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The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 346] 2024
► pp. 217–235

Chapter 11
Security, Sicherheit, ānquán

Similar-but-different key concepts in English, German and Chinese

ORCID logo | Griffith University
| Griffith University
ORCID logo | The Australian National University

In this chapter we first develop a semantic-conceptual analysis of the English word security, a key word in international geopolitical discourse, contrasting it with English safety. We then investigate the meanings of comparable words in German and in Chinese, i.e. Sicherheit and ānquán, respectively. Our method of lexical semantic description is the NSM (natural semantic metalanguage) approach, which is based on paraphrase into simple, cross-translatable words. The analysis is corpus-assisted. The results show that the meaning differences between “safety/security concepts” across languages are greater than many people would expect, and, furthermore, that these differences are culture-related. The implications for international “security discourse” are briefly explored.

Keywords: security concepts, lexical semantics, discourse of security, natural semantic metalanguage (NSM), German, Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.‘Security’: A global key word in international discourse
  • 2.English ‘safety’ vs. ‘security’
    • 2.1Safety
    • 2.2Security: Its uses and contexts
    • 2.3Security concepts involving ‘countries [m]’
  • 3.German Sicherheit
  • 4.Chinese ānquán
    • 4.1ānquán1 [Chinese]
    • 4.2ānquán2 [Chinese]
    • 4.3Uses of ānquán in international relations and public security contexts
  • 5.Implications for international “security discourse”
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
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References

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BCC Corpus (Beijing Language and Culture University)
[URL]]
CCL Corpus (Centre for Chinese Linguistics Corpus PKU)
[URL]]
WordBanks Online
[URL]]
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