Browsing results for Levisen Carsten
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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Tags: (E) co-cognition, (E) glad, (E) hygge, (E) hygger, (E) hygger sig, (E) janteloven, (E) lykkelig, (E) mener, (E) overskue, (E) security, (E) sind, (E) skråsikker, (E) stemning, (E) synes, (E) tilfreds, (E) tryg, (E) trygge rammer, (E) tryghed, (E) varm, (S) apprehension, (S) assertivity, (S) autonomous thinking, (S) categoricalness, (S) children, (S) cognitive relativism, (S) expectations, (S) humanism, (S) hygge, (S) imposing one's opinion, (S) living in the moment, (S) personal uniqueness, (S) self-worth, (S) strong group identity, (S) togetherness, (S) un-independence, (S) unreasonableness, (T) Danish
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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Tags: (E) grise, (E) griseri, (E) svin, (E) svineri, (E) tilsviner, (E) tryne, (E) tryner
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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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) livsglæde, (E) livslyst, (E) lykke, (S) anti-materialism, (S) depression, (S) life dissatisfaction, (S) pessimism, (S) small things in life
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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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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Tags: (E) Adam's apple, (E) adamsæble, (E) hals, (E) hnakki, (E) nakke
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 18, 2019.
Levisen, Carsten & Jogie, Melissa Reshma (2015). The Trinidadian ‘theory of mind’: Personhood and postcolonial semantics. International Journal of Language and Culture, 2(2), 169-193.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.2.2.02lev
Abstract:
Taking a postcolonial approach to the semantics of personhood, this paper critically engages with Anglo-international discourses of the mind, exposing the conceptual stranglehold of the colonial language (i.e., English) and its distorting semantic grip on global discourse. It is argued that creole categories of values and personhood provide a new venue for critical mind studies as well as for new studies in creole semantics and cultural diversity.
The paper investigates the cultural semantics of a personhood construct in one particular creole. It analyses the lexical semantics of the word mind/mine in Trini (the English-based creole of Trinidad) and explores the wider cultural meanings of the concept in contrastive comparison with the Anglo concept. The analysis demonstrates that the Anglo concept is a cognitively oriented construct with a semantic configuration based on ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’, whereas the Trinidadian mind is a moral concept configured around perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The paper explores the Trinidadian moral discourse of bad mind and good mind, and goes on to articulate a cultural script for the cultural values linked with personhood in the Trinidadian context.
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Tags: (E) mind, (E) mine, (S) forgiveness, (S) judgment of others, (S) tolerance, (T) Trinidadian Creole
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 5, 2019.
Levisen, Carsten (2016). Postcolonial lexicography: Defining creole emotion words with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Cahiers de lexicologie, 109, 35-60.
DOI: 10.15122/isbn.978-2-406-06861-7.p.0035
Abstract:
The lexicographical study of postcolonial language varieties is severely undertheorized and underdeveloped. Postcolonial Lexicography is a new framework that seeks to go some way towards filling the gap. It aims at providing a new praxis of word definition for the study of creoles, world Englishes, and other languages spoken in postcolonial contexts. NSM is used as an interpretative technique for the definition of meaning. The NSM approach allows for a fine-grained lexical-semantic analysis, and at the same time helps circumvent ‘conceptual colonialism’ and the related vices of Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism, all of which hamper advances in lexicographical studies in a postcolonial context.
More specifically, drawing on advances in lexical semantics, linguistic ethnography and postcolonial language studies, the paper offers an original analysis of emotion words in Urban Bislama, a creole language spoken in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The author develops a sketch of the Bislama lexicon of emotion and provides new definitions of kros, roughly ‘angry’, les, roughly ‘annoyed’ and sem, roughly ‘ashamed’. A table of Bislama exponents of NSM primes is included, as well as some discussion on the exponents for FEEL, GOOD, and BAD.
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Tags: (E) kros, (E) les, (E) sem, (T) Bislama
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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Tags: (E) bedrage, (E) giaman, (E) lie, (T) Bislama
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Levisen, Carsten (2017). The social and sonic semantics of reggae: Language ideology and emergent socialities in postcolonial Vanuatu. Language & Communication, 52, 102-116. DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2016.08.009
In Port Vila, Vanuatu, young Pacific Islanders with an ambivalent stance towards the value system represented by the jioj ‘church’ are forming new socialities and new ways of socializing on the fragments of kastom ‘traditional culture’. The reggae sociality stands out. As a cultural key word, reke ‘reggae’ offers a rich point for understanding local language-embedded ideologies, and also for understanding the status of Bislama, the national creole. This study breaks new ground into the emerging discipline of sonic semantics and the study of language ideologies in postcolonial contexts.
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Tags: (E) reke, (T) Bislama
Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Levisen, Carsten & Priestley, Carol (2017). Social keywords in postcolonial Melanesian discourse: Kastom ‘traditional culture’ and tumbuna ‘ancestors’. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 83-106). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.04lev
In postcolonial Melanesia, cultural discourses are increasingly organized around creole words, i.e. key words of Bislama (Vanuatu) and Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea). These words constitute (or represent) important emerging ethnolinguistic world views, which are partly borne out of the colonial era, and partly out of postcolonial ethnorhetoric. This chapter explores the word kastom ‘traditional culture’ in Bislama and pasin bilong tumbuna ‘the ways of the ancestors’ in Tok Pisin. Specific attention is paid to the shift from “negative “ to “positive” semantics, following from the re-evaluation of ancestral practices in postcolonial discourse. Social key words in postcolonial discourse form a fertile ground for understanding how speakers in Melanesia conceptualize the past as a vital part of the present.
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Published on June 13, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Levisen, Carsten & Bøegh, Kristoffer Friis (2017). Cognitive creolistics and semantic primes: A phylogenetic network analysis. In Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen & Eeva Sippola (Eds.), Creole studies – Phylogenetic approaches (pp. 293-313). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/z.211.13lev. PDF (open access)
This study presents a semantically driven lexical comparison of 20 creole languages and five European lexifier languages. Breaking new ground into understanding creole semantics, it uses insights from both cognitive semantics (in particular, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach) and phylogenetic approaches to linguistics comparisons. The authors provide an extensive study of label-meaning correlations as a way to explore the relationship between word labels and word meanings across creoles and lexifiers. They conclude that creoles are not simply “versions” of their lexifier languages, and that it is misleading to say that creoles are “based” on European languages in their basic lexical-semantic configuration. At the same time, they find that creoles do relate more closely to their historical lexifiers than to other creoles, and that the lexical-semantic perspective adds a new dimension to the typology of creoles, nuancing the picture provided by grammar-based comparisons.
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Published on June 13, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Levisen, Carsten & Aragón, Karime (2017). Lexicalization patterns in core vocabulary: A cross-creole study of semantic molecules. In Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen & Eeva Sippola (Eds.), Creole studies – Phylogenetic approaches (pp. 315-344). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/z.211.14lev. PDF (open access)
The study of semantic domains is important for creolistics, given the complex label-meaning configuration in creoles vis-à-vis the European lexifiers. Due to lexical semantic creativity in the creolization process as well as subsequent developments and contacts with lexifiers, substrates, and other contact varieties, each domain seems to have its own history, its own configuration.
Comparing creole words in four different semantic domains, the authors contrast the labels and lexicalizations of social concepts, body part terms, environmental concepts and logical concepts. They focus on the following meanings:
‘children’, ‘women’, ‘men’, ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘wife’, ‘husband’ (social molecules)
‘head’, ‘eyes’, ‘ears’, ‘mouth’, ‘nose’, ‘hands’, ‘legs’ (body part molecules)
‘sun’, ‘sky’, ‘ground, ‘water’, ‘fire’, ‘day’, ‘night’ (environmental molecules)
‘not’, ‘maybe’, ‘can’, ‘because’, ‘if’, ‘very’ and ‘more’ (semantic primes: logical concepts)
Phylogenetic networks are used to compare and contrast lexicalization patterns between domains.
It is shown that the core semantic-conceptual constructs investigated in the study tend to cluster with their lexifiers, but that there are important differences across domains as well: the label-meaning configurations of the social domain stand out as the most diverse, and the environmental domain as the most homogenous.
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Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Levisen, Carsten, & Waters, Sophia (2017). An invitation to keyword studies: Guidance for future research. In Carsten Levisen, & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 235-242). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.10lev
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Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Levisen, Carsten & Waters, Sophia (2017). How words do things with people. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 1-23). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.01lev
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Levisen, Carsten & Waters, Sophia (Eds.) (2017). Cultural keywords in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277
Abstract:
Cultural key words are words around which whole discourses are organized. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognized ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural key word studies by exploring key words from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse.
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds.
Table of contents:
- How words do things with people (Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters)
- Nice as a cultural keyword: The semantics behind Australian discourses of sociality (Sophia Waters)
- Bogan as a keyword of contemporary Australia: Sociality and national discourse in Australian English (Roslyn Rowen)
- Social keywords in postcolonial Melanesian discourse: Kastom ‘traditional culture’ and tumbuna ‘ancestors’ (Carsten Levisen and Carol Priestley)
- Talking about livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse and cultural models (Magnus Hamann and Carsten Levisen)
- Visuality, identity and emotion: Rosa mexicano as a Mexican Spanish keyword (Karime Aragón)
- Subúrbio and suburbanos: Two cultural keywords in Brazilian discourse (Ana Paulla Braga Mattos)
- Cantonese ‘mong4’: A cultural keyword of ‘busy’ Hong Kong (Helen Hue Lam Leung)
- Kawaii discourse: The semantics of a Japanese cultural keyword and its social elaboration (Yuko Asano-Cavanagh)
- An invitation to keyword studies: Guidance for future research (Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters)
More information:
Each chapter has a separate entry, where more information is provided.
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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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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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Tags: (E) ånd, (E) duša душа, (E) maum 몸, (E) mind, (E) sind, (E) sjæl, (S) immortality, (S) spirituality
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Levisen, Carsten; Priestley, Carol; Nicholls, Sophie; & Goldshtein, Yonatan (2017). The semantics of Englishes and Creoles: Pacific and Australian perspectives. In Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen & Eeva Sippola (Eds.), Creole studies – Phylogenetic approaches (pp. 345-368). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/z.211.15lev. PDF (open access)
This paper provides a lexical-semantic comparison of a selection of Englishes and English-related creoles in the Australia-Pacific area. Faced with the conundrum of sociolinguistic classificatory practice and its contested categories (“language”, “creole”, “dialect”, “variety” and English(es)”), it attempts to circumvent the problematic of metavocabulary by taking a new, two-pronged approach. Firstly, it relies on semantic primes, comparing and contrasting their lexicalizations (especially those of the prime PEOPLE) across the sample of creoles. Secondly, it uses phylogenetic networks to visualize the results and to form new hypotheses.
The results provide counter-evidence to the claim that Melanesian and Australian creoles are “varieties of English”. The creole sample displays three basic types of relations: “shared-core” types (Australian English vs. New Zealand English); “closely related core” types (Hawai’i Creole vs. Anglo Englishes); and “distantly related core” types (Tok Pisin vs. Anglo English, Kriol vs. Anglo English, or Yumplatok vs. Anglo English). The results are measured against Scandinavian languages to explore the language-dialect question, and against Trinidadian (a Caribbean creole) to explore the extent of lexical-semantic areality. It is concluded that current sociolinguistic metavocabulary is inadequate for representing the complexity of the new ways of speaking in the Australia-Pacific region, and it is suggested a principled areal-semantic investigation of words based on semantic principles is the way to go.
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Published on August 21, 2023. Last updated on November 17, 2023.
Levisen, Carsten. (2018). Biases we live by: Anglocentrism in linguistics and cognitive sciences. Language Sciences, 76, 101173.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2018.05.010
Abstract
This paper explores “Anglocentrism” as a bias in contemporary linguistics and cognitive sciences. Anglo concepts dominate international discourse on language and cognition, but the influence that this Anglocentric metalinguistic discourse has on global knowledge production, research methods, and the theoretical framing of research questions is rarely debated. Three case studies on heavily “Anglicised” discursive domains are provided: (i) “the mind” – and the Anglicisation of global discourse of human personhood; (ii) “happiness” – and the Anglicisation of the global discourse of human values; (iii) “com- munity” – and the Anglicisation of the global discourse of human sociality. With cross- linguistic evidence from Europe (Danish), and the Pacific (Bislama), the paper denatural- ises the English words mind, happiness, and community and the cognitive models they stand for, demonstrating that these words are not “neutral” nor “innocent” metalinguistic descriptors. Rather, they are quintessential Anglo constructs, and as such they provide a lens on humanity that is biased towards an Anglo interpretation of the world. Finally, the paper explores the “bias” concept. Paradoxically, the bias concept is in itself a product of the Anglosphere, as as such a part of the problem. However, due to this word’s meta- discursive function, the paper argues that the bias concept can become a useful Trojan Horse, a concept through which we can fight Anglocentrism from within, and pave the way for a more adequate representation of human diversity in linguistics and cognitive sciences.
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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Tags: (E) grine, (E) laugh, (E) sort humor, (E) tale sort, (T) Danish
