Semantics, Culture, and Cognition

Semantics, Culture, and Cognition
Author: Anna Wierzbicka
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 496
Release: 1992
Genre: Intercultural communication
ISBN: 0195073266

This study ranges across a wide variety of languages and cultures in an attempt to identify concepts which are truly universal and to explore whether certain words are culture-specific.

Semantics, Culture, and Cognition

Semantics, Culture, and Cognition
Author: Anna Wierzbicka
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Intercultural communication
ISBN: 9780197722381

This study ranges across a wide variety of languages and cultures in an attempt to identify concepts which are truly universal and to explore whether certain words are culture-specific.

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition
Author: Carsten Levisen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110294656

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.

Culture, Society, and Cognition

Culture, Society, and Cognition
Author: David B. Kronenfeld
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2008-12-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110211483

This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of "cultural models" that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition
Author: Carsten Levisen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2013-03-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9783110294668

Words do not emerge in a cultural vacuum. They are revealing of speakers' values, cognitive preferences and social practices. With an engaging study of Danish cultural keywords, this book offers a new framework for understanding language-particular universes of meaning and lays the ground for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe. The book is of compelling interest to anyone interested in language and cultural values, as well as for students and scholars in Scandinavian and European studies.

Semantics and Cognition

Semantics and Cognition
Author: Ray S. Jackendoff
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1985-09-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780262600132

This book emphasizes the role of semantics as a bridge between the theory of language and the theories of other cognitive capacities such as visual perception and motor control.

The Quest for Meaning--

The Quest for Meaning--
Author: Cliff Goddard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 28
Release: 2005
Genre: Cognition and culture
ISBN:

Meaning in linguistics, the atoms of meaning, and semantic variation across languages are all covered in this brief book.

Historical Semantics and Cognition

Historical Semantics and Cognition
Author: Andreas Blank
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2013-03-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110804190

Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for American and European cognitive linguists to confront representatives of different directions in European structural semantics. Papers are in sections on theories and models, descriptive categories, and case studies, and examine areas such as cognitive and structural semantics, diachronic prototype semantics, synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy, and intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change.

“Self” in Language, Culture, and Cognition

“Self” in Language, Culture, and Cognition
Author: Yanying Lu
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2019-11-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027261776

This book explores socio-cultural meanings of ‘self’ in the Chinese language through analysing a range of conversations among Chinese immigrants to Australia qualitatively on the topics of individuality, social relationships and collective identity. If language, culture and cognition are major roads, this book is the junction that unites them by arguing that selfhood occurs at their interface. It provides an interdisciplinary approach to unpack manifestations and perceptions of ‘self’ in the contemporary Chinese diaspora discourse from the perspectives of Sociolinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and the newly developed Cultural Linguistics. This book not only discusses empirical and theoretical issues on the conceptualisation and communication of social identity in a cross-cultural context, it also reveals how traditional and modern ideas in Chinese culture are interacting with those of other world cultures. Considering the power of language, enduring and emerging beliefs and stances that permeate these speakers’ views on their social being and outlooks on life impart their significance in cross-cultural communication and pragmatics. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

From Body to Meaning in Culture

From Body to Meaning in Culture
Author: Ning Yu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Chinese language
ISBN: 9789027232625

From the perspective of Cognitive Semantics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this collection of papers looks at the relationship between language, body, culture, and cognition. In particular, it looks into the embodied nature of human language and cognition as arising from and situated in the cultural environment. The papers in this collection all attempt to demonstrate, from different angles, the language-body connections that may reflect, to some extent, the mind-body connections as manifested in the interaction between the body and the physical and cultural world. They study language in a systematic way as a window into the human mind. As a collection of papers that focuses on the study of Chinese with a comparative viewpoint on English, it sheds light on the bodily basis of human meaning and understanding in particular cultural contexts.