Full Description
In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness.
The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.
Contents
1. Words, Meaning, and Methodology ; 2. Men, Women, and Children: The semantics of basic social categories ; 3. Sweet, Hot, Hard, heavy, Rough, Sharp: Physical quality words in cross-linguistic perspective ; 4. From Colour Words to Visual Semantics: English, Russian, Warlpiri ; 5. Happiness and Human Values in Cross-cultural and Historical Perspective ; 6. Pain Is it a Human Universal? The Perspective From Cross-linguistic Semantics ; 7. Suggesting, Apologising, Complimenting: English speech act verbs ; 8. A Stitch in Time and The Way of The Rice Plant: The semantics of proverbs in English and Malay ; 9. The Meaning of Abstract Nouns: Locke, Bentham and Contemporary Semantics ; 10. Broader Perspectives: Beyond lexical semantics ; References ; Index
