Cognitive creolistics and semantic primes

Levisen, Carsten; Bøegh, Kristoffer Friis

doi:10.1075/z.211.13lev

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…To our knowledge, there is no work on prime identification in Icelandic and Faroese, nor on any of the Nordic sign languages. Likewise, there is no published work on Kalaallisut, 1 or Saami, or on linguacultures related to Nordic colonialism, except for initial work on Virgin Island Dutch Creole (Levisen & Bøegh 2017), a historical contact language once spoken in the former Danish West India. There is well-established work on Arabic (Habib 2011) and Farsi (Arab 2021), both important minority languages in the Nordic context, but no work on, say, other important migrant languages in the Nordic region such as Somali, Tigrinya, or Tamil.…”

Section: Key Concepts In the Nsm Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Cultural Semantics

Levisen,

Fernández,

Hein

2022

Scanstudlang

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As human beings, we live profoundly meaning-centred lives. But the words and meanings we live by, and the discourse rituals of our daily interactions, most often escape our conscious awareness. This is why the role of linguistic analysis is to “light up the thick darkness of language”, as Benjamin Lee Whorf put it (1956:73), and “thereby much of the thought, the culture, and the outlook upon life of a given community” (ibid). In one of her early visionary works on linguistic semantics, Anna Wierzbicka (1980:22) stated: “this is what semantics is very largely about: the exploration of the depths of our consciousness”. The study of semantics brings together what we have all too often compartmentalized as "language and culture” and “lexicon and grammar”. United by the holistic attempt to understand and illuminate meaning, semanticists have a question space that stands out. Unlike the political scientist who might ask “what is democracy?”, or the biologist who might ask “what is an animal?”, semanticists frame their questions differently: “what does democracy mean?”, and “what does animal mean?”. Semantic studies centre on what words mean to speakers in a given community, and successful semantic analyses capture “emic” perspectives: insider construals of meaning, rather than the views, definitions, and registers of experts and outside observers. The contributors to this special issue all share the idea that the meaning of words intersects with habitual ways of thinking and knowing (roughly, the “cognitive” aspect), and more broadly with ways of living (roughly, the “cultural” aspect), and the approach to semantics that we seek to advance can therefore be called “cognitive cultural semantics”. We also share an approach and a methodology, namely, the “natural semantic metalanguage”, or NSM approach for short, and its method of paraphrase.

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Section: Key Concepts In the Nsm Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Cultural Semantics

Levisen,

Fernández,

Hein

2022

Scanstudlang

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Empiricism against imperialism

Bakker

2023

JPCL

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Large scale typological studies have been criticized for being unscientific, biased, methodologically unsound and as perpetrating neocolonial attitudes. Meakins (2022) echoes these views in her first JPCL column. The conclusions of all studies using large typological datasets, however, point in the direction that creoles do have structural properties that distinguish them from their lexifiers and the languages of the world, including a dozen not mentioned in Meakins’ column. Opponents use data that are a factor of thousand less extensive, yet apparently more credible. Creoles developed in adverse circumstances, and the flexibility of human genius led to new structural properties, apparently shared across the world. The opposite view, that creoles are continuations of their lexifiers, runs the risk of justifying colonialism, as if forced deportation, blackbirding, slavery, imperialism and colonialism could not have had catastrophic consequences for the continuation of languages. Devastating sociohistorical circumstances led to the creation of new societies, and human ingenuity created their fully-fledged natural languages.

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Cognitive creolistics and semantic primes

Cited by 2 publications

References 43 publications

Cognitive Cultural Semantics

Cognitive Cultural Semantics

Empiricism against imperialism

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