Cover not available

In:The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 346] 2024
► pp. 64–85

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 4
New social categories in dangerous times

Unidad familiar, conviviente, and grupo burbuja in Spain’s “New Normal”

ORCiD logo with link | I-COMMUNITAS. Institute for Advanced Social Research (Public University of Navarre)
Published online: 15 August 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.346.04azn
Abstract
After a three-month Covid-19 lockdown, the Spanish national and regional governments implemented stringent rules to curb the pandemic’s spread during the “new normal”. These measures aimed to reduce face-to-face interactions while sustaining economic and educational activities, reshaping social behaviours and perceptions. Notably, a distinct shift occurred in Spain’s landscape of social groups and relationships, traditionally characterised by keywords like familia and amigos/amigas used to refer to close connections. Emerging from political and legal jargon, technical terms such as unidad familiar, conviviente, and grupo burbuja entered the public sphere and everyday conversation. Using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework, this study analyses these expressions, revealing that, unlike familia and amigos/amigas, the new terms are primarily grounded in the concept of “space” and lack an inherent emotional component. This finding prompts reflection on the potential impact of these concepts on people’s mindsets in the “new normal” era.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Social categories and cognition
  • 3.The NSM approach and methodology
  • 4.Familia and amigos/amigas in Peninsular Spanish
  • 5.Unidad familiar, conviviente, and grupo burbuja in Spain’s “new normal”
  • 6.The meaning of unidad familiar2, conviviente, and grupo burbuja
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (48)
References
Álvarez, José, and Clemente Rodríguez. 2008. “El valor de la institución familiar en los jóvenes universitarios de la Universidad de Granada [The value of the family institution in young students from the University of Granada].” Bordón 60 (1): 7–21.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Campbell, Donald T. 1958. “Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of person as social entities.” Behavioural Science 3: 14–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Castano, Emanuele, Vincent Yzerbyt, and David Bourguigon. 2003. “We are one and I like it: The impact of ingroup entitativity on ingroup identification.” European Journal of Social Psychology 33: 735–754. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernández, Susana S. 2019. “Una introducción a la teoría de la Metalengua Semántica Natural (NSM) y su aplicación a la pragmática.” Pragmática sociocultural / Sociocultural Pragmatics 7 (3): 397–420. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fundéu/Real Academia Española. n.d. Conviviente. Retrieved 20 February 2021 from [URL]
Gladkova, Anna. 2013. “‘Is he one of ours?’ The cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics of social categories in Russian.” Journal of Pragmatics 55: 180–194. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 1998. Semantic analysis: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. Cross-linguistic semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. “Semantic primes, semantic molecules, semantic templates: Key concepts in the NSM approach to lexical typology.” Linguistics 50 (3): 711–43. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “The semantic roots and cultural grounding of ‘social cognition’.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 33 (3): 245–256. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff, and Anna Wierzbicka. 2002. Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings. Volume 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings. Volume 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2021. “‘We’: conceptual semantics, linguistic typology and social cognition.” Language Sciences 83, 101327. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hamilton, David L., and Tina K. Trolier. 1986. “Stereotypes and stereotyping: An overview of the cognitive approach.” In Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism, ed. by John F. Dovidio, and Samuel L. Gaertner, 127–163. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herrera-Torres, Marina, and Stephen D. Reicher. 2007. “Categorización social y construcción de las categorías sociales [Social categorisation and the construction of social categories].” In Psicología social ed. by José F. Morales, Elena Gaviria, Miguel C. Moya Morales, and María Isabel Cuadrado Guirado, 169–194. Madrid: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hogg, Michael A., and Dominic Abrams. 1988. Social identification: A social psychology of intergroup relations and group processes. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE). 2020. Encuesta continua de hogares [Continuous household survey]. Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital, Secretaría de Estado de Economía y Apoyo a la Empresa. [URL]
Levisen, Carsten. 2012. Cultural semantics and social cognition: A case study on the Danish universe of meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters. 2017. “How words do things with people.” In Cultural Keywords in Discourse, ed. by Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters, 1–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lickel, Brian, David L. Hamilton, Grazyna Wieczorkowska, Amy Lewis, Steven J. Sherman, and A. Neville Uhles. 2000. “Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2), 223–246. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Odriozola-González, Paula, Álvaro Planchuelo-Gómez, María Jesús Irurtia, and Rodrigo de Luis-García. 2022. “Psychological symptoms of the outbreak of the COVID-19 confinement in Spain.” Journal of Health Psychology 27 (4): 825–835. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Real Academia Española. Banco de datos (CREA) [on line]. Corpus de referencia del español actual [Reference corpus of present-day Spanish]. [URL]
Real Academia Española. Banco de datos (CORPES XXI) [on line]. Corpus del español del siglo XXI [Corpus of 21st century Spanish]. [URL]
Real Academia Española. n.d. “Amigo/Amistad.” In Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language]. Retrieved 7 February 2022, from [URL]
Rhodes, Marjorie, Sara-Jane Leslie, Lydia Bianchi, and Lisa Chalik. 2018. “The role of generic language in the early development of social categorization.” Child Development 89 (1): 148–155. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rodríguez, Clemente, Lucía Herrera, Oswaldo L. Quiles, and José Álvarez. 2008. “El valor de la familia en estudiantes universitarios de España: Análisis y clasificación [The value of family in university students in Spain: analysis and classification].” Enseñanza e Investigación en Psicología 13 (2): 215–230.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sandín, Bonifacio, Rosa M. Valiente, Julia García-Escalera, and Paloma Chorot. 2020. “Impacto psicológico de la pandemia de COVID-19: Efectos negativos y positivos en población española asociados al periodo de confinamiento nacional [Psychological impact of the Covid-19 pandemic: Negative and positive effects on the Spanish population associated with the period of national confinement].” Revista de Psicopatología y Psicología Clínica 25 (1): 1–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Seco, Manuel, Olimpia Andrés, and Gabino Ramos. 1999. Diccionario del español actual [Dictionary of present-day Spanish]. Madrid: Aguilar.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spencer-Rodgers, Julie, David L. Hamilton, and Steven J. Sherman. 2007. “The central role of entitativity in stereotypes of social categories and task groups.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (3): 369–388. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tajfel, Henri. 1981. Human groups and social categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Travis, Catherine. 2002. “La metalengua semántica natural: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage of Spanish.” In Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and empirical findings, vol. 1, ed. by Cliff Goddard, and Anna Wierzbicka, 173–242. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turner, John C., Penelope J. Oakes, S. Alexander Haslam, and Craig McGarty. 1994. “Self and collective: Cognition and social context.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20 (5): 454–463. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vo, Thi Lien Huong. 2016. The ethnopragmatics of Vietnamese: A study of the cultural logic of interaction focussing on the speech act complex of disagreement. [Doctoral Dissertation, Griffith University].
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1972. Semantic primitives. Frankfurt: Athenäum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. Semantics: Culture and cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “Kinship and social cognition in Australian languages: Kayardild and Pitjantjatjara.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 33 (3): 302–321. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “Back to ‘mother’ and ‘father’: Overcoming the eurocentrism of kinship studies through eight lexical universals.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 408–429. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. “The meaning of kinship terms: A developmental and cross-linguistic perspective.” In The Semantics of Nouns, ed. by Zhengdao Ye, 19–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wong, Jock O. 2014. The culture of Singapore English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ye, Zhengdao. 2004. “Chinese categorization of interpersonal relationships and the cultural logic of Chinese social interaction: An indigenous perspective.” Intercultural Pragmatics 1 (2): 211–230. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “Understanding the conceptual basis of the ‘Old friend’ formula in Chinese social interaction and foreign diplomacy: a cultural script approach.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 33 (3): 365–385. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “Stranger and acquaintance in English: meaning and cultural scripts.” In Text-sentence-word: Studies in English Linguistics, vol.2, ed. by Aganieszka Uberman and Teodor Hrehovcik, 119–130. Rzeszow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. “The semantics of social relation nouns in Chinese.” In The Semantics of Nouns, ed. by Zhengdao Ye, 63–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zinn, Jens O. 2020. “A monstrous threat: how a state of exception turns into a ‘new normal’.” Journal of Risk Research 23 (7–8): 1083–1091. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue