Carsten Levisen

List of John Benjamins publications for which Carsten Levisen plays a role.

Titles

The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives

Edited by Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 346] 2024. vii, 251 pp.
Subjects Communication Studies | Discourse studies | Pragmatics

Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches

Edited by Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola

[Not in series, 211] 2017. x, 414 pp.
Subjects Contact Linguistics | Creole studies | Historical linguistics | Theoretical linguistics

Cultural Keywords in Discourse

Edited by Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 277] 2017. ix, 249 pp.
Subjects Discourse studies | Pragmatics | Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
The word samfundssind, roughly “community spirit” came to be a keyword of the moment in the Danish discourses of the global coronavirus pandemic. In an era of acute dangers to humanity, entire linguacultures underwent massive pragmatic and semantic change, and in this chapter, multiple facets of… read more
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… read more
In 1898, a young Dane, Anker Jensen (1878–1937), published a pioneering study in which he investigated the linguistic situation in Aaby, then a village and parish located just west of Aarhus (the second-largest city of Denmark, in Jutland), and today an integrated part of the city. Anker… read more
Levisen, Carsten, Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Peter Bakker, Inger Schoonderbeek Hansen and Inger Schoonderbeek Hansen 2022 The Linguistic Situation in the Parish of Aaby, Aarhus CountyHistoriographia Linguistica 49:2/3, pp. 355–371 | Translation
This paper examines the Danish language of aesthetics from the perspective of four untranslatable adjectives: pæn, flot, dejlig, and lækker. These words are frequent and salient in everyday discourses, and as such they shed light on Danish “folk” conceptions. From the perspective of Lexical… read more
Levisen, Carsten 2019 “Brightness” in color linguistics: New light from Danish visual semanticsLexicalization patterns in color naming: A cross-linguistic perspective, Raffaelli, Ida, Daniela Katunar and Barbara Kerovec (eds.), pp. 83–108 | Chapter
This chapter scrutinizes the discourse of “brightness” in color linguistics. Drawing on insights from visual semantics and linguistic anthropology, and challenging the universal applicability of “brightness”, the study provides new evidence from Danish. The chapter provides a new analysis of the… read more
Hamann, Magnus and Carsten Levisen 2017 Chapter 5. Talking about Livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse and cultural modelsCultural Keywords in Discourse, Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters (eds.), pp. 107–129 | Chapter
This chapter explicates the word Livet, literally ‘the life’, a cultural keyword of the Danish Golden Age (1800–1850). With evidence from Golden Age Danish and its era-specific webs of words, we explore how “life and living” were construed discursively. We discuss how they relate to contemporary… read more
Levisen, Carsten 2017 Chapter 18. From basic to cultural semantics: Postcolonial futures for a cognitive creolisticsCreole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola (eds.), pp. 381–384 | Chapter
Levisen, Carsten and Carol Priestley 2017 Chapter 4. Social keywords in postcolonial Melanesian discourse: Kastom ‘traditional culture’ and tumbuna ‘ancestors’Cultural Keywords in Discourse, Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters (eds.), pp. 83–106 | Chapter
In postcolonial Melanesia, cultural discourses are increasingly organised around creole words, i.e. keywords of Bislama (Vanuatu) and Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea). These words constitute (or represent) important emerging ethnolinguistic worldviews, which are partly borne out of the colonial era,… read more
Levisen, Carsten and Karime Aragón 2017 Chapter 14. Lexicalization patterns in core vocabulary: A cross-creole study of semantic moleculesCreole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola (eds.), pp. 315–344 | Chapter
The study of semantic domains is important for creolistics, given the complex label-meaning configuration in creoles vis-à-vis the European lexifiers. Due to the lexical semantic creativity in the creolization process as well as the subsequent developments and contacts with lexifiers,… read more
Levisen, Carsten and Kristoffer Friis Bøegh 2017 Chapter 13. Cognitive creolistics and semantic primes: A phylogenetic network analysisCreole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola (eds.), pp. 293–313 | Chapter
This study presents a semantics-driven lexical comparison of 20 creole languages and five European lexifier languages. Breaking new ground into understanding creole semantics, it utilizes insights from both cognitive semantics (in particular, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach) and… read more
Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters 2017 Chapter 10. An invitation to keyword studies: Guidance for future researchCultural Keywords in Discourse, Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters (eds.), pp. 235–242 | Chapter
Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters 2017 Chapter 1. How words do things with peopleCultural Keywords in Discourse, Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters (eds.), pp. 1–23 | Chapter
Levisen, Carsten, Carol Priestley, Sophie Nicholls and Yonatan Goldshtein 2017 Chapter 15. The semantics of Englishes and Creoles: Pacific and Australian perspectivesCreole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola (eds.), pp. 345–368 | Chapter
This chapter provides a lexical-semantic comparison of a selection of Englishes and English-related creoles in the Australia-Pacific area. Faced with the conundrum in sociolinguistic classificatory practice and its contested categories: “language”, “creole”, “dialect”, “variety”, and… read more
Levisen, Carsten, Eeva M. Sippola and Peter Bakker 2017 Chapter 1. IntroductionCreole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola (eds.), pp. 1–4 | Chapter
Levisen, Carsten 2016 The story of “Danish Happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics“Happiness” and “Pain” across Languages and Cultures, Goddard, Cliff and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), pp. 45–64 | Article
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This chapter takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and… read more
Levisen, Carsten and Melissa Reshma Jogie 2015 The Trinidadian ‘Theory of Mind’: Personhood and postcolonial semanticsLanguage and Cultural Values: Adventures in applied ethnolinguistics, Peeters, Bert (ed.), pp. 169–193 | Article
In this paper, we study the cultural semantics of the personhood construct mind in Trinidadian creole. We analyze the lexical semantics of the word and explore the wider cultural meanings of the concept in contrastive comparison with the Anglo concept. Our analysis demonstrates that the Anglo… read more
Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters 2015 Lige, a Danish ‘magic word’? An ethnopragmatic analysisLanguage and Cultural Values: Adventures in applied ethnolinguistics, Peeters, Bert (ed.), pp. 244–268 | Article
The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as “please,” but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to ‘say please’. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is… read more
Levisen, Carsten 2014 The story of “Danish Happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics"Happiness" and "Pain" across Languages and Cultures, Goddard, Cliff and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), pp. 174–193 | Article
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and… read more