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.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
