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Cultural Keywords in Discourse
Editors
Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse.
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 277] 2017. ix, 249 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 3 October 2017
Published online on 3 October 2017
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Typographical conventions and symbols | pp. ix–9
- Chapter 1. How words do things with peopleCarsten Levisen and Sophia Waters | pp. 1–23
- Chapter 2. Nice as a cultural keyword: The semantics behind Australian discourses of socialitySophia Waters | pp. 25–54
- Chapter 3. Bogan as a keyword of contemporary Australia: Sociality and national discourse in Australian EnglishRoslyn Rowen | pp. 55–82
- Chapter 4. Social keywords in postcolonial Melanesian discourse: Kastom ‘traditional culture’ and tumbuna ‘ancestors’Carsten Levisen and Carol Priestley | pp. 83–106
- Chapter 5. Talking about Livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse and cultural modelsMagnus Hamann and Carsten Levisen | pp. 107–129
- Chapter 6. Visuality, identity and emotion]: Rosa mexicano as a Mexican Spanish keywordKarime Aragón | pp. 131–156
- Chapter 7. Subúrbio and suburbanos : Two cultural keywords in Brazilian discourseAna Paulla Braga Mattos | pp. 157–182
- Chapter 8. Cantonese ‘mong4’: A cultural keyword of ‘busy’ Hong KongHelen Hue Lam Leung | pp. 183–210
- Chapter 9. Kawaii discourse: The semantics of a Japanese cultural keyword and its social elaborationYuko Asano-Cavanagh | pp. 211–234
- Chapter 10. An invitation to keyword studies: Guidance for future researchCarsten Levisen and Sophia Waters | pp. 235–242
- Index | pp. 243–249
“Both the chapter authors and (especially) the editors must be congratulated on a solid contribution to cultural linguistics/ethnolinguistics, especially to Anna Wierzbicka's highly original, unique NSM framework. Given the fact that both Levisen and Waters have many years of scholarly career ahead of them, the future of the field looks promising.”
Adam Głaz, UMCS, Lublin, Poland, in LaMiCuS 2 (2018)
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