Cultural Semantics

Cultural Semantics PDF Author: Martin Jay
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A leading intellectual historian explores some of the reigning assumptions and imperatives of our age. By looking closely at what "words do and perform", Martin Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.

Cultural Semantics

Cultural Semantics PDF Author: Martin Jay
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A leading intellectual historian explores some of the reigning assumptions and imperatives of our age. By looking closely at what "words do and perform", Martin Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. Elegantly written and richly insightful, this is a work of cultural criticism and intellectual analysis of the first order.

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition PDF Author: Carsten Levisen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110294656
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Presenting original, detailed studies of keywords of Danish, this book breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values. Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly meaning, ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes. It is argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who live by Danish concepts are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by central Danish keywords and lexical grids. By means of a sophisticated semantic methodology, the author accounts for the meanings of even highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts. The book offers new tools for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe. Additionally, it contributes to the emerging discipline of cultural semantics, and to the ongoing debates of linguistic diversity, metalanguage, and the use of linguistic evidence in studies of culture and social cognition.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics PDF Author: Anna Wierzbicka
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110220962
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal "maxims of conversation" and "principles of politeness", which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows that in different societies, norms of human interaction are different and reflect different cultural attitudes and values; and it offers a framework within which different cultural norms and different ways of speaking can be effectively explored, explained, and taught. The book discusses data from a wide range of languages, including English, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Walmatjari (an Australian Aboriginal language), and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different "cultural scripts" prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias by using a "natural semantic metalanguage", based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

Cultural Semantics in the Lexicon of Modern Chinese

Cultural Semantics in the Lexicon of Modern Chinese PDF Author: Ming ZHAO
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004535187
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
What is cultural semantics? How to define and analyze it in the lexicon of modern Chinese? This book outlines the development and research results of cultural semantic theory, and then proposes the distinction between two types of cultural semantics at the synchronic level: conceptual gap items and items with a cultural meaning. It provides criteria for identifying these items by using detailed examples from theory and application. Finally, the two types of cultural semantics are applied to the case of modern Chinese. The criteria proposed for determining the Chinese cultural semantics apply not only to this, but also to other languages. Therefore, this book offers an operational basis for further studies of cultural semantics in academia.

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication PDF Author: Bert Peeters
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9813299754
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book is the second in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. It focuses on meaning and culture, with sections on "Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning" and "Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context". Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication PDF Author: Kerry Mullan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9813299835
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

The Cultural Semantics of Address Practices

The Cultural Semantics of Address Practices PDF Author: Gian Marco Farese
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498579280
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This book presents a contrastive analysis of various forms of address used in English and Italian from a cultural semantics perspective. The analysis investigates the different cultural values underlying address practices in English and Italian and emphasizes the risks of miscommunication caused by differences in intercultural interactions.

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication PDF Author: Lauren Sadow
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9813299797
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This book is the third in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. This third volume explores the potential of Minimal English, a recent offshoot of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, with special reference to its use in Language Teaching and Intercultural Communication. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

Cultural Semantics

Cultural Semantics PDF Author: Martin Jay
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In this account of some of the central concepts in modern life and thought, Jay investigates how language cannot fail to change and mediate experience. He examines theory, multiculturalism, experience and the dynamic of cultural subversion.

Semantics, Culture, and Cognition

Semantics, Culture, and Cognition PDF Author: Anna Wierzbicka
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195360915
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Not everything that can be said in one language can be said in another. The lexicons of different languages seem to suggest different conceptual universes. Investigating cultures from a universal, language-independent perspective, this book rejects analytical tools derived from the English language and Anglo culture and proposes instead a "natural semantic metalanguage" formulated in English words but based on lexical universals. The outcome of two and a half decades of research, the metalanguage is made up of universal semantic primitives in terms of which all meanings--including the most culture-specific ones--can be described and compared in a precise and illuminating way. Integrating insights from linguistics, cultural anthropology, and cognitive psychology, and written in simple, non-technical language, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition is accessible not only to scholars and students, but also to the general reader interested in semantics and the relationship between language and culture.