Tag: (E) bonito

(2021) Spanish – Aesthetics

Romero-Trillo, Jesús. (2021). The good, the bad… and the ugly? The conceptualization of aesthetics in Spanish. International Journal of Language and Culture 8(1): 147–168

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00039.rom

 

Abstract:

The present article describes the conceptualization of aesthetics in Spanish through the analysis of the two prototypical terms that describe positive and negative sensory appreciation, i.e., “bonito” (beautiful) and “feo” (ugly). Following a mixed-approach methodology combining Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Corpus Pragmatics, the article compares the use of these adjectives in spoken and written language, analyzes their realization in the corpora under analysis, provides the explications that support their poly- semy, and describes their distribution in different contexts. The final part of the paper is devoted to the comparison of the use of these adjectives with their counterparts in English, as evidenced by another paper in this special issue.

 


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2014) English, Russian, Spanish – Ethnopragmatics

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).

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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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