Understanding

Cultures Through

Their Key WordsAnna 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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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