Tag: (T) English
Levisen, Carsten. (2021). The syntax of something: Evaluative affordances of noget in Danish construction grammar. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 44(1), 3-24.
DOI: 10.1017/S033258652000013X
Abstract
This paper explores ‘the evaluative noget construction’ in Danish. The construction consists of noget ‘something’ juxtaposed by a noun in an evaluative frame such as e.g. Det er noget pjat, ‘It’s nonsense’. With a starting point in cross-linguistic studies on SOMETHING, the paper moves on to explore core members of this evaluative class in Danish, providing a detailed semantic analysis of the construction’s core configurations. The affordance of noget ‘something’ to mean ‘something bad’ is a key to understanding the construction, and from this general premise the class of evaluatives take off in multiple negative direc- tions, providing a snapshot of the Danish linguaculture of evaluation. The paper argues for a Cultural Construction Grammar that can bring together the lexicogrammatical integrationism of construction grammar approaches with the linguacultural holism of the research in ethnosyntax. The goal is to provide high-definition analysis of complex, language-specific constructions in a simple, globally translatable metalanguage.
Tagged as: (E) noget bras, (E) noget juks, (E) noget lort, (E) noget pjat, (E) noget rod, (E) noget sjusk, (E) noget skidt, (E) noget svineri, (T) Danish, (T) English
Levisen, Carsten, Fernández, Susana S., and Hein, Jan (2022) Cognitive Cultural Semantics: A Nordic Guide to Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Scandinavian Studies in Language 13(1): 1–38. https://tidsskrift.dk/sss/article/view/135133.
No abstract available
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) sur, (E) vred, (S) against displays of negative feelings in public (Scandinavian), (S) the “kløpulver” prank in coastal Jutland, (T) Danish, (T) English, (T) Finnish, (T) Spanish, (T) Swedish
Levisen, Carsten. (2019). Laughter interjections: Contributions to a lexical anthropology of humour (with special reference to Danish). Scandinavian Studies in Language, 10(1), 110-130.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v10i1.114674
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature on interjections by suggesting that ‘laughter interjections’ (words such English haha or hehe) make up an important type of interjections that has so far not been accounted for in cross-linguistic work on interjections. Secondly, it argues that laughter interjections are thick with cultural meaning, and that they can play an important role for an “emic turn” in humour studies. Third, it develops a case study on “Danish funniness” with a point of departure in the Danish paradigm of laughter interjections. The paper explores humourous discourse from the perspective of these culturally specific expressive words, and provides high definition analysis of two Danish laughter interjections tøhø and hæhæ, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage technique of explication. The general framework of the study is Lexical Anthropology, an approach to meaning analysis that combines insights from lexical semantics and linguistic anthropology.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) hæhæ, (E) tøhø, (T) Danish, (T) English
Levisen, Carsten. (2019). The Cultural Semantics of Untranslatables: Linguistic Worldview and the Danish Language of Laughter. In A. Glaz (Ed.), Languages – Cultures – Worldviews: Focus on Translation (pp. 319-346). Palgrave Macmillan. Palgrave studies studies in translating and interpreting
Abstract
Through an in-depth case study of humour concepts in Danish, the chapter develops a cultural-semantic analysis of the untranslatables of laughter, and provides a new account of the worldview engendered by such words. The Danish language of laughter is particularly rich in synaesthetic humour metaphor; the chapter sets out to explicate key categories within this class: sort humor ‘black, murky humour,’ plat humor ‘flat, plain humour,’ fed humor ‘fat humour,’ and tør humor ‘dry humour.’ The analysis is undertaken within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework of analysis and takes an explicitly translational approach to language, culture, and worldview. Providing a roadmap for how to navigate in the landscape of translatables and untranslables, the chapter contributes to both translational semantics and linguistic worldview studies.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) fed humor, (E) plat humor, (E) sort humor, (E) tør humor, (T) Danish, (T) English
Ye, Zhengdao. (2019).The semantics of emotion: From theory to empirical analysis. Pritzker, Sonya.E., Fenigsen, Janina., & Wilce, James.M. (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367855093
Abstract
This chapter provides a systematic account of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion and “affective science,” especially how it addresses three methodological questions: (a) how emotional meaning can be explicated in terms that are psychologically real to people; (b) how culture-specific meanings can be convened authentically to another linguacultural community, so that important nuances in the conceptualizations of emotions can be appreciated by cultural outsiders; and (c) how commonalities and differences in human experiences can be identified and articulated? The chapter draws upon a wide selection of NSM work across many languages, including Bislama, English, Mbula (PNG), and Chinese.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) fago, (E) horrified, (E) lele imbai pa, (E) love, (E) mata-iyoyou pa, (E) Mi kros, (E) Mi les, (E) petrified, (E) qiān cháng guà dù 牵肠挂肚, (E) téng/téng’ài, (E) terrified, (E) va ŋu/ŋú, (E) xìngfú 幸福, (E) xīnlǐ hén kŭ, (T) English
Wierzbicka, Anna. (2019). The biblical roots of English ‘love’: The concept of ‘love’ in a historical and cross-linguistic perspective. International Journal of Language and Culture 6(2) 225-254. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.18006.wie
Abstract
Seen from a broad cross-linguistic perspective, the English verb (to) love is quite unusual because it has very broad scope: it can apply to a mother’s love, a husband’s love, a sister’s love, etc. without any restrictions whatsoever; and the same applies to its counterparts in many other European languages. Trying to locate the origins of this phenomenon, I have looked to the Bible. Within the Bible, I have found both continuity and innovation. In the Hebrew Bible, the verb ’āhēb, rendered in the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint with the verb agapao, implies a “preferential love”, e.g. it is used for a favourite wife of a favourite son. In the New Testament, the concept of ‘love’ loses the “preferential” components and thus becomes applicable across the board: between anybody and anybody else.
The paper argues that the very broad meaning of verbs like love in English, aimer in French, lieben in German, etc. reflects a shared conceptual heritage of many European languages, with its roots in the New Testament; and it shows that by taking a semantic perspective on these historical developments, and exploring them through the rigorous framework of NSM and Minimal English, we can arrive at clear and verifiable hypotheses about a theme which is of great general interest, regardless of one’s own religious and philosophical views and commitments.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) love, (T) English
Wierzbicka, Anna. (2007). Do all languages have the same expressive power? An NSM perspective on semantic variation and universals. In Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest (ed.), Combat pour les langues du monde. Fighting for the world’s languages: Hommage à Claude Hagège, 483-496. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (T) English, (T) Malay
Levisen, Carsten. (2021). Pæn, flot, dejlig, and lækker : A lexical anthropology of Danish folk aesthetics. International Journal of Language and Culture 8(1): 14–34
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00033.lev
Abstract:
This paper examines the Danish language of aesthetics from the perspective of four untranslatable adjectives: pæn, flot, dejlig, and lækker. These words are frequent and salient in everyday discourses, and as such they shed light on Danish “folk” conceptions. From the perspective of Lexical Anthropology and NSM Semantics, each of the words are explored and explicated in order to shed light on the ways in which Danish discourse organize positive aesthetic experiences. Sensitive to polysemy, and the variety of lexicogrammatical frames in which the words occur, the paper provides a high-resolution analyses of the “something ADJ frame” which enables discourses of design, food, and art. Based on lexical semantic evidence, the paper locates two themes in Danish discourse: “aesthetic normality” and “ordinary hedonism” which seem to act as cognitive axes around which discourses revolve. The paper argues that words hold the key to understanding the diversity of aesthetic cultures, and that untranslatables in particular, allow for a deep emic understanding of how local configurations of seeing, feeling, touching, and thinking are constituted.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) dejlig, (E) flot, (E) lækker, (E) pæn, (T) Danish, (T) English
Gladkova, Anna, & Romero-Trillo, Jesús. (2021). Is ugliness in the mind of the beholder? The conceptualization of ‘ugly’ in English. International Journal of Language and Culture 8(1): 106–127
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00037.gla
Abstract:
The paper explores the meaning and use of ugly in English. The study is based on corpus data from Cobuild Wordbanks Online and investigates the polysemy and the spheres of application of the concept. Through corpus analysis methodology, we investigate the most common collocations and the pragmatic and contextual uses of the term. Based on this analysis, our study proposes semantic explications of ugly in universal human concepts within the theoretical framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). We also analyze the most common collocations with the word ugly and clas- sify them into several meaning-based categories. A comparison between beautiful and ugly reveals that they are not identical in their distribution, which suggests different cognitive salience of the concepts. We also note the special role of ‘people’ and ‘nature’ in conceptualization and use of beautiful and that of ‘human actions’ in ugly.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) ugly, (T) English
Goddard, Cliff. (2021). In Praise of Minimal Languages. In Goddard, Cliff (ed.). Minimal Languages in Action. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp 1-26.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-64077-4_1
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (T) English, (T) semantic molecules, (T) Supplementary words
Goddard, Cliff (2018). A semantic menagerie: The conceptual semantics of ethnozoological categories. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(3), 539-559. DOI: 10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-3-539-559. PDF (open access)
This paper proposes and discusses a set of semantic analyses of words from three different levels of the English ethnozoological taxonomic hierarchy: creature (unique beginner), bird, fish, snake, and animal (life-form level), dog and kangaroo (generic level). The analytical framework is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. Though ultimately resting on the foundational elements of the NSM system, i.e. 65 semantic primes and their inherent grammar of combination, the analysis relies on the analytical concepts of semantic molecules and semantic templates. These provide mechanisms for encapsulating semantic complexity and for modelling relations between successive layers of the hierarchy. Other issues considered include the extent to which cultural components feature in the semantics of ethnozoological categories, and the extent to which semantic knowledge may vary across different speech communities.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) animals, (E) birds, (E) creatures, (E) dogs, (E) eggs, (E) feathers, (E) fish, (E) kangaroos, (E) snakes, (E) wings, (T) English
Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). How much longer can the Berlin and Kay paradigm dominate visual semantics? English, Russian and Warlpiri seen ‘from the native’s point of view’. In Diana Young (Ed.), Rematerializing colour: From concept to substance (pp. 67-90). Herefordshire: Sean Kingston Publishing.
Abstract:
How does the outsider linguist find out if speakers of another language have colour terms? Using the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri as a starting point, the author argues that interpretation of the patterns of names produced in response to stimuli (such as Munsell colour chips) is difficult, and one has to take care not to assign English terms to those patterns. That is, in trying to interpret what a word means, we cannot assume that kardirri means ‘white’, because speakers produced this word when looking at chips with colours that English speakers might call ‘white’. The focus here is on determining the senses (intensions) of words – that is, on finding language-specific categories. The Warlpiri lack a word approximating the English word ‘colour’. It is claimed that, if speakers do not have a word for a category such as colour, it is hard to say that in their minds they see the world in terms of a cognitive category ‘colour’ (which is not to deny that they have colour vision).
Examination of dictionary entries in the Warlpiri-English Dictionary establishes the importance of the properties ‘visual conspicuousness’ (the startling pink prunus trees), ‘things shining somewhere’ (sunlight gleaming on the white cockatoos), ‘visual contrasts within an object’ (the dappled pink and green of the japonica hedge), and creating colour reference by comparison with things in the world around (kunjuru ‘smoke’, kunjuru-kunjuru ‘like smoke’, a term conventionally applied to smoke-coloured things). However, even though the Dictionary is a good starting-place for raising such hypotheses, it cannot help us test them, since it is a collection of all words, with little comment on whether they are used frequently or not, and since the words come from several dialects.
The author argues against using the word ‘colour’ in the English definitions and translations in the dictionary, because this creates or reinforces a belief that the Warlpiri have a linguistic category of ‘colour’.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) kunjuru-kunjuru, (E) sky, (E) yukuri-yukuri, (T) English
Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). A ‘sense of entitlement’ encoded in English grammar. Etnolingwistyka, 30, 133-143. DOI: 10.17951/et.2018.30.133. PDF (open access)
This study claims that in English there is a grammatical construction, or even a family of constructions, that expresses the notion of a ‘sense of entitlement’. In sentences like Can I have my apple and cheese, please?, this notion is expressed with the pronoun my. To describe the meaning of this construction in a way that would be understandable not only to speakers of English but also to those whose languages do not contain a word for ‘entitlement’, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is used.
The ‘sense of entitlement’ is expressed when everyday rituals are violated, which disturbs the speaker, e.g. Would you leave me finish my breakfast?. The assumption here is that everyone has the right and wants to perform these regular, ritualistic activities. The range of potential obstacles has not been established at this stage of research but can be captured in the formula “I cannot do now what I always do at this time; this is bad; everybody can know this”.
The meaning of a ‘sense of entitlement’ is connected with such words and expressions as have the right to, be entitled to, personal space, privacy, violate/disturb/interfere, which express some of the major assumptions and concerns of contemporary Anglo-culture. Especially interesting is the connection between the ‘sense of entitlement’ and justice because both are grounded in the existence of voluntarily obeyed principles. It appears that English grammar contains an implicit understanding that everybody has the right to their personal routine that involves having breakfast (my breakfast) or dinner (my dinner) in a particular way, or e.g. reading (my newspaper). It is bad when the routine is disturbed by others.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) sense of entitlement, (T) English
Goddard, Cliff (2018). Ten lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring language, thought and culture using simple, translatable words. Leiden: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004357723
These lively lectures introduce the theory, practice, and application of a versatile, rigorous, and non-Anglocentic approach to cross-linguistic semantics.
Table of contents:
- Preliminary material
- From Leibniz to Wierzbicka: The history and philosophy of NSM
- Semantic primes and their grammar
- Explicating emotion concepts across languages and cultures
- Wonderful, terrific, fabulous: English evaluational adjectives
- Semantic molecules and semantic complexity
- Words as carriers of cultural meaning
- English verb semantics: Verbs of doing and saying
- English verb alternations and constructions
- Applications of NSM: Minimal English, cultural scripts and language teaching
- Retrospect: NSM compared with other approaches to semantic analysis
Chapter 3 discusses selected exponents of primes in Farsi (Persian). Chapter 4 provides an explication of a North-Spanish homesickness word (morriña). Chapter 7 provides an explication of Chinese 孝 xiào ‘filial piety’.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) Alles in Ordnung, (E) ask, (E) at night, (E) believe that, (E) blink, (E) brilliant, (E) build, (E) children, (E) complex, (E) contented, (E) crawl, (E) cut, (E) delighted, (E) delightful, (E) dig, (E) during the day, (E) eat, (E) entertaining, (E) excellent, (E) exciting, (E) great, (E) happy, (E) homesick, (E) impressive, (E) know someone, (E) know that, (E) lykke, (E) memorable, (E) men, (E) morriña, (E) mouth, (E) not fair, (E) order, (E) pleased, (E) pour, (E) powerful, (E) sčitat’ čto считать что, (E) sky, (E) stars, (E) stunning, (E) suggest, (E) sun, (E) swim, (E) tell, (E) terrific, (E) tęsknić, (E) water, (E) women, (E) wonderful, (E) xiào 孝, (E) xìngfú 幸福, (S) expressiveness, (S) feelings, (S) personal autonomy, (S) personal comments, (S) personal remarks, (S) requests, (S) sincerity, (T) Chinese, (T) English, (T) Finnish, (T) semantic molecules
Goddard, Cliff (2017). Natural Semantic Metalanguage and lexicography. In Patrick Hanks, & Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (Eds.), International handbook of modern lexis and lexicography (online). Berlin: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_14-1
Abstract:
This chapter gives perspectives on meaning description in lexicography from the standpoint of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to linguistics, which among contemporary approaches to linguistics can claim the longest and most serious engagement with lexical semantics.
Note:
The Handbook is classified as a “Living Reference Work”, which means it is being continously updated. It was first published in 2017.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) birrimbirr, (E) mind, (T) English, (T) semantic molecules, (T) Spanish
Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). Talking about the universe in Minimal English: Teaching science through words that children can understand. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 169-200). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_8
Science education faces many challenges, not least that of rendering the key propositions into language that children can readily understand. This chapter applies Minimal English to a canonical science education narrative about changing scientific and pre-scientific understandings of the universe. It attempts to capture the key beliefs and mindsets associated with the views of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo, with a look ahead to the possibilities of further advances in scientific thinking about the cosmos.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) (living) creature, (E) day and night, (E) earth, (E) moon, (E) sky, (E) stars, (E) sun, (T) English, (T) semantic molecules
Goddard, Cliff (2018). Minimal English: The science behind it. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 29-70). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_3
This chapter explains in an accessible way the linguistic research that underpins the specifics of Minimal English. The “science behind Minimal English” is the body of research, by linguists working in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, into which words and grammatical patterns match across the languages of the world. The chapter includes a review of all semantic primes, classified in twelve groups.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (T) English
Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). Minimal English and how it can add to Global English. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 5-27). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_2
The concept of Minimal English was first proposed by Anna Wierzbicka in 2014 as a radically reduced ‘mini English’ that can provide a common auxiliary interlanguage for speakers of different languages, and as a global means for clarifying, elucidating, storing and comparing ideas. This idea is taken up by Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka in this chapter. Aside from arguing for the benefits of using cross-translatable words, they stress that Minimal English is intended not to replace or supplant ordinary English, but to add to its effectiveness as a global tool for communication and discourse. The chapter outlines the origins, purpose and composition of Minimal English and explains its value as a supplement to English in its role as a global lingua franca. It argues for the great importance of cross-translatability in many contexts and shows with examples that many taken-for-granted words and concepts of Anglo English are heavily culture-laden and hence untranslatable. The chapter also clarifies how Minimal English is different from Ogden’s ‘Basic English’ and from Plain English.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (T) English, (T) semantic molecules
Goddard, Cliff (1991). Anger in the Western Desert: A case study in the cross-cultural semantics of emotion. Man, (N.S.) 26(2), 265-279. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2803832
This article sets out to show that by adopting a method of semantic description based on reductive, cross-translatable paraphrases (the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach) it is possible to elucidate the meanings of emotion concepts, and their similarities and differences across cultures, within a principled, formal framework. Using this approach, it explores the semantic differences between pikaringanyi, mirpanarinyi and kuyaringanyi, three expressions in the Aboriginal language of the Western Desert of Australia, each of which corresponds to some extent to the English concept of anger.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) angry, (E) kuyaringanyi, (E) mirpanarinyi, (E) pikaringanyi, (T) English
Goddard, Cliff (2018). “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(4), 487-514. DOI: 10.1515/ip-2018-0017
Terms like to joke (and joking) and to tease (and teasing) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding. More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives such as jocular and mock are also much used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse, mock abuse, jocular mockery, and the like.
Against this background, the present paper has three main aims.
In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comparison therefore risks introducing an Anglocentric bias into our theoretical vocabulary. Nor can the problem be easily solved by attributing technical meanings to the terms.
Detailed analysis of the everyday meanings of words like joking and teasing, on the other hand, can yield insights into the ethnopragmatics of Anglo conversational humour. This task is undertaken in the second part of the paper. The important English verb to kid and the common conversational formulas just kidding and only joking are also examined. The semantic methodology used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach.
Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humour based on cross-translatable terminology.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) amusing, (E) funny, (E) humour, (E) joke, (E) kid, (E) laugh, (E) tease, (T) English
