Browsing results for Bułat Silva Zuzanna

(2002) Spanish – Address forms

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2002). Un intento de aplicación del metalenguaje semántico natural a las fórmulas de tratamiento españolas [An attempt at applying Natural Semantic Metalanguage to Spanish address forms]. Estudios hispánicos, 10, 61-68.

Written in Spanish.

A lot has been written on address forms from a pragmatic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective. This short study is an attempt at providing a semantic analysis of some of the factors that impact on the use of nominal address forms in Spanish. Semantic components, expressed in a Spanish-based NSM, are provided, but focus on what is conveyed by the address forms – cordiality, spontaneity, emotionality, irony, machismo, etc. – as opposed to what specific address forms stand for.


Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner

(2005) Portuguese – Emotions

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2005). Saudade, czyli portugalska tęsknota za czymś, co być mogło, a nie było [Saudade, or Portuguese longing for something that could be, and was not]. In Anna Duszak & Nina Pawlak (Eds.), Anatomia szczęścia: Emocje pozytywne w językach i kulturach świata (pp. 115-123). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Abstract:

The article contains an analysis of the meaning of the Portuguese word saudade, usually translated as Polish tęsknota, melancholia, nostalgia, English longing or yearning, German Sehnsucht, Spanish añoranza. Saudade describes a typical state of mind for the Portuguese, which they claim is untranslatable in other languages. This feeling, although it tends to be included among feelings of sadness, is indispensable to happiness for the Portuguese. If someone feels saudade, it means that they have found something good in their life, something they miss and would like to experience some more of. The component ‘I feel something good’ is very important for this concept. Saudade is also one of the main themes of Portuguese songs. The article investigates the word in various contexts of use and formulates a semantic explication expressed in Natural Semantic Metalanguage.

More information:

Written in Polish.

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Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner

(2008) Portuguese – AMOR

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2008). Amor em português [Love in Portuguese]. In Anna Kalewska (Ed.), Diálogos com a Lusofonia: Colóquio comemorativo dos 30 anos da secção Portuguesa do Instituto de Estudos Ibéricos e Ibero-americanos da Universidade de Varsóvia (pp. 408-420). Warszawa: Universidade de Varsóvia, Instytut Studiów Iberoamerykanskich UW. PDF (pre-publication version with different page numbering)

Written in Portuguese.

Every culture has its own ways of speaking, thinking, acting and even feeling, which are reflected in language. In this paper, I analyse a lexical meaning of one Portuguese word, amor. Having as a base a corpus consisting of Lisbon fado songs, I try to look for a semantic invariant of the word amor in fado and to define it in terms of a Portuguese-based NSM.


Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner

(2008) Portuguese – Key words in Lisbon ‘fado’ songs

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2008). Fado – podejście semantyczne: Próba interpretacji słów kluczy [Fado – a semantic approach: An attempt at interpreting key words]. Wroclaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT.

Written in Polish.

This book interprets a dozen Portuguese-based lexical units, mainly from the domain of emotion, selected through a frequency-based survey of Lisbon fado songs. It is the published version of the author’s PhD thesis, University of Wrocław (2007).


Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner

(2009) Portuguese – PAIXÃO

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2009). How to use both the NSM and CL approaches to meaning – Portuguese lexeme paixão ‘passion’. Studia Linguistica, 28, 31-41. PDF (open access)

The aim of this paper is to show that the NSM approach to meaning can be used together with some methodological tools elaborated within Cognitive Linguistics. By combining NSM explications, based on reductive paraphrase, with prototype semantics, stating that meaning of a lexeme has a centric structure (with some senses more salient than others) we are able to refer more accurately to the peripheral senses of a given word. The radial network diagram makes it possible to isolate precisely the lexical unit we are interested in and describe it in terms of semantic primes.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2010) Portuguese – Emotions

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2010). Przydatnosc eksplikacji metajezykowych w tworzeniu definicji leksykograficznych (na przykladzie definicji nazw uczuc w jezyku portugalskim) [On the usefulness of metalanguage explications for the creation of lexicographical definitions (exemplified through the definition of nouns of emotions in Portuguese)]. In Wojciech Chlebda (Ed.), Etnolingwistyka a leksykografia: Tom poswiecony Profesorowi Jerzemu Bartminskiemu (pp. 93-102). Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego.

Written in Polish.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2011) Spanish – DOLOR

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2011). El dolor y el tango [Pain and tango]. Estudios hispánicos, 19, 27-37. PDF (open access)

Written in Spanish.

The present paper is dedicated to the analysis of the Spanish word dolor (‘pain’) on the basis of a corpus consisting of 100 tango lyrics. I describe the linguistic picture of dolor in tangos, demonstrating its cultural specificity. To describe its lexical and cultural meaning without an ethnocentric bias I rely on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2012 sqq) Portuguese – CASA (3 sequential papers)

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2012). Portugalski DOM – uma casa portuguesa [Portuguese HOME]. In Maciej Abramowicz, Jerzy Bartmiński, & Iwona Bielińska-Gardziel (Eds.), Wartości w językowo-kulturowym obrazie świata Słowian i ich sąsiadów: Volume 1 (pp. 123-135). Lublin: UMCS.

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2014). Portugalski DOM – badanie korpusowe [Portuguese HOME – corpus examination]. In Jerzy Bartmiński, Iwona Bielińska-Gardziel, & Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska (Eds.), Wartości w językowo-kulturowym obrazie świata Słowian i ich sąsiadów: Volume 2. Wokół europejskiej aksjosfery (41-52). Lublin: UMCS.

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2014). Jaki obraz DOMU mają młodzi Portugalczycy? Badanie ankietowe [How do young Portuguese picture their ‘home’? A survey]. In Iwona Bielińska-Gardziel, Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, & Joanna Szadura (Eds.), Wartości w językowo-kulturowym obrazie świata Słowian i ich sąsiadów: Volume 3. Problemy eksplikowania i profilowania pojęć (pp. 309-322). Lublin: UMCS.

Written in Polish. The first of the three papers is a virtual translation into Polish of a Portuguese original (2012), which has its own entry.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2012) Portuguese – CASA

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2012). O conceito de ‘casa’ em português europeu [The concept of ‘home’ in European Portuguese]. In Petar Petrov, Pedro Quintion de Sousa, Roberto López-Iglésias Samartim, & Elias J.Torres Feijó (Eds.), Avanços em ciências da linguagem (pp. 343-357). Faro: Através.

Written in Portuguese.

This introductory analysis of the lexico-cultural meaning of the word casa in European Portuguese shows in the main that ‘casa’ is an essential value in Portugal. Casa is an important reference point, a place where one stays for a short time or a long time, but always a place to go back to. Casa is linked to family, thought of not just as a group of people who live together, but rather as a network of multi-generational relations and obligations. Casa is more than just a place in physical space, it is also a metaphorical place in the heart, a place that inspires beautiful emotions, necessary for humans to live well.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2012) Portuguese – Emotions

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2012). Saudade: A key Portuguese emotion. Emotion Review, 4(2). 203-211.

DOI: 10.1177/1754073911430727

Abstract:

This paper analyses the meaning of the Portuguese emotion word saudade, roughly translatable as ‘nostalgia’, in an attempt to show its cultural significance and contradict the view that nostalgia is a marginal feeling, deprived of any practical function. Saudade is not a marginal feeling in Portuguese culture, but an important and basic emotion term going hand in hand with amor ‘love’. Saudade may be viewed as a typically prototypical category, because it covers the whole scale of feelings, from sadness to happiness. The Portuguese claim it has no equivalents in any other language in the world and regard it as a fundamental and distinctive feature of their national identity. Its main characteristic lies in its ambivalence — saudade is both a memory and a feeling; it is both pleasure and pain.

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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2012) Spanish – DOLOR

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2012). Spanish pain, el dolor. In Zdzislaw Wasik, & Piotr P. Chruszczewski (Eds.), Languages in contact 2011 (pp. 61-71). Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo WSF.

The present paper is dedicated to the analysis of the Spanish word dolor ‘pain’; my aim is to demonstrate its cultural specificity and uniqueness. On the basis of lexical and textual data I explicate what the meaning of dolor is, and why I consider it very different from pain, its English counterpart. To free my considerations from an ethnocentric bias, I rely on NSM or Natural Semantic Metalanguage.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2014) Spanish (Latin America) – Emotions / Feelings

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2014). Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 239-252.

DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.1.2.06bul

Abstract:

The aim of this paper is to examine the Spanish counterpart of pain, that is, the lexeme dolor. It seems that dolor, different from both English pain and French douleur, has two clearly distinguishable meanings, dolor1 referring to physical (and emotional) sensation of pain, and dolor2, a quite frequent emotion term belonging to the domain of “sadness”. To support the above hypothesis, this article examines different lexical occurrences of the word dolor, coming inter alia from tango lyrics.

More information:

Reissued as:

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2016). Some remarks on “pain” in Latin American Spanish. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 109-122). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.06bul

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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2016) Ladino – KURTIJO

August-Zarębska, Agnieszka, & Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2016). Recalling the past: The linguistic and cultural images of kurtijo, Sephardic courtyard. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 25(1), 96-117.

DOI: 10.3167/ajec.2016.250107

Abstract:

The present article investigates the concept of kurtijo, roughly ‘courtyard’, ‘home’, in Ladino (also known as Judeo-Spanish, Djudezmo or Sephardi), the language of Sephardic Jews, currently under threat of extinction. It argues that, after the Holocaust, kurtijo became a culturally salient word and may be regarded as a cultural key word in Ladino. Dictionaries and texts of contemporary Ladino poets are used as the main source of data. The meaning of kurtijo is expressed in the form of an NSM explication.

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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2016) Portuguese – LAR

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2016). Descrever o lar português [Describing the Portuguese home]. In Barbara Hlibowicka-Węglarz, Justyna Wiśniewska, & Edyta Jabłonka (Eds.), Língua portuguesa: unidade na diversidade: Volume 1 (pp. 201-213). Lublin: Editora da Universidade Marie Curie-Skłodowska.

Written in Portuguese.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2018) Polish, Portuguese – HOME

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2018). The concept of HOME in Polish and Portuguese — distant cultures, similar concepts. Studia Linguistica [Wrocław], 37, 7-23.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.19195/0137-1169.37.1 / Open access

Abstract:

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the concept of HOME in Polish and Portuguese language and culture. The methodology that suits this purpose best and allows to compare words from different languages without an ethnocentric bias is the NSM approach. On the basis of lexical and textual data, the meaning of Polish dom is explicated and compared with its Portuguese equivalent, casa. Despite differences in the way public and private space are treated in Polish and Portuguese cultures, the notions of HOME in these two languages have many things in common: both dom and casa are multidimensional concepts referring not only to ‘people living together in a place’ but they are also related to emotions such as love, tenderness and homesickness, and to feelings of security and warmth.

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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2019) Spanish (Spain) – Address forms and social cognition; Ethnopragmatics

Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2019). Los vocativos de cariño en español peninsular: un enfoque desde la Metalengua Semántica Natural. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 7(3), 445-467.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/soprag-2019-0013

Abstract:

This article adopts an ethnopragmatic approach to the interpretation of linguistic strategies through their relation with cultural aspects which underlie their usage. The focus is on the relation between Spanish cultural scripts and nominal forms of address (terms of endearment) used in Peninsular Spanish. Cultural scripts would appear to be the perfect tool for explicating the sociocultural premises behind the interpretations we make of the function that terms of endearment have in Spanish politeness. Of particular interest are typically
Spanish scripts of “expressiveness”, “complimenting others”, “treating others with affection” and “being friendly”, and terms of endearment such as alma, ‘soul’, vida, ‘life’, cielo, ‘heaven’ and cariño, ‘love’. The explication of the semantic content of the terms of endearment on the one hand and the underlying sociocultural values on the other, applies the method of semantic and pragmatic analysis known as NSM.

More information:

Written in Spanish.

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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2020) English (UK) – Cultural key words

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.

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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