Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.
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Transcript of Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.
![Page 1: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Understanding
Cultures Through
Their Key WordsAnna Wierzbicka, 1997
İDB 427- Language and Culture
![Page 2: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
Presentation Plan
• Word frequencies – cultures
• Key words – core cultural values
• Natural semantic metalanguage• Semantic primitives• Lexical universals• Categories• The universal syntax of meaning
![Page 3: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
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)
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Word Frequencies - Cultures
English / Frequency
• fool 43 19• stupid 25 33• stupidly 2 -• idiot 4 -
• absolutely 0 58 • utterly 27 13• perfectly 31 44
• terribly 18 13• awfully 10 -• horribly 2 -
Russian / Frequency
• durak 122• glupyj 99• glupo 34• idiot 29
• absoljutno 166• soversenno 365
• uzasno 70• strasno 159
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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.
![Page 6: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
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
![Page 7: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
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.
![Page 8: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
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)
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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.
![Page 10: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
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)
![Page 11: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
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 mini-language.
• 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.
![Page 12: Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words Anna Wierzbicka, 1997 İDB 427- Language and Culture.](https://reader035.fdocuments.net/reader035/viewer/2022062320/56649f485503460f94c69f1e/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
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.
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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.
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Lexical Universal
• Conceptual primitives can be found through in-depth 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.
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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
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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