Browsing results for Danish

(1990) English, Danish – Emotions (shame, embarrassment)

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on November 11, 2018.

Dineen, Anne (1990). Shame/embarrassment in English and Danish. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 217-229. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599442

The paper discusses one area of the emotion lexicon in Danish and English, namely a set of terms within the domain of ‘shame’/’embarrassment’. This set of terms constitutes a folk taxonomy, the internal relationships between these terms being a matter for empirical investigation. The paper relies on NSM to make semantic relationships explicit and easily comparable. English and Danish terms are discussed in turn, and comparisons are drawn between them.


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(2012) Danish – Cultural key words

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 18, 2019.

Levisen, Carsten (2012). Cultural semantics and social cognition: A case study on the Danish universe of meaning. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110294651

Abstract:

This book contributes to the emerging discipline of cultural semantics, and to the ongoing debates of linguistic diversity, metalanguage, and the use of linguistic evidence in studies of culture and social cognition. Presenting original, detailed studies of key words of Danish, it breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values, offering new tools for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe.

Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes. The author uses NSM to account for the meanings of highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts. It is argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who live by Danish concepts are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by central Danish key words and lexical grids.

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(2013) Danish – Social cognition

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.

Levisen, Carsten (2013). On pigs and people: The porcine semantics of Danish interaction and cognition. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 344-364. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846455

There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and adjectives abound, and the pragmatics of Danish, including its repertoire of abusives, is heavily reliant on porcine phraseology. Despite the highly urbanized nature of the contemporary Danish speech community, semantic structures from Denmark’s peasant-farmer past appear to have survived and taken on a new significance in today’s society. Unlike everyday English, which mainly distinguishes pig from pork, everyday Danish embodies an important semantic distinction between grise, which roughly speaking translates as ‘nice pigs’, vis-à-vis svin, which, very roughly, translates as ‘nasty pigs’.

Focusing on the pragmatics of svin-based language, this paper demonstrates how this concept is used in Danish interaction and social cognition. The paper explores systematically the culture-specific porcine themes in Danish evaluational expressions, speech acts and interpersonal relations. The paper demonstrates that ‘pigs in language’ is far from a trivial topic and argues that cultural elaboration of “pig words” and the culture-specific meaning of pigs in Danish not only sheds light on the diverse linguistic construals of “animal concepts” in the world’s languages: it also calls for a cultural-semantic approach to the study of social cognition.


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(2014) Danish – Cultural key words, cultural values

Published on July 30, 2018. Last updated on August 21, 2023.

Horn, Nynne Thorup (2014). Child-centered semantics: Keywords and cultural values in Danish language socialisation. MA thesis, Aarhus University.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Danish child-view, including Danish language socialization practices, is perceived as particularly foreign and peculiar by immigrants and other cultural outsiders. Personal accounts from Middle-Eastern immigrants are supported by available information material offered by Danish integration services. Thus, the booklet Your child lives in Denmark, devised by the Danish child-oriented organisation Børns Vilkår ‘Children’s Welfare’, which is available in Afghan, Arabic, Danish, English, Somali, Turkish, and Urdu, advises immigrants in Denmark to bring up their children by talking with them, by avoiding coaxing them with sweets, and by giving them the freedom to be children. While this advice may make sense to a native member of Danish culture, they are unintelligible and meaningless to cultural outsiders. By means of semantic and ethnopragmatic analyses, the thesis seeks to concretize and clarify the meaning as well as the inherent cultural values and assumptions inherent in the culture-specific advice and the Danish child-view in general. More specifically, the thesis combines the theory of language socialization with the approach of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to identify and analyse cultural key words and core values in the Danish child-view and investigates if, and how, Danish children become socialized with these key words and their underlying values.


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(2014) Danish – Emotions

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.

Levisen, Carsten (2014). The story of “Danish happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 174-193.

DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846455

Abstract:

According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse on “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Adopting the NSM approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed. It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and think about life in terms of ”happiness”, but rather through a different set of cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural key word lykke.

The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts livsglæde, roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst ‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. The paper calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.

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Reissued as:

Levisen, Carsten (2016). The story of “Danish happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 45-64). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.03lev

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(2015) Danish – Cultural key words: LIGE

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.

Levisen, Carsten & Waters, Sophia (2015). Lige, a Danish ‘magic word’? An ethnopragmatic analysis. International Journal of Language and Culture, 2(2), 244-268. DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.2.2.05lev

The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as ‘please’, but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to “say please”. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is in fact no direct equivalent of anything like English please, German bitte, or similar constructs in other European languages. Consequently, Danish speakers cannot “say please”, and Danish children cannot “say the magic word”.

However, lige is in its own way a magic word, performing a different kind of pragmatic magic that has almost been left unstudied because it does not correlate well with any of the major Anglo-international research questions such as “how to express politeness” or “how to make a request”. This paper analyses the semantics of lige to shed light on the peculiarities of Danish ethnopragmatics. It is demonstrated not only that Danish lige does a different semantic job than English please, but also that please-based and lige-based interactions are bound to different interpretations of social life and interpersonal relations, and reflect differing cultural values.


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(2015) Danish, Icelandic – Body parts

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on October 29, 2021.

Levisen, Carsten (2015). Scandinavian semantics and the human body: An ethnolinguistic study in diversity and change. Language Sciences, 49, 51-66. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2014.05.004

This paper presents an ethnolinguistic analysis of how the space between the head and the body is construed in Scandinavian semantic systems vis-à-vis the semantic system of English. With an extensive case study of neck-related meanings in Danish, and with cross-Scandinavian reference, it is demonstrated that Scandinavian and English systems differ significantly in some aspects of the way in which they construe the human body with words. Reference is made in particular to the neck, throat, and Adam’s apple.

The study ventures an innovative combination of methods, pairing the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to linguistic and conceptual analysis with empirical evidence from the Evolution of Semantic Systems (EoSS) project. This combination of empirical and interpretative tools helps to integrate evidence from semantics and semiotics, pinning out in great detail the intricacies of the meanings of particular body words.

The paper concludes that body words in closely related languages can differ substantially in their semantics. In related languages, where shared lexical form does not always mean shared semantics, ethnolinguistic studies in semantic change and shifts in polysemy patterns can help to reveal and explain the roots of semantic diversity.

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(2016) Bislama, English, Danish – Speech acts: lies

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.

Levisen, Carsten (2016). The ethnopragmatics of speech acts in postcolonial discourse: “Truth” and “trickery” in a transculturated South Pacific tale. In Christoph Schubert & Laurenz Volkmann (Eds.), Pragmatic perspectives on postcolonial discourse: Linguistics and literature (pp. 41-64). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Abstract:

Providing a high-resolution explication of the Bislama (Vanuatu, South Pacific) speech act word giaman, from colonial English gammon (“to humbug”), the paper develops an ethnopragmatic profile of the speech act category “truth/lies/deception” and discusses the interpretative potential for a giaman-based interpretation of one of Hans Christian Andersen’s most cherished fairy tales, The Emperor’s New Clothes, which has now also been translated into Bislama. Demonstrating how giaman differs from European-type speech acts, and in particular from English and Danish semi-counterparts of the word (respectively lie and bedrage), the paper launches into a postcolonial critique of Anglo-international pragmatics and its so-called universal maxims and speech acts, showing a new way and a new synthesis called postcolonial ethnopragmatics.

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(2017) Danish – Cultural key words: LIVET

Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.

Hamann, Magnus & Levisen, Carsten (2017). Talking about livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse and cultural models. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 107-129). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.05ham

This chapter explicates the word livet, literally ‘the life’, a cultural key word of the Danish Golden Age (1800-1850). With evidence from Golden Age Danish and its era-specific webs of words, it explores how “life and living” were construed discursively and how they relate to contemporary discourses of the good life in English and the related Danish calque det gode liv. The authors argue that era-specific cultural semantics should not be seen as being substantially different from other kinds of culture-specific discourses and that historical varieties such as Golden Age Danish can help us dismantle the hegemonic modern and Anglo take on “narratives of life” that dominate contemporary global discourse.


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(2017) Danish – Ethnopsychology and personhood

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 18, 2019.

Levisen, Carsten (2017). Personhood constructs in language and thought: New evidence from Danish. In Zhengdao Ye (Ed.), The semantics of nouns (pp. 120-146). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736721.003.0005

Abstract:

This chapter analyses personhood constructs, a particular type of noun whose meanings conceptualize invisible parts of a person. The meaning of personhood constructs originates in cultural discourses, and they can vary considerably across linguistic communities. They are reflective of society’s dominant ethnopsychological ideas, and they co-develop with historical changes in discourse. Drawing on insights from previous studies, a semantic template is developed to account for the differences but also the similarities in personhood constructs. With a detailed case study on Danish personhood constructs, the chapter tests the template on the translation-resistant Danish concept of sind, along with two other Danish nouns: sjæl ‘soul’ and ånd ‘spirit’. The case study provides a model for how personhood constructs can be empirically explored with tools from linguistic semantics.

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(2018) Danish – Conversational humour

Published on August 7, 2017. Last updated on November 2, 2018.

Levisen, Carsten (2018). Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(4), 515-531. DOI: 10.1515/ip-2018-0018

This paper explores sort humor ‘black humour’, a key concept in Danish conversational humour. Sort forms part of a larger class of Danish
synesthetic humour metaphors that also includes other categories such as tør ‘dry’, syg ‘sick’, and fed ‘fat’. Taking an ethnopragmatic perspective on humour discourse, it is argued that such constructs function as a local catalogue for socially recognized laughing practices.

The aim of the paper is to provide a semantic explication for sort humor and explore the discursive practices associated with the concept. From a comparative perspective, it is demonstrated that the Danish conceptualization of ‘blackness’ differs from that of l’humour noir, a category of French surrealism, and English black humour with its off-limit topics such as death and handicap. In Danish discourse, sort humor has come to stand for a practice of collaborative jocular non-sense making. It is further argued that the main function of sort humor is to establish or enhance a feeling of ‘groupy togetherness’.


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(2018) Danish – Cultural key words: VOLD

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’.


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(2019) Danish – Colours and vision

Published on November 28, 2019. Last updated on November 28, 2019.

Levisen, Carsten (2019). “Brightness” in color linguistics: New light from Danish visual semantics. In Ida Raffaelli, Daniela Katunar, & Barbara Kerovec (Eds.), Lexicalization patterns in color naming: A cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 83-108). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.78.05lev

Abstract:

This chapter scrutinizes the discourse of “brightness” in colour linguistics. Drawing on insights from visual semantics and linguistic anthropology, and challenging the universal applicability of “brightness”, the study provides new evidence from Danish. The chapter provides a new analysis of the lexicogrammar and linguaculture of lys ‘light, brightness’ in relation to color. The NSM approach is used to provide detailed semantic explications for three grammatical devices based on lys (lys, lys-, and lyse-), along with an analysis of three Danish lys + colour compounds lyserød ‘light red’, lysegrøn ‘light green’, and lyseblå ‘light blue’. Based on the evidence from Danish and other studies in visual semantics, the chapter calls for a renewed focus on the non-chromatic aspects of visual meanings, and for a metalinguistic reform in colour linguistics.

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(2019) Danish — Humour

Published on January 15, 2022. Last updated on August 18, 2023.

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.

 


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(2019) Danish — Humour, interjections

Published on August 18, 2023. Last updated on August 18, 2023.

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.

 


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(2020) Danish – Grammatical categories & constructions

Published on July 28, 2020. Last updated on August 18, 2023.

Levisen, Carsten (2020). Postcolonial prepositions: semantics and popular geopolitics in the Danosphere. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 169-186). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_9

Abstract:

This study breaks new ground in the semantics of ‘popular geopolitics’. With a case study on two Danish prepositions, i and på, both of which are important for the Danish construal of Greenland, the study develops a new analysis of the popular geopolitics that guide Danish ways of thinking about Greenland. Empirically, the study relies on evidence from social media discourse, which is subjected to the NSM method of analysis. The aim is to provide semantic explications for the two prepositional phrases i Grønland ‘in Greenland’ and på Grønland ‘on Greenland’, and to articulate the cultural scripts that allow speakers to ascribe geopolitical meaning to these prepositions. Drawing on Goddard’s seminal work on spatial semantics, place constructs and ethnopragmatics, the paper develops a postcolonial semantic account of Danish ‘preposition talk’. It is shown that the two prepositions have come to stand for two different Danish attitudes towards Greenland, in short, the på-attitude, which emphasizes Greenland’s ‘Islandness’, and the i-attitude, which emphasizes Greenland as a country among other countries.

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(2021) Danish – Aesthetics

Published on August 15, 2021. Last updated on August 15, 2021.

Levisen, Carsten. (2021). Pæn, flot, dejlig, and lækker : A lexical anthropology of Danish folk aesthetics.  International Journal of Language and Culture 8(1): 14–34

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00033.lev

 

Abstract:

This paper examines the Danish language of aesthetics from the perspective of four untranslatable adjectives: pæn, flot, dejlig, and lækker. These words are frequent and salient in everyday discourses, and as such they shed light on Danish “folk” conceptions. From the perspective of Lexical Anthropology and NSM Semantics, each of the words are explored and explicated in order to shed light on the ways in which Danish discourse organize positive aesthetic experiences. Sensitive to polysemy, and the variety of lexicogrammatical frames in which the words occur, the paper provides a high-resolution analyses of the “something ADJ frame” which enables discourses of design, food, and art. Based on lexical semantic evidence, the paper locates two themes in Danish discourse: “aesthetic normality” and “ordinary hedonism” which seem to act as cognitive axes around which discourses revolve. The paper argues that words hold the key to understanding the diversity of aesthetic cultures, and that untranslatables in particular, allow for a deep emic understanding of how local configurations of seeing, feeling, touching, and thinking are constituted.

 


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(2021) Danish – Syntax

Published on August 21, 2023. Last updated on November 17, 2023.

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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