Bromhead, Helen (2018). Landscape and culture – Cross-linguistic perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/clscc.9
This book is based, in part, on the author’s PhD thesis:
Bromhead, Helen (2013). Mountains, rivers, billabongs: Ethnogeographical categorization in cross-linguistic perspective. PhD thesis, Australian National University.
The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This ground-breaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization.
The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. It presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective, based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is used throughout, because it allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent, and culturally sensitive.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
