Words and meanings

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Words and Meanings

Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures

Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka

Description

In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri, and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness.

The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.

1. Words, Meaning, and Methodology

2. Men, Women, and Children: The semantics of basic social categories

3. Sweet, Hot, Hard, heavy, Rough, Sharp: Physical quality words in cross-linguistic perspective

4. From Colour Words to Visual Semantics: English, Russian, Warlpiri

5. Happiness and Human Values in Cross-cultural and Historical Perspective

6. Pain Is it a Human Universal? The Perspective From Cross-linguistic Semantics

7. Suggesting, Apologising, Complimenting: English speech act verbs

8. A Stitch in Time and The Way of The Rice Plant: The semantics of proverbs in English and Malay

9. The Meaning of Abstract Nouns: Locke, Bentham and Contemporary Semantics

10. Broader Perspectives: Beyond lexical semantics
References
Index

Author Information

Cliff Goddard is Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University, Brisbane. His books include Semantic Analysis (OUP 1998, 2nd edn 2011), Cross-Linguistic Semantics (ed., 2008, John Benjamins), and The Languages of East and Southeast Asia: An Introduction (2005, OUP).

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at Australian National University. Her many books include Semantics: Primes and Universals (OUP 1996), Emotions across Languages and Cultures (CUP 1999), and Experience, Evidence & Sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English (OUP 2010).

Reviews and Awards

"the great pleasure the reader will experience while reading Words & Meanings as it revivifies the rich philosophical background you can keep in mind when discussing the main topics: the authors demonstrate that beyond linguistic schools of thought, there is still a lot to learn from Jeremy Bentham, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, John Locke and John Stuart Mill to put things in perspective. They guide the reader from the general to the particular, from the generic to the specific, from the concrete to the abstract, from the simple to the complex ... As a result, the reader's linguistic landscape cannot fail to be enriched because it becomes more diversified" -- Cathy Parc, Lexis

Product Code: WW4Hf6S

Brand: Good for undergraduate and graduate researchers of language and Linguistics

Product Condition: New

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