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Part of
The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 346] 2024
► pp. 1–22

Chapter 1
“When bad things happen to people”

Cultural pragmatics and cross-linguistic perspectives on danger

ORCID logo | Roskilde University
| The Australian National University

The main challenge for studying the pragmatics of danger in a global context is how to separate pseudo-universals from genuinely shared themes in discourses of danger. To identify common themes, it is important to approach the discourses from a principled perspective that enables a genuine comparison of linguacultural logics that guide language usage. In this chapter, we first elaborate on cultural pragmatics as the shared theoretical standpoint of all the studies in the volume. We then introduce the common method­ological framework employed by all chapters for case analyses – the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach. We also discuss possibilities for modelling core scenarios that generate the discourses of danger and explain how explications of cultural concepts and cultural logics can be formulated. Finally, an overview of each case study in this collection is provided.

Keywords: cultural pragmatics, discourse studies, discourse of danger, linguaculture, cross-linguistic studies, cultural keywords, cultural scripts, global crisis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Speaking culturally about danger
  • 3.Doing cultural pragmatics
    • 3.1Decentring pragmatics
    • 3.2Keywords and cultural concepts
    • 3.3Themes in pragmatics: Emotions, socialities, values and beliefs
    • 3.4Scenes in pragmatics: Health, climate, education and politics
  • 4.The analytical framework
    • 4.1The metalanguage: Primes and molecules
    • 4.2Scripts and explications
    • 4.3Defining “danger”
  • 5.The chapters
  • Acknoledgement
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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