSM approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, this chapter provides new analyses of the meaning of bogan, and cultural scripts related to the concept. It also opens up the study of the emergence of new cultural key words, and on the semantic and discursive diversity within Anglo Englishes.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) bogan
Published on April 2, 2018. Last updated on June 22, 2019.
Gusmeldi, Ridha Fitryani (2017). Indonesian cultural keyword hati and its English translation. Master’s thesis, Australian National University.
Hati, regarded by Indonesian speakers as the central controller of psychological functioning, is a cultural key word that is very difficult to translate into other languages. Due to this fact, selecting equivalent words for target texts, as well as understanding the concept of hati itself, is highly challenging. However, without a good understanding of this cultural key word, cultural and linguistic misunderstandings of hati-related terms are bound to emerge in translation.
This thesis investigates the meanings and English translations of hati-related terms in Bahasa Indonesia. Hati-related terms are grouped into several categories: feeling, moral judgement, thinking, religion, and physical meaning. The eleven highest frequency terms including hati are explicated using semantic primes. The terms are dalam hati, sepenuh hati, sakit hati, patah hati, senang hati, besar hati, menarik hati, baik hati, rendah hati and sesuka hati.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) baik hati, (E) besar hati, (E) dalam hati, (E) hati, (E) menarik hati, (E) patah hati, (E) rendah hati, (E) sakit hati, (E) senang hati, (E) sepenuh hati, (E) sesuka hati, (T) Malay
Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on May 23, 2019.
Asano-Cavanagh, Yuko (2017). Kawaii discourse: The semantics of a Japanese cultural keyword and its social elaboration. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 211-234). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.09asa
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Taking its starting point in the Japanese cultural key word kawaii (roughly, ‘cute’), this chapter explores contemporary Japanese social discourse. Using NSM to explicate kawaii, the two kawaii compounds ita-kawaii and otona-kawaii and the related cultural key words itai and otona, it breaks new ground and increases our understanding of the conceptual basis of kawaii and its elaborations in discourse. A view on Japanese socialization and gendered discourse is simultaneously developed, and the value of ‘being kawaii’ is being scrutinized through the stability and innovations of kawaii in discourse.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ita-kawaii いた かわいい, (E) itai 痛い, (E) kawaii かわいい, (E) otona 大人, (E) otona-kawaii 大人ーかわいい
Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Braga Mattos, Ana Paulla (2017). Subúrbio and suburbanos: Two cultural keywords in Brazilian discourse. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 157-182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.07mat
This chapter studies the Brazilian Portuguese key words subúrbio ‘suburb’ and suburbanos ‘suburb dwellers’. Despite formal similarities, the English cityscape word suburb conveys a very different concept than subúrbio. In dictionaries, the cultural semantics of the words subúrbio ‘suburb’ and suburbanos ‘suburb dwellers’ is largely missing. This is unfortunate since the semantic richness of these words shed light on Brazilian discourses of urbanism and on a culturally-specific way of categorising people in the urban space. Using evidence from a range of different Brazilian discourses and speakers’ reflections on the two words, I propose a semantic explication for each, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to adequately account for the complex and cultural meaning of the words – seen from an insider’s perspective.
Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on June 17, 2019.
Aragón, Karime (2017). Visuality, identity and emotion: Rosa mexicano as a Mexican Spanish keyword. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 131-156). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.277.06ara
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This chapter presents a semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of the Mexican Spanish colour word rosa mexicano. This word functions as a symbol of Mexican identity and serves as a cultural key word for Mexican Spanish speakers. It appears in a variety of discourses, such as international and cross-cultural relations, the arts, education and discursive representations of national self-perception. After providing a semantic analysis of the meaning of the word, the chapter moves on to an ethnopragmatic examination, articulating cultural scripts for the visual, identificational and emotional meanings associated with rosa mexicano discourse.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) rosa mexicano, (S) rosa mexicano
Published on May 19, 2019. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna, & Larina, Tatiana (2018). Anna Wierzbicka, language, culture and communication. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(4), 717-748.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-4-717-748 / Open access
Abstract:
This introduction to the second part of a special issue of the Russian Journal of Linguistics marking Anna Wierzbicka’s 80th birthday focuses on her research in the area of language and culture. It surveys some of the fundamental concepts of Wierzbicka’s research program in cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics, in particular cultural key words and cultural scripts, both of which she unpacks using the universal human concepts of NSM. The article also discusses the concept of Minimal Language as a recent development in the NSM program and presents associated research in a variety of fields.
More information:
Simultaneously published in English and Russian. The Russian version follows the English one.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) sud'ba судьба, (S) imposition, (S) non-imposition, (S) personal autonomy, (S) sincerity
Published on August 18, 2018. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Levisen, Carsten (2018). The grammar of violence: Insights from Danish ethnosyntax and the Wierzbicka-Pinker debate. Etnolingwistyka, 30, 145-167. DOI: 10.17951/et.2018.30.145. PDF (open access)
This paper explores the Danish key word vold ‘violence, abuse’ and scrutinizes its associated ethnosyntax, which is hidden in compound morphology. Focusing on the compounds hustruvold ‘wife vold’ and politivold ‘police vold’, it explores the conceptual syntax embedded in such coinages. Exploring more recent constructs, such as forældrevold ‘parent vold’, the author argues that Danish ethnosyntax embodies a view of the world in which traditional authority figures (men, police, parents) are coded as aggressors, whereas women, citizens and children are coded as victims.
In more general terms, the paper aims to open a new ethnolinguistic research agenda for the study of negative sociality constructs and the positive value system hidden in them. It does so by drawing attention to the differences and similarities of violence-related concepts in ethnolinguistic communities, and to the key role played by ethnosyntax in the elaboration of violence, vold, and similar concepts.
The paper also proposes an explication for the Bislama word faetem ‘punch, fight physically’.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) faetem, (E) vold, (S) domestic violence against women, (S) police violence, (T) Danish
Published on August 7, 2017. Last updated on February 16, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2018). “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(4), 487-514. DOI: 10.1515/ip-2018-0017
Terms like to joke (and joking) and to tease (and teasing) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding. More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives such as jocular and mock are also much used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse, mock abuse, jocular mockery, and the like.
Against this background, the present paper has three main aims.
In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comparison therefore risks introducing an Anglocentric bias into our theoretical vocabulary. Nor can the problem be easily solved by attributing technical meanings to the terms.
Detailed analysis of the everyday meanings of words like joking and teasing, on the other hand, can yield insights into the ethnopragmatics of Anglo conversational humour. This task is undertaken in the second part of the paper. The important English verb to kid and the common conversational formulas just kidding and only joking are also examined. The semantic methodology used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach.
Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humour based on cross-translatable terminology.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) amusing, (E) funny, (E) humour, (E) joke, (E) kid, (E) laugh, (E) tease, (T) English
Published on November 9, 2019. Last updated on November 9, 2019.
Farese, Gian Marco (2019). Italian discourse: A cultural semantic analysis. Lanham: Lexington.
Abstract:
Using NSM methodology, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the most important Italian cultural key words and cultural scripts that foreign learners and cultural outsiders need to know to become linguistically and culturally proficient in Italian. It focuses on the words and speech practices that are used most frequently in Italian discourse and that are uniquely Italian, both because they are untranslatable into other languages and because they are reflective of salient aspects of Italian culture and society. The book sheds light on ways in which the Italian language is related to Italians’ character, values, and way of thinking, and it does so in contrastive perspective with English. Each chapter focuses on a cultural keyword, putting it into cultural context and tracing it through a series of written texts including novels, plays, poems, and songs.
Table of contents:
- Parlami e ti dirò chi sei
- Che bello!
- Una brutta storia
- Italiani, brava gente
- Italiani sapientoni
- Italiani attori
- Italiani comandanti
- Conclusione
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on February 20, 2019. Last updated on January 26, 2020.
Svetanant, Chavalin (2019). Tracing the Thai ‘heart’: The semantics of a Thai ethnopsychological construct. In Bert Peeters (Ed.), Heart- and soul-like constructs across languages, cultures, and epochs (pp. 82-115). New York: Routledge.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180670-4
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This chapter sheds light on the semantic journey of chai ใจ, a key cultural concept in Thai culture. Chai is a person’s innermost secret part, linked to the body, with a dynamic capacity to move around and change its shape, size, colour, and even temperature, depending on the circumstances.
The chapter surveys the lexical meaning and multiple ways in which chai is used in contemporary Thai, then takes a historical turn to examine the semantic development of the word from its earliest attested uses to the present day, relying on data from a wide range of classical and contemporary sources. The analysis reveals that the primary conceptuality of the personhood construct embedded in the word chai ใจ has remained relatively stable since its first appearance in the 13th century, when it was used to refer to a person’s disposition, representing a ‘locus’ where psychological activity occurs. The literary data in the later periods demonstrates massive growth in cognitive and cultural salience with its occurrence in a steadily increasing number of metaphorical expressions and idioms. The chapter concludes with the explication of the modern folk concept of chai ใจ, using English and Thai NSM to avoid cultural bias.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) chai ใจ
Published on July 28, 2020. Last updated on July 28, 2020.
Thompson, Rachel (2020). Common Akan insults on GhanaWeb: a semantic analysis of kwasea, aboa and gyimii. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 103-122). Singapore: Springer.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) aboa, (E) gyimii, (E) kwasea
Published on July 28, 2020. Last updated on July 28, 2020.
Peeters, Bert; Lecompte-Van Poucke, Margo (2020). Bwénaado: an ethnolexicological study of a culturally salient word in Cèmuhî (New Caledonia). In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 123-148). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_7
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Ever since people have come together in communities, they have felt the need to regulate and control their relationships with members of other groups. One way of building and maintaining a stable society is by sharing wealth. New Caledonia has developed its own unique system of exchange, referred to as la coutume by its French-speaking inhabitants and by the Melanesian part of the population, which also uses indigenous terms that have relatively high cultural visibility and can thus be considered culturally salient. This paper focuses on one such word, bwénaado, and aims to demonstrate that it reflects an important cultural value in Cèmuhî, an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 3300 people dispersed along the north-east coast and in the valleys of New Caledonia’s rugged interior. To the best of our knowledge, no detailed treatment of bwénaado exists. Our semantic analysis therefore breaks new ground. Three different meanings of the word (roughly, ‘large-scale customary celebration’, ‘customary ceremony’ and ‘customary gift’) are distinguished. It will be argued that, even though the Kanak social exchange system (in which all three meanings are highly relevant) seems to be linked to a universal principle of reciprocity, it is highly culture-specific. To ensure utmost respect for this cultural specificity and to break out of the prison walls of the English language, NSM will be used to frame the description, and applied ethnolinguistics will form the backdrop against which the description is carried out.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) bwénaado, (E) mwa, (S) reciprocity, (T) Cèmuhî
Published on July 28, 2020. Last updated on July 28, 2020.
Peeters, Bert (2020). Culture is everywhere! In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 1-14). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_1
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This introductory chapter to the second of three volumes celebrating the career of Griffith University academic Cliff Goddard recaps the fundamentals of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which is explicitly adopted by all contributors to this volume (Sect. 1.2), then contextualizes and introduces the individual papers (Sects. 1.3 and 1.4).
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on August 14, 2021. Last updated on August 14, 2021.
Peeters, Bert. (2020). Gezellig: A Dutch cultural keyword unpacked. In Bromhead, Helen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.). Meaning, Life and Culture. Canberra: ANU Press pp 61-84.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/MLC.2020.03 (Open Access)
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) gezellig, (T) Dutch
Published on February 16, 2019. Last updated on February 9, 2020.
Goddard, Cliff (2020). ‘Country’, ‘land’, ‘nation’: Key Anglo English words for talking and thinking about people in places. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics, 1(2), 8-27.
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This is a corpus-assisted, lexical-semantic study of the English words ‘country’, ‘land’ and ‘nation’, using the NSM technique of paraphrase in terms of simple, cross-translatable words. The importance of these words and their derivatives in Anglophone public and political discourses is obvious. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that without the support of words like these, discourses of nationalism, patriotism, immigration, international affairs, land rights, and post/anti-colonialism would be literally impossible.
The study builds on Anna Wierzbicka’s (1997) seminal study of “homeland” and related concepts in European languages, as well as more recent NSM work that has explored ways in which discursively powerful words encapsulate historically and culturally contingent assumptions about relationships between people and places. The primary focus is on conceptual analysis, lexical polysemy, phraseology and discursive formation in mainstream Anglo English, but the study also touches on one specifically Australian phenomenon, which is the use of country in a distinctive sense which originated in Aboriginal English, e.g. in expressions like my grandfather’s country and looking after country. This highlights how Anglo English words can be semantically “re-purposed” in postcolonial and anti-colonial discourses.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) be called, (E) country, (E) creature, (E) earth, (E) ground, (E) grow, (E) land, (E) nation, (E) we
Published on July 28, 2020. Last updated on July 28, 2020.
Rowen, Roslyn (2020). The “Aussie” bogan: an occasioned semantics analysis. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 57-84). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_4
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This chapter explores the meaning and social use of the word bogan in Australian English. Although bogan is arguably a term that is currently trending in use and has been parodied in television series such as Bogan Pride and Upper Middle Bogan, it has so far been examined predominantly by sociologists, media scholars and social commentators, with little to no semantic research to date into bogan as a personal descriptor in colloquial Australian English. This study contributes to filling this gap by providing a foundation based on which the
meaning(s) of the term and its current widespread use in social interactions can be understood. In the process, it demonstrates that bogan is more than a term that asserts middle class hegemony, a label it has been repeatedly branded with; rather, it has a strong semantic core to which its meaning across various Australian discourses can be traced back. The chapter draws on interactional pragmatics to analyse the interactional achievement of locally situated meanings of bogan in conversational data. I will then provide comment on the role of NSM in dealing with participants’ interactionally specific meaning(s) of bogan. Data on usage comes from a corpus of naturally occurring examples of use of bogan in social interaction.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) bogan
Published on August 14, 2021. Last updated on August 15, 2021.
Bromhead, Helen (2020). The semantics of bushfire in Australian English. In Bromhead, Helen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.) Meaning, Life and Culture. pp 115-134. Canberra: ANU Press.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/MLC.2020.06 (Open Access)
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) bushfire, (S) response to bushfires
Published on July 28, 2020. Last updated on July 28, 2020.
Butter, Stella; Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2020). The comfort of home as an ethical value in Mike Packer’s Inheritance. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 85-101). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_5
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The loss of, and search for, comfort is at the heart of the 2010 social realist play Inheritance, in which the English dramatist Mike Packer explores the burst of the housing bubble in England by depicting the declining fortunes of a family. The pensioner Harry decides to buy his council house as an inheritance for his sons, but when the economic recession hits, the house is lost. This chapter gauges how the play negotiates meanings and sources of comfort by linking them with the theme of home. Packer’s play is notable for the way it connects the
characters’ understanding of comfort with specific forms of subjectivity, highlighting in particular how comfort may be understood as an ethical value and how neoliberal subjects reduce such ethical comfort to a sensuous appeasement achieved through appropriate technological devices. In order to tease out different dimensions and meanings of comfort in the play, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, conjoining literary studies and linguistics. In presenting our results, we rely heavily on the method of semantic analysis known as the NSM approach. The interdisciplinary analysis is presented as a first step towards establishing the heuristic value of NSM methodology for enriching the study of literary negotiations of meanings and values while also showing how the inclusion of literary texts in NSM studies helps trace semantic meaning transformations in the wake of changing life worlds.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) comfort
Published on January 15, 2022. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
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
Tags: (E) comfort, (E) conforto, (E) komfort
