Browsing results for Waters Sophia
Published on January 15, 2022. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia. (2020). The lexical semantics of blaguer: French ways of bringing people together through persuasion, deception and laughter. European Journal of Humour Research 8 (4) 31–47
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2020.8.4.Waters
Abstract
This study presents a lexical semantic analysis of the French verb blaguer and related expressions. This verb belongs to a suite of “French humour practices”, and French-English dictionaries translate it as ‘to joke’. However, Anglo-specific terminology such as “joke” does not match the conceptual semantics of blaguer and its related noun blague. Relying on Anglo- specific terms to categorise culture-specific practices perpetuates conceptual and terminological Anglocentrism. This study furthers the call to avoid the dangers of sustaining Anglocentrism in the theoretical vocabulary of humour studies (Goddard & Mullan 2020; Goddard 2018; Wierzbicka 2014a).
Working from the assumption that semantic categories reflect particular ways of speaking, thinking, and behaving, this study’s goal is to capture the insider perspective that French speakers have about the meaning of the verb blaguer and the noun blague. Making local understandings more obvious and accessible to cultural and linguistic outsiders will increase cross-cultural understanding and foster appreciation for the different ways that speakers construct and interpret their world with words (Levisen & Waters 2017).
The analytical tool for this study is the technique of semantic explication couched in the simple cross-translatable and culture-neutral words of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014). Carefully chosen example sentences are drawn from Google searches (google.fr) of authentic language use of the verb blaguer and the noun blague. Comparative reference is made to the verb ‘to joke’ from Australian English to highlight the differences in the conversational humour cultures of French and English speakers (Goddard & Mullan 2020; Béal & Mullan 2013, 2017).
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) blague, (E) blaguer, (T) French
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
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on October 15, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia (2017). Nice as a cultural keyword: The semantics behind Australian discourses of sociality. In Carsten Levisen & Sophia Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 25-54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.277.02wat
This chapter investigates the English word nice as a cultural key word, around which sociality discourses revolve. Focusing on its semantic scope in Australian discourse, the key word nice has an important story to tell about socially accepted and approved ways of thinking, communicating and behaving. Nice has often been trivialized, or even ridiculed as an “empty word”, but closer scrutiny reveals that nice has all the characteristics of a cultural key word. It is frequent and foundational in Australian discourse, and it reflects cultural logics, values and orientations. Also, as is common with cultural key words, nice lacks translational equivalents, even in closely related languages. A comparison with French gentil demonstrates how nice is distinctive in the way it organizes and maintains specific discursive orders.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) nice
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.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 24, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia (2007). “Ben, voilà, quoi”: les significations et les emplois des particules énonciatives en français parlé [“Ben, voilà, quoi”: The meanings and uses of discourse particles in spoken French]. BA(Hons) thesis, University of New England, Armidale.
Written in French.
The aim of this thesis is to extract the meanings of three French utterance particles, used in the spoken language, viz. quoi, voilà and ben. The author relies on authentic examples to describe the use of each. The tool used to this end is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which allows us to make explications accessible both to speakers of French and to those for whom French is a second language.
The author also emphasizes the importance of a thorough understanding of the particles of a language.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ben, (E) quoi, (E) voilà, (T) French
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia Elizabeth (2014). The cultural semantics of “sociality” terms in Australian English, with contrastive reference to French. PhD thesis, University of New England.
This thesis investigates the lexical semantics of nice and a set of other superficially “simple” sociality concepts (rude, polite and manners) in Australian English. When appropriately analysed, these words reveal much about the socially accepted and approved ways of behaving in Australian society. As expected of heavily culture-laden words, nice and rude lack precise translation equivalents in many languages and can be regarded as cultural key words. The comparative reference to French (for example, nice vs. gentil lit. ‘kind’, rude vs. mal élevé lit. ‘badly brought up’) highlights differences in ways of behaving and construals of sociality.
The thesis engages with the (im)politeness literature, and addresses the problem of transparent definitions of sociality words as they are used by ordinary speakers. This thesis enriches the current literature on (im)politeness and sociality by providing clear and accessible lexical semantic analyses of these words in Australian English, in a range of contexts, collocations and constructional frames in 24 explications. The methodology for the semantic analysis is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. The lexical semantic analysis of the abstract noun manners pioneers the theoretical innovation of “manners scripts”, which are an extension of the cultural scripts approach.
A quasi-ethnographic approach was taken to compile the dataset of example sentences of Australian English and French sourced from the search engine Google. These form a purpose-built corpus of almost 3000 tokens.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) mal élevé, (E) manners, (E) nice, (E) polite, (E) rude, (E) table manners, (E) well-mannered, (S) expressiveness, (S) no elbows on the table, (S) no reaching, (S) not chewing with the mouth open, (S) not speaking with the mouth full, (S) saying excuse me, (S) saying hello, (S) saying please, (S) saying sorry, (S) saying thank you, (S) using cutlery, (T) French
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia (2012). “It’s rude to VP”: The cultural semantics of rudeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1051-1062. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2012.02.002
Over recent years, linguists have given an increasing amount of attention to impoliteness studies. Oddly, however, little attention has yet been paid to the semantics of the English word rude. Lacking precise translation equivalents in many languages, rude is a key word revealing much about socially accepted ways of behaving in Anglo society. In Australian English, as in English generally, it is the primary ethno-descriptor in the domain of “impoliteness”. This paper provides a detailed lexical semantic analysis of rude in the productive formula It’s rude to VP, and also in the fixed expression rude word. The semantic explications are framed in the simple universal primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). The argumentation is supported by data on Australian English collected from Google searches.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) rude, (E) rude word
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia (2010). The semantics of French discourse particles quoi and ben. In Yvonne Treis & Rik De Busser (Eds.), Selected papers from the 2009 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2009.html. PDF (open access)
Discourse particles are strewn throughout natural spoken discourse, revealing the speakers’ attitude towards what they are saying and guiding the interlocutors’ interpretation of that utterance. The majority of works in the area of the French discourse particles quoi and ben provide detailed analyses and place their primary focus on usage. Problems arise, however, when word usage is discussed without a systematic approach to semantics. The present study applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of description to these particles, proposing definitive explications that can be substituted into naturally occurring examples of quoi and ben without causing any semantic loss. Explications, framed in the culture-neutral terms of the NSM, capture the subtleties of meaning conveyed by each discourse particle. They are presented in parallel English and French versions and are tested against a corpus of spoken French.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ben, (E) quoi, (T) French
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.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
