Full Description
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.
Contents
1. Preface; 2. Typographical conventions and symbols; 3. Chapter 1. How words do things with people (by Levisen, Carsten); 4. Chapter 2. Nice as a cultural keyword: The semantics behind Australian discourses of sociality (by Waters, Sophia); 5. Chapter 3. Bogan as a keyword of contemporary Australia: Sociality and national discourse in Australian English (by Rowen, Roslyn); 6. Chapter 4. Social keywords in postcolonial melanesian discourse: Kastom 'traditional culture' and tumbuna 'ancestors' (by Levisen, Carsten); 7. Chapter 5. Talking about Livet 'Life' in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse and cultural models (by Hamann, Magnus); 8. Chapter 6. Visuality, identity and emotion: Rosa mexicano as a Mexican Spanish Keyword (by Aragon, Karime); 9. Chapter 7. Suburbio and suburbanos: Two cultural keywords in Brazilian discourse (by Mattos, Ana Paulla Braga); 10. Chapter 8. Cantonese 'mong4': A cultural keyword of 'busy' Hong Kong (by Leung, Helen Hue Lam); 11. Chapter 9. Kawaii discourse: The semantics of a Japanese cultural keyword and its social elaboration (by Asano-Cavanagh, Yuko); 12. Chapter 10. An invitation to keyword studies: Guidance for future research (by Levisen, Carsten)
