Gladkova, Anna, & Romero-Trillo, Jesús (2014). Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an ethnopragmatic perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 140-159.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.005
Abstract:
This study addresses the question of the ethnopragmatic conceptualization of ‘beautiful’ in three European languages – English, Russian and Spanish. Specifically, it investigates the polysemy and the spheres of application of English beautiful, Russian красивый krasivyj, and Spanish bonito/a. Through corpus analysis methodology, the authors investigate the most common collocations and the pragmatic and contextual uses of these terms. On the basis of the analysis, the study then adopts NSM to propose semantic explications of the three words in universal human concepts. In particular, it investigates the presence of the perception universals SEE, HEAR, and FEEL, which in the data are central to the analysis of the aesthetics vocabulary, along with the primes GOOD, SOMEONE, SOMETHING and THINK.
The data for the study comes from three online corpora: the Russian National Corpus (Russian), Cobuild’s Wordbanks Online (English) and the Corpus de referencia del español actual (Spanish).
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
