Transcript Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words

Understanding Cultures Through
Their Key Words
Anna Wierzbicka, 1997
İDB 427- Language and Culture
Presentation Plan
• Word frequencies – cultures
• Key words – core cultural values
• Natural semantic metalanguage
•
•
•
•
Semantic primitives
Lexical universals
Categories
The universal syntax of meaning
Word Frequencies Cultures
• Measuring word frequency
• Fully objective word frequency is impossible.
• Size of the corpus and text types in the corpus.
• Kucera and Francis (1967) Computational analysis
of present day English- Brown Corpus
• English: homeland 5
Russian: rodina 172
(the difference is 1:30)
Word Frequencies Cultures
English / Frequency
•
•
•
•
fool
stupid
stupidly
idiot
43
25
2
4
19
33
-
Russian / Frequency
•
•
•
•
durak
glupyj
glupo
idiot
122
99
34
29
• absolutely 0 58
• utterly
27 13
• perfectly
31 44
• absoljutno
• soversenno 365
166
• terribly
• awfully
• horribly
• uzasno
• strasno
70
159
18 13
10 2
-
Word Frequency-Cultures:
Generalizations
• Russian culture encourages direct, sharp,
undiluted value judgments, whereas Anglo
culture does not.
• Frequency of use of hyperbolic adverbs in two
languages show the difference between two
cultures in their attitude to overstatement.
Key Words – Core
Cultural Values
• Key words are words which are particularly
important and revealing in a given culture.
• Example:
• Russian sud’ba (fate); dusa (soul); toska
(melancholy-cum-yearning)
• No finite set of key words in language
• No objective discovery procedure for
identifying them
How to justify the claim that a particular
word is one of the culture’s “key words”?
• A common word, not a marginal word
• Frequent use in one particular semantic
domain: E.g., domains of emotion or moral
judgments
• Centre of a whole phraseological cluster
• Frequent occurrence in sayings, in popular
songs, in book titles, and so on.
How do we use cultural
key word analysis?
Not only do we prove that a particular
word is one of culture’s key word but we
also be able to say something significant
and revealing about that culture by
undertaking an in-depth study of some of
them. (p.16)
Critics to using “key words” approach in
cultural studies
• An “atomistic” pursuit, inferior to “holistic”
approaches which targets more general
cultural patterns rather than “a random
selection of individual words”— viewed as
isolated lexical items.
• Contemporary approach in key word studies:
Some words can be studied as focal points
around which entire cultural domains are
organized.
Contemporary approach in“key words”
analysis
To explore focal points in depth, linguists
show the general organizing principles
which lend structure and coherence to a
cultural domain as a whole, and which
often have an explanatory power
extending across a number of domains.
Example: Russian dusa (soul) sud’ba (fate)
Natural Semantic
Metalanguage
• Existence of conceptual and linguistic
universals
• All languages have innate, common core:
readiness for meaning; lexicon-grammar
• This common core can be used as minilanguage.
• We can carve within any language a mini-language
which we can use a metalanguage as talking about
languages and cultures as if from outside of them.
NSM
• Meaning relies on paraphrases formulated in a
self-explanatory “natural semantic
metalanguage” carved out of natural
languages.
• Since NSM do not use the full resources of
natural languages but only their minimally
shared core, they can be standardized,
comparable across languages, free of the
inherent circularity.
Semantic primitives
• On can not define all words.
• The elements which can be used to define the
meaning of words cannot be defined by
themselves; they must be accepted as
“indefinibilia”, that is as semantic primes, all
complex meanings can be coherently
represented.
• Via semantic primitives, semantics manages to define
complex and obscure meanings in terms of simple
and self-explanatory ones.
Lexical Universal
• Conceptual primitives can be found through indepth analysis of any natural language.
• The sets of primitives identified in this way
would match, and in fact each such set is one
language-specific manifestation of a universal
set of fundamental human concepts.
• Languages: Niger-Cango family, Mandarin
Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Australian languages,
and so on.
Categories and “parts of
speech”
• 60 candidates for the status of universal
semantic primitives
• Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE/PERSON,
SOMETHING/THING, PEOPLE, BODY
• Actions, events, and movement: DO, HAPPEN, MOVE
A network of categories- compared to the parts of
speech categories of traditional grammar.
Semantic-structural categories
The universal syntax of
meaning
• Conceptual primitives are components which
have to be combined in certain ways to be able
to express meaning.
• I WANT DO THIS: innate and universal
conceptual primitives
• Universal syntax of meaning =universal
combinations of universal conceptual
primitives