Browsing results for Language families

(2020) Australian English — Humour

Published on January 15, 2022. Last updated on January 15, 2022.

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.

Tags:

(2020) Cèmuhî – Cultural key words

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

Abstract:

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.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , ,

(2020) Chinese (Cantonese) – Discourse particles

Published on July 28, 2020. Last updated on July 28, 2020.

Leung, Helen Hue Lam (2020). Combining NSM explications for clusters of Cantonese utterance particles: laa3-wo3 and zaa3-wo3. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 187-206). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_10

Abstract:

Utterance particles expressing speakers’ attitudes, assumptions or feelings are indispensable in informal Hong Kong Cantonese. Everyday conversation would sound very unusual if they were omitted. There are approximately 30 ‘basic’ (monosyllabic) particles, which can be either used on their own or combined with each other in ‘clusters’, i.e. polysyllabic combinations where two or more particles occur one after the other in immediate succession. Clusters of particles have consistently been claimed to have the combined meaning of the separate particles of
which they are made up; however, in the absence of rigorous semantic analyses of the individual particles involved, evidence for this has been scant at best. Indeed, the range of use of each of the particles is broad and varied, and it is extremely difficult, even for native speakers, to satisfactorily explain their meanings and functions. Most prior studies provide semantic descriptions that are vague, contradictory, and sometimes untrue. The current chapter builds on some of the evidence-based, translatable and testable NSM explications of individual particles put forward in the author’s earlier work, which demonstrated that the particles have stable and identifiable meanings. It shows how, using NSM, the semantic content of clusters of Cantonese utterance particles can effectively be derived from the meaning of individual particles.

Two clusters are examined, laa3-wo3 and zaa3-wo3, which are formed from three ‘basic’ particles: laa3, zaa3 and wo3. The short explications of the individual particles are combined to create ‘joint’ explications, with the resulting cluster definitions tested by substitution into real examples taken from the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus. It is found that the combined NSM explications adequately portray the meanings of the particle clusters.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , , ,

(2020) Chinese (Cantonese), English – Ethnopragmatics

Published on February 10, 2020. Last updated on February 10, 2020.

Wakefield, John C.; Winnie Chor, Winnie; & Lai, Nikko (2020). Condolences in Cantonese and English: What people say and why. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 35-58). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_3

Abstract:

This study uses the ethnopragmatics approach to examine the cultural-based knowledge that guides Cantonese and Anglo-English speakers when offering death-related condolences, or what we refer to here as ‘condolence routines’. The data come from discourse completion tasks, the existence of cultural key phrases, and the authors’ native-speaker intuitions. The authors examine condolences that are offered to a good friend who has recently lost someone close to him or her. They present cultural scripts that are proposed to account for the linguistic contrasts in Cantonese versus English condolence routines. The Cantonese script is entirely new while the English script is revised from a previous study.

Based on our analysis, we conclude that the primary contrast is that Anglo-English condolences typically focus on expressing that the condoler feels sad because of the bereaved’s loss, while Cantonese condolences typically focus on telling the bereaved not to be sad and to take care of his- or herself. Knowledge of this contrast in sociopragmatics is not only a meaningful contribution to the study of pragmatics; it is also of practical help to people in regular contact with Cantonese and/or Anglo-English speakers. It can help one understand how to avoid saying something during a condolence routine that may sound inappropriate, or even insensitive, to speakers of these two languages.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , ,

(2020) Chinese (Cantonese), English – Intonational morphology [BOOK]

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 9, 2020.

Wakefield, John C. (2020). Intonational morphology. Singapore, Springer, 2020.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2265-9

Abstract:

This book discusses the morphological properties of intonation, building on past research to support the long-recognized relationship between the functions and meanings of discourse particles and the functions and meanings of intonation. The morphological status of intonation has been debated for decades, and this book provides evidence from the literature combined with new and compelling empirical evidence to show that specific intonational forms correspond to specific segmental discourse particles. It also describes how intonation is represented in speakers’ minds, which has important implications for first and second language acquisition as well as for theories and approaches to artificial speech recognition and production.

Chapter 6 of the book presents evidence that strongly indicates that six Cantonese sentence-final particles (SFPs) have English intonational equivalents. These six SFPs divide into three pairs of related particles: the evidential particles 咯 lo1 and 吖吗 aa1maa3; the question particles 咩 me1 and 呀 aa4; and the “only” particles zaa3 and ze1. Each SFP’s meaning is described and an NSM explication of it is presented before showing and discussing the data related to its English equivalent. The data comprise Cantonese-to-English oral translations and their accompanying F0 contours. The translators were ambilingual speakers of L1 Cantonese and L1 English. Based on the fact that each SFP translated into English as the same form of intonation by more than one ambilingual translator in more than one context, it is assumed that the definition given to each SFP also applies to its English intonational equivalent. It is further proposed that these English forms of intonation are tonal morphemes that reside in native-English speakers’ lexicons.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(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.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , , ,

(2020) English – Cultural key words

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.

Abstract:

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.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

(2020) English (Australia) – Lexicography

Published on June 19, 2020. Last updated on August 15, 2021.

Sadow, Lauren (2020). Principles and prototypes of a cultural dictionary of Australian English for learners. In Lauren Sadow, Bert Peeters, & Kerry Mullan (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 3. Minimal English (and beyond) (pp. 165-190). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9979-5_9

Abstract:

This chapter discusses some of the issues that need to be considered when producing a user-friendly resource intended to familiarize ESL learners with the invisible culture of Australian English. It draws on specialized function lexicography and on the cultural scripts approach as proposed by Goddard. The resource takes the form of an encyclopedic dictionary focusing on Australian values, attitudes and interactional norms and aims to respond to an industry need for pedagogical materials that introduce migrants coming to Australia to the culture embodied in Australian English. Best practice for teaching cultural awareness and related skills is to use a method for teaching that encourages students to reflect on their experience and to analyse it from an insider or emic perspective. The cultural scripts approach, which deconstructs complex cultural elements into simpler and universally intelligible building blocks, provides an effective means to this end. The chapter contends that drawing connections between different cultural scripts and illustrating those connections in a way that promotes the acquisition of concepts for learners is one of the most important elements in cultural dictionary design.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , ,

(2020) English (UK) – Cultural key words

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

Abstract:

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.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags:

(2020) English, Australian Aboriginal English, Bislama – Shame

Published on November 22, 2020. Last updated on November 22, 2020.

Peeters, Bert (2020). Language Makes a Difference: Breaking the Barrier of Shame. Lublin Studies in Modern Language and Literature,  44(1), 27-37.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2020.44.1.27-37 (Open Access)

Abstract:
This paper argues against the reification of shame and the use of Anglocentric jargon to explain what it entails. It shows how the Natural Semantic Metalanguage can be used to define shame and set it apart from related concepts in Australian Aboriginal English and in Bislama, an English creole spoken in Vanuatu.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , ,

(2020) English, French – Laughing with others

Published on February 16, 2019. Last updated on November 11, 2020.

Goddard, Cliff, & Kerry Mullan (2020). Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” in French and English (and why it matters for humor studies). Humor, 33(1), 55-77.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2017-0114

Abstract:

This study undertakes a contrastive lexical-semantic analysis of a set of related verbs in English and French (English to joke and to kid, French rigoler and plaisanter), using the NSM approach to semantic analysis. We show that the semantic and conceptual differences between French and English are greater than commonly assumed. These differences, we argue, have significant implications for humor studies: first, they shed light on different cultural orientations towards “laughter talk” in Anglo and French linguacultures; second, they highlight the danger of conceptual Anglocentrism in relying on English-specific words as a theoretical vocabulary for humor studies.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , ,

(2020) English, Italian – Ethnopragmatics

Published on February 9, 2020. Last updated on February 9, 2020.

Farese, Gian Marco (2020). The ethnopragmatics of English understatement and Italian exaggeration: Clashing cultural scripts for the expression of personal opinions. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 59-73). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_4

Abstract:

This chapter presents a cultural semantic analysis of the differences in the expression of personal opinions between English and Italian. In English, personal opinions are generally understated, whereas speakers of Italian tend to purposely exaggerate when making a statement. As one might expect, opposite communicative styles can lead to cases of miscommunication in cross-cultural interactions. Such cases can be avoided if language learners are provided with efficient tools, which can help them improve their cross-cultural awareness and competence. Adopting the approach of ethnopragmatics, this chapter proposes the theory of cultural scripts as the optimal pedagogical tool to pinpoint the differences in the expression of personal opinions between English and Italian and show how scripts can be used effectively for cross-cultural training.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , , ,

(2020) English, Italian, Japanese – NSM

Published on November 9, 2020. Last updated on November 22, 2020.

Farese, Gian Marco (2020). ‘Changing’ and ‘becoming’: new perspectives from cross-linguistic cognitive semantics. Cognitive Semantics, 6, 214-242.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10009

Abstract:

This paper examines the conceptual and semantic relation between ‘changing’ and ‘becoming’ in cross-linguistic perspective to demonstrate that: (i) the assumption that ‘becoming’ is conceptually and semantically related to ‘changing’ is invalidated in at least two cases in which the meaning of ‘becoming’ does not encompass ‘changing’; (ii) the main verbs of ‘becoming’ in different languages are highly polysemous and therefore not cross-translatable in all contexts of use; (iii) differences in meaning reflect different conceptualizations of ‘becoming’ across languages. These results emerge from a contrastive semantic analysis between the main verbs of ‘changing’ and ‘becoming’ in English (change, become), Italian (cambiare, diventare) and Japanese (なるnaru) adopting NSM methodology. This paper also makes a strong case for the epistemic nature of the predicative complements licensed by verbs of ‘becoming’ by showing that a semantic component ‘it is like this, I know it’ emerges consistently from cross-linguistic comparison.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , , ,

(2020) English, Russian – Cultural key words

Published on June 19, 2020. Last updated on November 22, 2020.

Gladkova, Anna (2020). When value words cross cultural borders: English tolerant versus Russian tolerantnyj. In Lauren Sadow, Bert Peeters, & Kerry Mullan (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 3. Minimal English (and beyond) (pp. 73-93). Singapore: Springer.

DOI:

Abstract:

This chapter investigates the situation of language change in contemporary Russian with a particular focus on value words. Using data from the Russian National Corpus, it analyses the meaning of the word толерантный tolerantnyj, which has been borrowed from English. It compares its meaning with the English tolerant as a source of borrowing and the traditional Russian term tерпимый terpimyj. The chapter demonstrates a shift in meaning in the borrowed term, which allows it to accommodate to the Russian value system. The meanings of the terms in question are formulated using universal meanings employed in Minimal English, which makes the comparison transparent and explicit.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags: , , , ,