Carsten Levisen | Roskilde University (original) (raw)
Papers by Carsten Levisen
![Research paper thumbnail of [CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS]: The Pragmatics of Place: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56253382/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This special issue explores the diversity of ways in which “place” is construed and enacted in ... more This special issue explores the diversity of ways in which “place” is construed and enacted in colonial and postcolonial discourse. The special issue understands pragmatics in broad terms as the study of meaning-making in cultural, historical, and situational contexts. We seek papers that can help explore place-specific knowledges, conceptualizations of place, or codes associated with people in specific places. A place, in this context, can be highly localized (busses, beaches), ethnogeographical (cities, nations), virtual (internet forums), or symbolic/mythical (terra australis, paradise). Our focus on (post)colonial means that we are interested in papers that can shed new light on (1) conceptions of place as associated with colonial-era discourse and contemporary postcolonial discourse across the globe, and/or (2) papers that can help deconstruct the Anglocentrism (and Eurocentrism) of universalist pragmatics through comparative studies.
PUBLICATION PLANS
The Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal currently under preparation, and this special issue will be the second number of the journal.
Important dates and contact information
Expression of interest (title and short abstract): June 15, 2018
Submission of full papers: December 15, 2018
Please send your expressions of interests to calev@ruc.dk and eeva.sippola@helsinki.fi.
Scandinavian Studies in Language (/Skandinaviske Sprogstudier) invites papers for a thematic issu... more Scandinavian Studies in Language (/Skandinaviske Sprogstudier) invites papers for a thematic issue on The social life of interjections. Contributions may be short (with a maximum of 4000 words) or full articles (with a maximum of 7000 words). We welcome empirical-analytical as well as theoretical contributions, and we welcome studies on interjections in any language. Interdisciplinary studies are also very welcome. We are interested in all aspects of interjections: the meanings and functions of interjections in communicative settings, the definition and categorization of interjections, cross linguistic comparisons of interjections, the ontogenetic as well as the phylogenetic development of interjections, and more. Contributions should be written in English. All contributions will be subject to anonymous peer-review. If interested, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words to one or more of the three guest editors: Tina Thode Hougaard (nortth@cc.au.dk), Carsten Levisen (calev@ruc.dk) or Eva Skafte Jensen (esj@dsn.dk), no later than December 15 th 2017. If accepted, you will receive a stylesheet in English along with the letter of acceptance. Abstract: State your interest and your point of view. Are you going for a primarily theoretical paper, or a more empirically based paper? Do you wish to write a short paper (max 4000 words) or a full paper (max 7000 words)?
This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phy... more This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the " creole " concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.
In this introduction we present themes and concepts that are central to this volume and give an o... more In this introduction we present themes and concepts that are central to this volume and give an overview of the contributions. First, we discuss some conceptual and methodological challenges of sociolinguistics in the global era. Second, we discuss the interactive formation and conceptualization of social units that have no clear-cut ethnic or national connections.
These are crucial to our understanding of ways of being in today’s global world. As argued later on, language practices constituted on grounds of music constitute a pertinent example of these social units. Finally, before presenting the individual contributions to this issue, we make notes on the recurrent themes they display, such as transnationality, fixity, fluidity, and
place.
Chapter 5 studies janteloven ‘the Jante Law’, a much-cited but often misunderstood Danish cultura... more Chapter 5 studies janteloven ‘the Jante Law’, a much-cited but often misunderstood Danish cultural construct. The chapter explores the cultural semantics of janteloven and studies how the term functions in con-temporary Danish discourses. Through an original semantic exegesis, the chapter exposes stereotypes commonly associated with janteloven. It argues that the underlying values can be identified in accordance with, not in opposition to, dominant cultural discourses of “tender values” in Danish society.
In Paulsen, Geda, Uusküla, Mari & Brindle, Jonathan (eds.) Color Language and Color Categorizatio... more In Paulsen, Geda, Uusküla, Mari & Brindle, Jonathan (eds.) Color Language and Color Categorization. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 270-301.
Hygge is a keyword in Danish culture and a product of the distinctive Danish social ethos which d... more Hygge is a keyword in Danish culture and a product of the distinctive
Danish social ethos which developed in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The aim of this chapter is to provide a semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of the concept hidden in this word, and the two main questions are: What does hygge mean, and which cultural values are co-construed with the word? (Ch3 in "Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition")
This paper presents an ethnolinguistic analysis of how the space between the head and the body is... more This paper presents an ethnolinguistic analysis of how the space between the head and the body is construed in Scandinavian semantic systems visa -vis the semantic system of English. With an extensive case study of neck-related meanings in Danish, and with cross-Scandinavian reference, it is demonstrated that Scandinavian and English systems differ significantly in some aspects of the way in which the construe the human body with words. The study ventures an innovative combination of methods, pairing the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to linguistic and conceptual analysis with empirical evidence from the Evolution of Semantic Systems (EoSS) project. This combination of empirical and interpretative tools helps to integrate evidence from semantics and semiotics, pinning out in great detail the intricacies of the meanings of particular body words. The paper concludes that body words in closely related languages can differ substantially in their semantics. In related languages, where shared lexical form does not always mean shared semantics, ethnolinguistic studies in semantic change and shifts in polysemy patterns can help to reveal and explain the roots of semantic diversity.
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper t... more According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the
world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse of
“happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the
Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a
new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed.
It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and
think about life in terms of ”happiness”, but rather through a different set of
cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural keyword lykke.
The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts livsglæde,
roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst ‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic
analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new
evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness
discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided
focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of crosslinguistic
confrontation. The paper calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of
words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic
and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.
The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translation... more The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as “please,” but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to ‘say please’. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is in fact no direct equivalent of anything like English please, German bitte, or other similar European constructs. Consequently, Danish speakers cannot ‘say please’, and Danish children cannot ‘say the magic word’. However, lige is in its own way a magic word, performing a different kind of pragmatic magic which has almost been left unstudied because it does not fit into any of the major Anglo-international research frameworks such as ‘how to express politeness’ or ‘how to make a request’. This paper analyses the semantics of lige in order to shed light on the peculiarities of Danish ethnopragmatics. It is demonstrated that Danish lige not only does a different semantic job compared to English please, but also that please-based and lige-based interactions are tied up with different interpretations of social life and interpersonal relations.
Language Sciences, 2014
This article traces the birth of two different pink categories in western Europe and the lexical... more This article traces the birth of two different pink categories in western Europe and the
lexicalization strategies used for these categories in English, German, Bernese, Danish,
Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic with the cognate sets pink, rosa, bleikur, lyserød, ceris.
In the 18th century, a particular shade of light red established itself in the cultural life of
people in Western Europe, earning its own independent colour term. In the middle of the
20th century, a second pink category began to spread in a subset of the languages.
Contemporary experimental data from the Evolution of Semantic Systems colour project
(Majid et al., 2011) is analysed in light of the extant historical data on the development of
these colour terms. We find that the current pink situation arose through contact-induced
lexical and conceptual change. Despite the different lexicalization strategies, the terms’
denotation is remarkably similar for the oldest pink category and we investigate the
impact of the advent of the younger and more restricted secondary pink category on the
colour categorization and colour denotations of the languages.
In this paper, we study the cultural semantics of the personhood construct 'mind' in Trinidadian ... more In this paper, we study the cultural semantics of the personhood construct 'mind' in Trinidadian creole. We analyze the lexical semantics of the word and explore the wider cultural meanings of the concept in contrastive comparison with the Anglo concept. Our analysis demonstrates that the Anglo concept is a cognitively oriented construct with a semantic configuration based on ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’, whereas the Trinidadian 'mind' is a moral concept configured around perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We further explore the Trinidadian moral discourse of 'bad mind' and 'good mind', and articulate a set of cultural scripts for the cultural values linked with personhood in the Trinidadian context. Taking a postcolonial approach to the semantics of personhood, we critically engage with Anglo-international discourses of the mind, exposing the conceptual stranglehold of the colonial language (i.e., English) and its distorting semantic grip on global discourse. We argue that creole categories of values and personhood — such as the Trinidadian concept of 'mind' — provide a new venue for critical 'mind' studies as well as for new studies in creole semantics and cultural diversity.
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2013
There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and adjectives ... more There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and
adjectives abound, and the pragmatics of Danish, including its repertoire of abusives, is heavily reliant on porcine phraseology. Despite the highly urbanized nature of the
contemporary Danish speech community, semantic structures from Denmark’s peasant-farmer past appear to have survived and taken on a new significance in today’s society. Unlike everyday English, which mainly distinguishes pig from pork, everyday Danish embodies an important semantic distinction between grise, which roughly speaking translates as ‘nice pigs’, vis-à-vis svin, which, very roughly, translates as ‘nasty pigs’. Focusing on the pragmatics of svin-based language, this paper demonstrates how this concept is utilized in Danish interaction and social cognition. The paper explores systematically the culture-specific porcine themes in Danish evaluational expressions, speech acts and interpersonal relations. The paper demonstrates that ‘pigs in language’ is far from a trivial topic and argues that cultural elaboration of pig-words and the culture-specific ‘meaning of pigs’ in Danish not only sheds light on the diverse linguistic construals of ‘animal concepts’ in the world’s languages: it also calls for a cultural-semantic approach to the study of social cognition.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2012
(Edited) books and journals by Carsten Levisen
This special issue explores the diversity of ways in which “place” is construed and enacted in ... more This special issue explores the diversity of ways in which “place” is construed and enacted in colonial and postcolonial discourse. The special issue understands pragmatics in broad terms as the study of meaning-making in cultural, historical, and situational contexts. We seek papers that can help explore place-specific knowledges, conceptualizations of place, or codes associated with people in specific places. A place, in this context, can be highly localized (busses, beaches), ethnogeographical (cities, nations), virtual (internet forums), or symbolic/mythical (terra australis, paradise). Our focus on (post)colonial means that we are interested in papers that can shed new light on (1) conceptions of place as associated with colonial-era discourse and contemporary postcolonial discourse across the globe, and/or (2) papers that can help deconstruct the Anglocentrism (and Eurocentrism) of universalist pragmatics through comparative studies.
PUBLICATION PLANS
The Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal currently under preparation, and this special issue will be the second number of the journal.
Important dates and contact information
Expression of interest (title and short abstract): June 15, 2018
Submission of full papers: December 15, 2018
Please send your expressions of interests to calev@ruc.dk and eeva.sippola@helsinki.fi.
Scandinavian Studies in Language (/Skandinaviske Sprogstudier) invites papers for a thematic issu... more Scandinavian Studies in Language (/Skandinaviske Sprogstudier) invites papers for a thematic issue on The social life of interjections. Contributions may be short (with a maximum of 4000 words) or full articles (with a maximum of 7000 words). We welcome empirical-analytical as well as theoretical contributions, and we welcome studies on interjections in any language. Interdisciplinary studies are also very welcome. We are interested in all aspects of interjections: the meanings and functions of interjections in communicative settings, the definition and categorization of interjections, cross linguistic comparisons of interjections, the ontogenetic as well as the phylogenetic development of interjections, and more. Contributions should be written in English. All contributions will be subject to anonymous peer-review. If interested, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words to one or more of the three guest editors: Tina Thode Hougaard (nortth@cc.au.dk), Carsten Levisen (calev@ruc.dk) or Eva Skafte Jensen (esj@dsn.dk), no later than December 15 th 2017. If accepted, you will receive a stylesheet in English along with the letter of acceptance. Abstract: State your interest and your point of view. Are you going for a primarily theoretical paper, or a more empirically based paper? Do you wish to write a short paper (max 4000 words) or a full paper (max 7000 words)?
This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phy... more This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the " creole " concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.
In this introduction we present themes and concepts that are central to this volume and give an o... more In this introduction we present themes and concepts that are central to this volume and give an overview of the contributions. First, we discuss some conceptual and methodological challenges of sociolinguistics in the global era. Second, we discuss the interactive formation and conceptualization of social units that have no clear-cut ethnic or national connections.
These are crucial to our understanding of ways of being in today’s global world. As argued later on, language practices constituted on grounds of music constitute a pertinent example of these social units. Finally, before presenting the individual contributions to this issue, we make notes on the recurrent themes they display, such as transnationality, fixity, fluidity, and
place.
Chapter 5 studies janteloven ‘the Jante Law’, a much-cited but often misunderstood Danish cultura... more Chapter 5 studies janteloven ‘the Jante Law’, a much-cited but often misunderstood Danish cultural construct. The chapter explores the cultural semantics of janteloven and studies how the term functions in con-temporary Danish discourses. Through an original semantic exegesis, the chapter exposes stereotypes commonly associated with janteloven. It argues that the underlying values can be identified in accordance with, not in opposition to, dominant cultural discourses of “tender values” in Danish society.
In Paulsen, Geda, Uusküla, Mari & Brindle, Jonathan (eds.) Color Language and Color Categorizatio... more In Paulsen, Geda, Uusküla, Mari & Brindle, Jonathan (eds.) Color Language and Color Categorization. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 270-301.
Hygge is a keyword in Danish culture and a product of the distinctive Danish social ethos which d... more Hygge is a keyword in Danish culture and a product of the distinctive
Danish social ethos which developed in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The aim of this chapter is to provide a semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of the concept hidden in this word, and the two main questions are: What does hygge mean, and which cultural values are co-construed with the word? (Ch3 in "Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition")
This paper presents an ethnolinguistic analysis of how the space between the head and the body is... more This paper presents an ethnolinguistic analysis of how the space between the head and the body is construed in Scandinavian semantic systems visa -vis the semantic system of English. With an extensive case study of neck-related meanings in Danish, and with cross-Scandinavian reference, it is demonstrated that Scandinavian and English systems differ significantly in some aspects of the way in which the construe the human body with words. The study ventures an innovative combination of methods, pairing the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to linguistic and conceptual analysis with empirical evidence from the Evolution of Semantic Systems (EoSS) project. This combination of empirical and interpretative tools helps to integrate evidence from semantics and semiotics, pinning out in great detail the intricacies of the meanings of particular body words. The paper concludes that body words in closely related languages can differ substantially in their semantics. In related languages, where shared lexical form does not always mean shared semantics, ethnolinguistic studies in semantic change and shifts in polysemy patterns can help to reveal and explain the roots of semantic diversity.
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper t... more According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the
world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse of
“happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the
Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a
new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed.
It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and
think about life in terms of ”happiness”, but rather through a different set of
cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural keyword lykke.
The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts livsglæde,
roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst ‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic
analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new
evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness
discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided
focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of crosslinguistic
confrontation. The paper calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of
words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic
and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.
The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translation... more The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as “please,” but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to ‘say please’. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is in fact no direct equivalent of anything like English please, German bitte, or other similar European constructs. Consequently, Danish speakers cannot ‘say please’, and Danish children cannot ‘say the magic word’. However, lige is in its own way a magic word, performing a different kind of pragmatic magic which has almost been left unstudied because it does not fit into any of the major Anglo-international research frameworks such as ‘how to express politeness’ or ‘how to make a request’. This paper analyses the semantics of lige in order to shed light on the peculiarities of Danish ethnopragmatics. It is demonstrated that Danish lige not only does a different semantic job compared to English please, but also that please-based and lige-based interactions are tied up with different interpretations of social life and interpersonal relations.
Language Sciences, 2014
This article traces the birth of two different pink categories in western Europe and the lexical... more This article traces the birth of two different pink categories in western Europe and the
lexicalization strategies used for these categories in English, German, Bernese, Danish,
Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic with the cognate sets pink, rosa, bleikur, lyserød, ceris.
In the 18th century, a particular shade of light red established itself in the cultural life of
people in Western Europe, earning its own independent colour term. In the middle of the
20th century, a second pink category began to spread in a subset of the languages.
Contemporary experimental data from the Evolution of Semantic Systems colour project
(Majid et al., 2011) is analysed in light of the extant historical data on the development of
these colour terms. We find that the current pink situation arose through contact-induced
lexical and conceptual change. Despite the different lexicalization strategies, the terms’
denotation is remarkably similar for the oldest pink category and we investigate the
impact of the advent of the younger and more restricted secondary pink category on the
colour categorization and colour denotations of the languages.
In this paper, we study the cultural semantics of the personhood construct 'mind' in Trinidadian ... more In this paper, we study the cultural semantics of the personhood construct 'mind' in Trinidadian creole. We analyze the lexical semantics of the word and explore the wider cultural meanings of the concept in contrastive comparison with the Anglo concept. Our analysis demonstrates that the Anglo concept is a cognitively oriented construct with a semantic configuration based on ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’, whereas the Trinidadian 'mind' is a moral concept configured around perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We further explore the Trinidadian moral discourse of 'bad mind' and 'good mind', and articulate a set of cultural scripts for the cultural values linked with personhood in the Trinidadian context. Taking a postcolonial approach to the semantics of personhood, we critically engage with Anglo-international discourses of the mind, exposing the conceptual stranglehold of the colonial language (i.e., English) and its distorting semantic grip on global discourse. We argue that creole categories of values and personhood — such as the Trinidadian concept of 'mind' — provide a new venue for critical 'mind' studies as well as for new studies in creole semantics and cultural diversity.
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2013
There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and adjectives ... more There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and
adjectives abound, and the pragmatics of Danish, including its repertoire of abusives, is heavily reliant on porcine phraseology. Despite the highly urbanized nature of the
contemporary Danish speech community, semantic structures from Denmark’s peasant-farmer past appear to have survived and taken on a new significance in today’s society. Unlike everyday English, which mainly distinguishes pig from pork, everyday Danish embodies an important semantic distinction between grise, which roughly speaking translates as ‘nice pigs’, vis-à-vis svin, which, very roughly, translates as ‘nasty pigs’. Focusing on the pragmatics of svin-based language, this paper demonstrates how this concept is utilized in Danish interaction and social cognition. The paper explores systematically the culture-specific porcine themes in Danish evaluational expressions, speech acts and interpersonal relations. The paper demonstrates that ‘pigs in language’ is far from a trivial topic and argues that cultural elaboration of pig-words and the culture-specific ‘meaning of pigs’ in Danish not only sheds light on the diverse linguistic construals of ‘animal concepts’ in the world’s languages: it also calls for a cultural-semantic approach to the study of social cognition.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2012
This paper explores sort humor 'black humour', a key concept in Danish conversational humour. Sor... more This paper explores sort humor 'black humour', a key concept in Danish conversational humour. Sort forms part of a larger class of Danish synaesthetic humour metaphors that includes other categories such as tør 'dry', syg 'sick', and fed 'fat'. Taking an ethnopragmatic perspective on humour discourse, it is argued that such constructs function as a local catalogue for socially recognized laughing practices. The aim of the paper is to provide a semantic explication for sort humor and explore the discursive practices associated with the concept. From a comparative perspective, it is demonstrated that the Danish conceptualization of " blackness " differs from that of l'humour noir, a category of French surrealism, and English black humour with its off-limit topics such as death and handicap. In Danish discourse, sort humor has come to stand for a practice of collaborative jocular nonsense making. It is further argued that the main function of sort humor is to establish or enhance a feeling of " groupy togetherness " .
![Research paper thumbnail of [CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS]: The Pragmatics of Place: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56253387/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](CALL for CONTRIBUTIONS The Pragmatics of Place: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives Special I... more CALL for CONTRIBUTIONS
The Pragmatics of Place: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives
Special Issue of Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics, the journal associated with IACPL, the International Association of Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics.
Editors:
Carsten Levisen, Roskilde University
Eeva Sippola, University of Helsinki
INTRODUCTION
This special issue explores the diversity of ways in which “place” is construed and enacted in colonial and postcolonial discourse. The special issue understands pragmatics in broad terms as the study of meaning-making in cultural, historical, and situational contexts. We seek papers that can help explore place-specific knowledges, conceptualizations of place, or codes associated with people in specific places. A place, in this context, can be highly localized (busses, beaches), ethnogeographical (cities, nations), virtual (internet forums), or symbolic/mythical (terra australis, paradise). Our focus on (post)colonial means that we are interested in papers that can shed new light on (1) conceptions of place as associated with colonial-era discourse and contemporary postcolonial discourse across the globe, and/or (2) papers that can help deconstruct the Anglocentrism (and Eurocentrism) of universalist pragmatics through comparative studies.
PUBLICATION PLANS
The Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal currently under preparation, and this special issue will be the second number of the journal.
Important dates and contact information
Expression of interest (title and short abstract): June 15, 2018
Submission of full papers: December 15, 2018
Please send your expressions of interests to calev@ruc.dk and eeva.sippola@helsinki.fi.
In postcolonial Melanesia, cultural discourses are increasingly organized around creole words, i.... more In postcolonial Melanesia, cultural discourses are increasingly organized around creole words, i.e. keywords of Bislama (Vanuatu) and Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea). These words make up (or represent) key features of an emerging ethnolinguistic worldview, which is partly born out of the colonial era, and partly out of postcolonial ethno-rhetoric. This paper explores two cultural keywords of Melanesia kastom 'traditional culture' in Bislama and pasim bilong tumbuna 'the ways of the ancestors' in Tok Pisin. The words kastom (from custom) and pasin (from fashion) are examples of semantic cryptodiversity, i.e. of words with an English surface, but with Melanesian-specific meanings. The study explores the pancronic semantics of three kastom meanings in Bislama, and pays specific attention to the shift from " negative " to " positive " , following from postcolonial rhetoric of, and its re-evaluation of the importance of ancestral practices. The Tok Pisin phrase pasin bilong tumbuna 'ways of the ancestors' 117 shares with kastom a number of semantic tropes and discursive functions, but it is used in a more descriptive and less celebratory way. Sociality terms in postcolonial discourse make up a fertile ground for understanding neo-cultures through their keywords.
The lexicographic study of postcolonial language varieties is severely undertheorized and underde... more The lexicographic study of postcolonial language varieties is severely undertheorized and underdeveloped. Against that background, this paper develops a new framework, Postcolonial Lexicography. This framework aims at providing a new praxis of word definition for the study of creoles, world Englishes, and other languages spoken in postcolonial contexts. Drawing on advances in lexical semantics, linguistic ethnography and postcolonial language studies, the paper offers an original analysis of emotion words in Urban Bislama, a creole language spoken in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The paper develops a sketch of the Bislama lexicon of emotion and provides new definitions of kros, roughly " angry " , les, roughly " annoyed " and sem, roughly " ashamed ". The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is utilized as an interpretative technique for the definition of meaning. The NSM approach allows for a fine-grained lexical-semantic analysis, and at the same time, it helps circumvent " conceptual colonialism " and the related vices of Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism, all of which hamper advances in the field of lexicographic studies in postcolonial context. Résumé:
This study breaks new ground into the emerging discipline of sonic semantics and the study of lan... more This study breaks new ground into the emerging discipline of sonic semantics and the study of language ideologies in postcolonial contexts. The point in case is Vanuatu’s creolophone neo-culture, in which young speakers are forming new ways of socializing on the fragments of kastom ‘traditional culture’, and with an ambivalent stance towards the value systems represented by jioj ‘church’. The study finds that Caribbean reggae remains only a distant symbol of the reke ‘reggae’ of Urban Vanuatu, and that reke has been appropriated and refunctionalized to fit local meanings, knowledges, and ideologies. As a cultural keyword, reke offers a rich point for understanding local language-embedded ideologies, and also for understanding the status of Bislama, the national creole. The paper re-opens the dialogue between two approaches to language ideologies: ideology-in-language perspectives and ideology-of-language perspectives, demonstrating how sonic semantics and keyword studies can help pave the way for a meaning-based approach to discourse, sociality, and worldview.
Det Naturlige Semantiske Metasprogs ordforråd kaldes 'semantiske primer'. Kortet viser de danske ... more Det Naturlige Semantiske Metasprogs ordforråd kaldes 'semantiske primer'. Kortet viser de danske eksponenter og nogle af de mest basale kombinationsmuligheder. Der findes flere muligheder for kombinatorik end de muligheder der vises her. I nogle sprog kan to primer udtrykkes ved det samme ord (fx føler og hører, noget og del), og sommetider kan primer have to eller flere eksponenter (allolexer), som det fx er tilfaeldet med noget og ting eller nogen og person i dansk. Nogle gange kan kombinationer af to eller flere primer udtrykkes ved et enkelt ord fx *samtidigt (på samme tidspunkt), eller *sådan (som det her). Dette kaldes portmanteau og er markeret med asterisker. [c.goddard@griffith.edu.au; clevisen@ruc.dk]
In this panel, we explore the diversity of ways in which " place " is construed and enacted in co... more In this panel, we explore the diversity of ways in which " place " is construed and enacted in colonial and postcolonial discourse. Universalist pragmatics has had little to say about place, let alone the pragmatics of place across cultures and historical epochs. Within newer post-universalist approaches to pragmatics, we can begin to study the historicity and variability of " place discourses " constituted by words, metaphors, grammars, narratives, memories, cosmologies, and linguistic worldviews. The aim of this panel is to shed light on the cultural models and knowledges that are at play in discourse and inscribed in people and produced by them through socialization and recurrent discursive enactments. We encourage contributions from a broad range of diversity-oriented approaches to pragmatics, such as Postcolonial Pragmatics (Anchimbe &
Конструкции личности в той или иной мере различаются в европейских языках. Некоторые конструкции ... more Конструкции личности в той или иной мере различаются в европейских языках. Некоторые конструкции отражают специфику конкретного языка. Иные же сопоставимы друг с другом, как, например, весь европейский класс конструкций, связанных с концептом «душа». Принято считать, что они уходят корнями в религиозный или квазирелигиозный дискурс, однако, по европейским стандартам, современный датский концепт sjæl («душа») представляется удивительно светским.
С целью извлечения значения sjæl при написании статьи в качестве метода исследования был использован естественный семантический метаязык (ЕСМ). Статья заключает в себе глубокий анализ
- семантики sjæl в современном датском дискурсе;
- семантики sjæl в период Золотого века Дании (1800-1850);
- сравнение этих двух концептуализаций.
Опираясь на данные семантико-фразеологических сдвигов, материалы корпусной прагматики и дискурсивных инноваций, автор статьи приводит доказательства того, что современное понятие sjæl и понятие sjæl времён периода Золотого века Дании заметно отличаются. Несмотря на то что исторически sjæl было культурным ключевым словом датского дискурса, со временем оно подверглось дискурсивной маргинализации. Однако данные свидетельствуют о том, что sjæl, возможно, переживает период подъема, по крайней мере, в определенных нишах дискурса.
В статье утверждается, что новый датский концепт sjæl является отражением постматериалистической, постпротестантской чувственности – концепта, связанного с благополучием, гармонией и
счастьем. Sjæl – хрупкий и слабый концепт личности, над которым доминирует более сильный концептуальный аналог «тело» (kroppen). Тем не менее, концепт sjæl периода Золотого века, т.е. в его классическом понимании, по-прежнему звучит в песенной традиции, произведениях литературы и воспоминаниях о прошлом.
Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally reve... more 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.