Article published in:
The Conceptualization of ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Ugly’ across Languages and Cultures
Edited by Anna Gladkova and Jesús Romero-Trillo
[International Journal of Language and Culture 8:1] 2021
► pp. 147–168

The good, the bad… and the ugly?

The conceptualization of aesthetics in Spanish

| Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

The present article describes the conceptualization of aesthetics in Spanish through the analysis of the two prototypical terms that describe positive and negative sensory appreciation, i.e., “bonito” (beautiful) and “feo” (ugly). Following a mixed-approach methodology combining Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Corpus Pragmatics, the article compares the use of these adjectives in spoken and written language, analyzes their realization in the corpora under analysis, provides the explications that support their polysemy, and describes their distribution in different contexts. The final part of the paper is devoted to the comparison of the use of these adjectives with their counterparts in English, as evidenced by another paper in this special issue.

Keywords: “bonito”, “feo”, natural semantic metalanguage, corpus pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • Shape
  • 2.“Bonito” and “feo” in theory and practice
  • 3.Methodology and data analysis
    • 3.1Analysis of “bonito/a”
      • Bonito/a1
      • Bonito/a2
      • Bonito/a3
    • 3.2Analysis of “feo/a”
      • Feo/a1
      • Feo/a2
      • Feo/a3
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 07 June 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00039.rom
References
Diccionario de la Real Academia Española
www​.rae​.es). Accessed June 2018.
Diccionario de Sinónimos y Antónimos (2 Edición)
(1994) Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar
Gladkova, A. & Romero-Trillo, J.
(2014) Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an ethnopragmatic perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 601: 140–159. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A.
(2014) Words & Meanings. Croydon: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jones, S., Murphy, L., Paradis, C. & Willners, C.
(2012) Antonyms in English: Construals, constructions and canonicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Romero-Trillo, J.
(2017) Editorial. Corpus Pragmatics 11: 1–2. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Romero-Trillo, J. & Espigares, T.
(2012) The cognitive representation of natural landscapes in language. Pragmatics and Cognition 201: 168–185. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2015) Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting the selection of landscapes in the Corpus of Language and Nature. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science 21: 157–159. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Romero-Trillo, J. & Fuentes, V.
(2017) What is pretty cannot be beautiful? A corpus-based analysis of the aesthetics of nature, in J. Blochowiak, C. Grisot, S. Durrleman-Tame & C. Laenzlinger (eds.). Formal models in the study of language. (pp. 415–430). Dordrecht: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Travis, C.
(2002) La metalengua semántica natural: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage of Spanish. In: Goddard, C., & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings Vol. 1. (pp. 173–242). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar