Landscape and Culture – Cross-linguistic Perspectives
Author
The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This ground-breaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them.
Notably, the study presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective, based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent. The book is aimed, first of all, at scholars and students of linguistics. Yet it will also be of interest to researchers in geography, environmental studies, anthropology, cultural studies, Australian Studies, and Australian Aboriginal Studies because of the book’s cultural take.
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts, 9] 2018. xii, 227 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements
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List of abbreviations | pp. xi–xii
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Chapter 1. Landscape and culture: An overview | pp. 1–28
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Chapter 2. Flowing-water places: River, Fleuve, Karu | pp. 29–56
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Chapter 3. Elevated places: Mountain, Hill, Puli | pp. 57–88
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Chapter 4. Semantics by ‘the sea’: The Beach, the Coast, the Shore | pp. 89–114
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Chapter 5. Desert in Australian English and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara eco-zones | pp. 115–140
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Chapter 6. Human intent in the landscape: Paddocks and Meadows | pp. 141–170
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Chapter 7. The bush in Australian English | pp. 171–192
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Chapter 8. Concluding remarks | pp. 193–198
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References | pp. 199–220
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Appendix 1. Recordings information | p. 221
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Index of names | p. 223
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Index of subjects | p. 225
“In conclusion, Landscape and Culture offers readers something out of the ordinary: semantics studied in an expansive, culturally sensitive way leading to exquisitely formulated analytical statements (the “reductive paraphrases” of NSM). The engagement with cultural context, commitment to an experientialist / anthropocentric agenda, reliance on easily accessible concepts, and a gentle, natural style of writing will all be appreciated by cognitive linguists. One sees on every page a human mind at work, not just the application of an algorithm. It is both refreshing and inspiring.”
John Newman, Monash University, in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 17:2 (2019)
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Bromhead, Helen
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Burenhult, Niclas
2023. Sustainability and Semantic Diversity: A View from the Malayan Rainforest. Topics in Cognitive Science 15:3 ► pp. 546 ff.
Gladkova, Anna
2020. The semantics of verbs of visual aesthetic appreciation in Russian. In Meaning, Life and Culture: In conversation with Anna Wierzbicka, ► pp. 155 ff.
Gladkova, Anna
2023. Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Context. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context, ► pp. 225 ff.
Gladkova, Anna & Jesús Romero-Trillo
2021. The linguistic conceptualization in folk aesthetics. International Journal of Language and Culture 8:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Goddard, Cliff
2020. Prototypes, polysemy and constructional semantics: The lexicogrammar of the English verb climb. In Meaning, Life and Culture: In conversation with Anna Wierzbicka, ► pp. 13 ff.
Goddard, Cliff
2021. Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ► pp. 93 ff.
Harvey, Mark
2022. The Wagiman Landscape: Mental Maps and Prototypes. Oceania 92:3 ► pp. 287 ff.
Hill, Clair
2022. The irrelevance of scale and fixedness in landscape terms in two Australian languages. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s1 ► pp. 91 ff.
Levisen, Carsten
2020. Postcolonial Prepositions: Semantics and Popular Geopolitics in the Danosphere. In Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, ► pp. 169 ff.
Mamontova, Nadezhda & Elena Klyachko
2022. ‘Process Toponymy’: A GIS-Based Community-Engaged Approach to Indigenous Dynamic Place Naming Systems and Vernacular Cartography. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 57:3 ► pp. 213 ff.
O’Meara, Carolyn, Niclas Burenhult, Mikael Rothstein & Peter Sercombe
2018. Representing space and place: hunter-gatherer perspectives. Hunter Gatherer Research 4:3 ► pp. 287 ff.
Rojas-Garcia, Juan
2022. Semantic Representation of Context for Description of Named Rivers in a Terminological Knowledge Base. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Sadow, Lauren & Kerry Mullan
2020. A Brief Introduction to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach. In Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, ► pp. 13 ff.
Virdis, Daniela Francesca
2022. Ecostylistics, Ecolinguistics and Stylistics: A Theoretical Overview. In Ecological Stylistics, ► pp. 29 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
Main BISAC Subject
LAN016000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Semantics