The Cultural Semantics Of Address Practices

This book presents a contrastive analysis of various forms of address used in English and Italian from the perspective of cultural semantics, the branch of linguistics which investigates the relationship between meaning and culture in discourse. The objects of the analysis are the interactional meanings expressed by different forms of address in these two languages, which are compared adopting the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The forms analyzed include greetings, titles and opening and closing salutations used in letters and e-mails in the two languages. Noticeably, the book presents the first complete categorization of Italian titles used as forms of address ever made on the basis of precise semantic criteria. The analysis also investigates the different cultural values and assumptions underlying address practices in English and Italian, and emphasizes the risks of miscommunication caused by different address practices in intercultural interactions. Every chapter presents numerous examples taken from language corpora, contemporary English and Italian literature and personal e-mails and letters. The book encourages a new, innovative approach to the analysis of forms of address: it proposes a new analytical method for the analysis of forms of address which can be applied to the study of other languages systematically. In addition, the book emphasizes the role of culture in address practices and takes meaning as the basis for understanding the differences in use across languages and the difficulties in translating forms of address of different languages. Combining semantics, ethnopragmatics, intercultural communication and translation theory, this book is aimed at a very broad readership which includes not only scholars in linguistics, second-language learners and students of cross-cultural communication, but virtually anyone interested in Italian and English linguistics as well as in cultural semantics. The approach taken is interdisciplinary and brings together various fields in the social sciences: linguistics, anthropology, cross-cultural studies and sociology.

This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This book is the second in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. It focuses on meaning and culture, with sections on "Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning" and "Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context". Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal "maxims of conversation" and "principles of politeness", which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows that in different societies, norms of human interaction are different and reflect different cultural attitudes and values; and it offers a framework within which different cultural norms and different ways of speaking can be effectively explored, explained, and taught. The book discusses data from a wide range of languages, including English, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Walmatjari (an Australian Aboriginal language), and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different "cultural scripts" prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias by using a "natural semantic metalanguage", based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

This book presents cross-linguistic and cross-cultural investigations of word meaning from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. The words they consider are complex, culturally important, and basic, in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay.

This book is a collection of studies about forms of address in the world’s languages, with a focus on contrast and difference. The individual chapters highlight inter- and intralinguistic variation in the expression of address and its sociol-cultural functions across media, registers, geographical contexts and time – in more than 15 languages. The volume showcases the variety of approaches that exists in current address research, including the breadth of contrastive methodologies harnessing surveys and questionnaires, focus group discussions, corpus linguistics, discourse and conversation analysis to offer complementary perspectives on culture-specific address practice. This volume is for students and researchers of address and social interaction in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including various sub-disciplines of linguistics (such as contrastive, variational and intercultural pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and morphology) and intercultural communication, as well as experts in individual languages and qualitative sociologists.

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.