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(2014) English (Australia) – Mateship and jocular FTAs

Sinkeviciute, Valeria (2014). “When a joke’s a joke and when it’s too much”: Mateship as a key to interpreting jocular FTAs in Australian English. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 121-139. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.004

This exploratory study focuses on interactions containing jocular FTAs in Australian English in relation to cultural attitudes that are valued in an Anglo-Australian cultural context. ‘Not taking yourself too seriously’ is considered to be a preferred attitude in the English-speaking world, but what seems to make it even more prominent in Australia is not its humour potential, but rather a strong link with ‘mateship’, i.e. projecting equality. The results of this study show not only a difference between public and personal offence taken at FTAs, but also a clear connection that can be observed between the category of ‘mateship’ and public offence. Furthermore, a distinction between laughter (an omnipresent reaction in the analysed data), funniness and ‘mateship’ in relation to public offence is made. The findings are based on interactions from the television gameshow Big Brother Australia 2012.


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(2010) English – SLAP, SMACK

Sibly, Anne (2010). Harry slapped Hugo, Tracey smacked Richie: The semantics of slap and smack. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 30(3), 323-348. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2010.498804

This article analyses and compares the meanings of two English contact verbs: slap and smack. Although they are sometimes regarded as synonymous in their primary senses, evidence is adduced to show that each verb has a distinct meaning. Corpus data are used to identify the everyday patterns of each verb’s use and the analysis and discussion focus on the syntactic and semantic implications of these patterns. Attention is also given to the social and cultural factors that have influenced the way people think about the actions described by the verbs. Meanings are expressed in explications using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM); this allows direct comparison of their semantic content. Slap and smack are shown to share many salient semantic features but, at the same time, to have unique characteristics that make them capable of distinctive description. Their prototypical meanings provide a strong conceptual foundation for other senses, including metaphorical uses.


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(2006) Tuareg – Proverbs

Savage, Andrew (2006). What do Tuareg proverbs mean? In Cristina Mourón Figueroa, & Teresa Iciar Moralejo Gárate (Eds.), Studies in contrastive linguistics (pp. 907-916). Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Publicacións.

This article demonstrates the application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) tool in the process of ascertaining the meaning of Tuareg proverbs. It shows how NSM is helpful in making meaning understandable to cultural outsiders.

(2009) Tuareg – Proverbs

Savage, André (2009). Que veulent dire les proverbes touareg? In Rainer Voßen, Dymitr Ibriszimow, & Harry Stroomer (Eds.), Études berbères IV – Essais lexicologiques et lexicographiques et autres articles (pp. 193-203). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.

(2010) Tuareg – Proverbs

Savage, André (2010). Un proverbe touareg, plusieurs variantes, un seul sens. In Harry Stroomer, Maarten Kossmann, Dymitr Ibriszimow, & Rainer Voßen (Eds.), Études berbères V – Essais sur des variations dialectales et autres articles (pp. 165-176). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.

(2000) Persian – Politeness

Sahragard, Rahman (2000). Politeness in Persian: A cultural pragmatic analysis. PhD thesis, University of Leicester.

This exploratory study attempts to analyse some features of Persian politeness, in particular the central term of تعارف  ta’arof. This important central concept is highly elaborate and complex, and it is often mentioned in Persian conversation, yet surprisingly it has received very little attention in pragmatics.

Using questionnaire, interviews, and discourse completion tasks, this study elicited information on تعارف  ta’arof from native speakers: their views and perceptions of the meaning and functions of تعارف  ta’arof, the distribution of تعارف  ta’arof with regard to age, gender, social class, and familiarity, as well as the language and strategies involved in a few controlled situations. Based on these results, five important components of تعارف  ta’arof were identified. They are ادب  adab, احترام  ehteraam, رودربایستی  rudarbaayesti, تواضع  tavaazo, and مهمان-نوازی mehmaan-navaazi. حیا  hayaa, شرم  sharm and کمرو  kamru are brought up as part of the discussion around رودربایستی  rudarbaayesti. The various component concepts, and تعارف  ta’arof as a superordinate concept, were then analysed using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage as an analytic framework for cultural pragmatics. As a prior step, it was necessary to establish the Persian exponents of NSM primes (referred to by means of the old terminology primitives). The resulting 38 exponents were then used to formulate explications for تعارف  ta’arof and its five subcomponents. Conventional descriptive methods of giving explanations were also used.

Another aspect of the study is its investigation of the performance of Iranian EFL learners in polite language situations in English, using a discourse completion questionnaire. The results show that these learners tend to transfer their native تعارف  ta’arof norms of being polite in their English responses. EFL teachers in their interviews had suggested this trend. This calls for the adoption of techniques to help learners become aware of the sociopragmatics of being polite in English.


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(2004) Persian – NSM primes

Sahragard, Rahman (2004). Semantic primitives in Persian. Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences of Shiraz University, 21(1), 77-93. PDF (open access)

In general, identifying the putative semantic primitives in Persian has proved to be unproblematic. On the whole, this study supports the hypothesized set of universal semantic primitives.


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(2004) Persian – Politeness

Sahragard, Rahman (2004). A cultural script analysis of a politeness feature in Persian. In Kyung-Ja Park & Michiko Nakano (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics (pp. 399-423). Tokyo: PAAL Japan. PDF (open access)

Many writers have identified the Iranian system of politeness with a complex concept called تعارف ta’arof. In fact, any description or analysis of the Iranian politeness system without reference to this concept will be deficient and incomplete. This study takes a cultural script approach to describe the Persian concept of تعارف ta’arof. As far as is known, this is the first attempt at analysing and accounting for a Persian concept using this approach.

This study demonstrates that تعارف ta’arof is a part of the culture of being polite in Persian (ادب adab). It is manifested in both verbal and non-verbal communication. The language and the strategies involved are controlled by تواضع tavaazo (humility), urging individuals to lower themselves in self-references and raise others instead. Power, distance, social class, and age are very important in its use. The direction of the frequency of use is from the lower to the upper for all of the above variables. This points to the fact that Persian culture places great emphasis on having احترام ehteraam (respect) for superiors. Having restraint and limiting one’s wants and wishes in front of others is another aspect of تعارف ta’arof usually referred to as رودربایستی rudarbaayesti. تعارف ta’arof is also shown in receiving guests warmly by being polite and respectful and serving them with the best possible refreshments (مهمان-نوازی mehmaan-navaazi). Thus, تعارف ta’arof can be seen as the manifestation of ادب adab, احترام ehteraam, تواضع  tavaazo, رودربایستی rudarbaayesti, and مهمان-نوازی mehmaan-navaazi.


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(2017) English (Ireland) – Emotions

Romero-Trillo, Jesús & Avila-Ledesma, Nancy E. (2017). The ethnopragmatic representation of positive and negative emotions in Irish immigrants’ letters. In Keith Allan, Alessandro Capone & Istvan Kecskes (Eds.), Pragmemes and theories of language use (pp. 393-420). Cham: Springer.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_21

Abstract:

This chapter explores the ethnopragmatic conceptualization of happiness and sadness in the language of the Irish citizens who immigrated to North America between 1811 and 1880, on the basis of a corpus of Irish emigrants’ personal correspondence. In particular, this study proposes a Natural Semantic Metalanguage examination of the emotional load of the positive adjectives happy and glad, and their negative counterparts, unhappy and sad, to elucidate Irish emigrants’ psychological states of mind and emotional responses to transatlantic migrations and life abroad. It investigates the pragmatic uses of key emotion terms in the corpus based upon the semantic explications developed by Wierzbicka and adds to these an explication of the adjective glad. It is shown that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework can be fruitfully used as an analytic tool to unveil the linguistic specificities embedded in the conceptualization of psychological acts such as emotions.

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(1993) French – Negative markers

Ritz, Marie-Ève (1993). La sémantique de la négation en français. Langue française, 98, 67-78. DOI: 10.3406/lfr.1993.5834. PDF (open access)

This paper shows how the use of a metalanguage consisting of primitives allows one to clarify some of the problems raised by negation in French. The latter is envisaged not from a static point of view, but, within the psychomecanic tradition, as a cinetism moving from more to less, from plus to minus. The author deals first with fuzziness in negation as achieved by the use of hedges, then looks at the “redundant” ne wich occasionally occurs in the language.

(2014) Japanese – Politeness and impoliteness

Rilliard, Albert; Erickson, Donna; De Moraes, João Antônio; & Shochi, Takaaki (2014). Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions. In Fabienne Baider & Georgeta Cislaru (Eds.), Linguistic approaches to emotions in context (pp. 251-276). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

DOI: 10.1075/pbns.241.15ril

Abstract:

Prosodic strategies may express polite or impolite speech acts. Five such strategies in Japanese were studied in a cross-cultural experiment. The attitudes were presented to subjects in different modalities: audio-only, video-only, audio-video; they were also described in NSM scripts written in Japanese, American English, Brazilian Portuguese and French. Native subjects of these languages took a pair comparison test, as a way to measure the perceived proximity of presented stimuli. A multidimensional statistical analysis of the results allows a description of the main expressive dimensions perceived by subjects. The test shows the similarity of the perceptive patterns obtained via NSM scripts and visual and audio modalities. It also shows that subjects of different cultural origins shared about 60% of the global representation of these expressions, that 8% are unique to modalities, while 3% are unique to language background.

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(2011) Arabic – Discourse particles: YAᶜNI

Rieschild, Verna (2011). Arabic yaᶜni: Issues of semantic, pragmatic, and indexical translation equivalence. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8(3), 315-346. DOI 10.1515/IPRG.2011.016

This paper explores the idea that some discourse particles are so culturally embedded that they defy translation. Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Conversation Analysis are used to examine the meanings and functions of (a) the polysemous Arabic discourse particle yaᶜni (derived from yaᶜni ‘it means’), translatable as ‘well’, ‘I mean’, ‘that is’, ‘you see’, ‘like’, and ‘so’, and (b) sorta and I mean, the main English translation candidates for yaᶜni. The findings show that yaᶜni’s focus on marking relevance is useful in elaborating, correcting, creating narrative suspense, holding a turn, or, as sole constituent of a turn, hedging a response. Similar English functions are achieved using discourse particles that focus approximation. The analysis also shows that semantic or pragmatic similarity in discourse particles from different languages can predict translation potential. In the same way, similarity in the meaning of a discourse particle and of a speech act predicts translatability. However, despite semantic and pragmatic equivalence (of a sort), culture-specific indices may mean that a word is not a suitable translation candidate. The results augment our understanding of cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics, and have applications to the study of translation and intercultural communication.


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(2013) English – Emotions

Rakić, Jelena. (2013). Emotions in English: Cultural scripts as mediators between language and culture. Facta Universitatis, Series Linguistics & Literature, 11(1), 75-89. PDF (open access)

Among studies on the English language, there is a notable absence of works on the relationship between English and its cultural underpinnings. Also, various research studies on language, emotion and culture lack descriptions of the situation in English, fostering the conclusion that English is culturally neutral. Anna Wierzbicka proposes the term Anglo-culture to cover the culture(s) behind the language, formulating cultural scripts that serve as a basis for modelling interaction, and which are founded on the
linguistic behaviour. We present those scripts relevant for understanding the domain of emotions in Anglo-culture, connecting them to the stereotypes about English reserve and politeness to show that the domain of emotions is a building block in the totality of Angloculture. The lexical items investigated show strong cultural markedness in line with the more general cultural scripts, which serves to prove that they are a useful tool for investigating the relationship between languages and cultures.

(2002) Koromu – Emotions and body parts

Priestley, Carol (2002). Insides and emotion in Koromu. Pragmatics & Cognition, 10(1/2), 243-270. DOI: 10.1075/pc.10.12.11pri

This paper describes several emotion expressions in Koromu, a language of Papua New Guinea. As in other languages, emotions can be expressed by reference to body events and processes. Bodily images are used for common and pertinent emotion expressions in Koromu; the alternative grammatical constructions in which some of these expressions occur enable speakers to express varying emotions while still indicating that there are shared semantic components between the expressions. In addition, as the emotion expressions are examined and their meanings explicated, a number of universal concepts and components of meaning can be observed. A study of these language-specific expressions therefore contributes to a cross-linguistic understanding of the relationship between emotion and the body.


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(2008) Koromu – ‘Inalienable possession’

Priestley, Carol (2008). The semantics of “inalienable possession” in Koromu (PNG). In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 277-300). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.102.18pri

This chapter examines the semantics of “inalienable possession” constructions in Koromu, a Madang language of Papua New Guinea. Person and number suffixes or enclitics mark head nouns in possessive nominal constructions and indicate the person and number of the “possessor”. Inanimate, animate and
partially animate nominal constructions describe relationships between two inanimates, two animates, or an animate and an inanimate referent, respectively. The key relationship between the two entities varies across these subtypes but rather than “possession” in the sense of ownership, it commonly
involves the concept ‘part of’; for example, in ‘parts of things’, ‘parts of the same thing’ and things which are ‘like a part of something’. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage is used to explicate the meaning of these constructions.

(2012) Koromu – Potential event modality

Priestley, Carol (2012). The expression of potential event modality in the Papuan language of Koromu. In Maia Ponsonnet, Loan Dao, & Margit Bowler (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference – 2011 (pp. 389-422). http://hdl.handle.net/1885/9404. PDF (open access)

This paper aims to give an overview of the morphosyntax and semantics of potential event modality in
Koromu (Kesawai), a Madang language in the Papuan group. Potential event modality refers to Palmer’s “events that are not actualized…but are merely potential” (2001: 70). Some characteristics of event modality are compared with English and other Papuan/regional languages. The study is based on Koromu data in recorded texts, collected over a number of years and on earlier grammatical analysis. Meanings are represented in semantic explications in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, a metalanguage that can be used in many different languages. The findings include a range of constructions and meanings for “imperative” and “desiderative” type expressions, a distinction between external, internal and negative desires, and strategies for testing meaning and grammar analysis with Koromu speakers.

(2012) Koromu – Temporal expressions

Priestley, Carol (2012). Koromu temporal expressions: Semantic and cultural perspectives. In Luna Filipovic, & Kasia Jaszczolt (Eds.), Space and time in languages and cultures: Language, culture and cognition (pp. 143-165). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/hcp.37.12pri

This chapter examines different types of time expressed in Koromu (Kesawai), a Papuan language, to show the interaction of time expressions with cultural and environmental contexts and to investigate semantic description. Meanings are explicated in a metalanguage based on semantic primitives. The discovery of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) temporal primes and investigation of semantic molecules, non-primitive meanings that occur within the meaning of other concepts, promotes comparative and contrastive semantic description. The finding of culture-specific concepts referring to ‘time-’ and ‘event-based’ time intervals, linear and cyclical time, suggests that a range of expressions need consideration when cultural perspectives are assessed.

 

(2013) Koromu – Social categories, shared experience, reciprocity

Priestley, Carol (2013). Social categories, shared experience, reciprocity and endangered meanings: Examples from Koromu (PNG). Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 257-281. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846457

Speakers of many Trans New Guinea or Papuan languages use a number of reciprocal person-referring expressions. Various examples are found in the Papuan language of Koromu, spoken in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. This paper examines the meanings of Koromu reciprocal expressions that recall shared past experiences, in particular, social category terms connected with coming of age events and spontaneous nicknames created at the time events occur in the course of everyday life. The meanings are explicated in clear simple terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage primes. The
explications point to important aspects of social cognition, including identification with significant others based on shared experience and relational concepts of personhood. Although this study points to the possibility of some language endangerment for some meanings, it also indicates the ongoing cultural importance of shared experiences, including commensality, in both rites of passage and everyday life.

(2014) Koromu – Feelings: physical pain

Priestley, Carol (2014). The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG): Verbal and nominal constructions. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 253-271.

DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.1.2.07pri

Abstract:

This paper examines the words and constructions that Koromu speakers (PNG) use to talk about tare ‘hurt/pain’ and other painful sensations. It also reflects on links to cultural and environmental influences in daily life and key life events, environmental knowledge and traditional health care. Terms such as warike ‘be/feel bad’, tare ‘hurt/pain’, perere ‘hurt: sting, cut, burn’, and kaho ‘ache: burn, pierce’ are used in different constructions with varying emphases. These constructions are among the most typologically interesting in Koromu grammar. They are related to, but also distinct from, constructions found in other Papuan languages. They include experiencer object constructions, serial verb constructions with the grammaticized valency-increasing verb here/he put, and nominal constructions with, or without, prominent noun-phrase marking.

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Reissued as:

Priestley, Carol (2016). The semantics and morphosyntax of tare “hurt/pain” in Koromu (PNG): Verbal and nominal constructions. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 123-141). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.07pri

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(2017) Koromu – Body parts

Priestley, Carol (2017). Some key body parts and polysemy: A case study from Koromu (Kesawai). In Zhengdao Ye (Ed.), The semantics of nouns (pp. 147-179). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198736721.003.0006

This chapter discusses body part nouns, a part of language that is central to human life, and the polysemy that arises in connection with them. Examples from everyday speech and narrative in various contexts are examined in a Papuan language called Koromu and semantic characteristics of body part nouns in other studies are also considered. Semantic templates are developed for nouns that represent highly visible body parts: for example, wapi ‘hands/arms’, ehi ‘feet/legs’, and their related parts. Culture-specific explications are expressed in a natural metalanguage that can be translated into Koromu to avoid the cultural bias inherent in using other languages and to reveal both distinctive semantic components and similarities to cross-linguistic examples.


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