The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 346] 2024. vii, 251 pp.
Carsten Levisen
List of John Benjamins publications for which Carsten Levisen plays a role.
Titles
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
2024 Chapter 2. Society in danger: Samfundssind ‘community spirit’ and the cultural pragmatics of Danish pandemic discourse The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives, Levisen, Carsten and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), pp. 23–40 | Chapter
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
2024 Epilogue: Beyond dangers and disasters: Further reflections and a guide for future research in cultural pragmatics The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives, Levisen, Carsten and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), pp. 236–242 | Chapter
2024 Chapter 1. “When bad things happen to people”: Cultural pragmatics and cross-linguistic perspectives on danger The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives, Levisen, Carsten and Zhengdao Ye (eds.), pp. 1–22 | Chapter
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
2022 The Beginning of Quantitative Sociolinguistics in the Nineteenth Century: The Dane Anker Jensen (1878–1937) and his pioneering study “The Linguistic Situation in the Parish of Aaby, Aarhus County” (1898) Historiographia Linguistica 49:2/3, pp. 336–354 | Article
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
2022 The Linguistic Situation in the Parish of Aaby, Aarhus County Historiographia Linguistica 49:2/3, pp. 355–371 | Translation
2021 Pæn, flot, dejlig , and lækker: A lexical anthropology of Danish folk aesthetics The Conceptualization of ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Ugly’ across Languages and Cultures, Gladkova, Anna and Jesús Romero-Trillo (eds.), pp. 14–34 | Article
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
2019 “Brightness” in color linguistics: New light from Danish visual semantics Lexicalization 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
2017 Chapter 5. Talking about Livet ‘life’ in Golden Age Danish: Semantics, discourse and cultural models Cultural 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
2017 Chapter 18. From basic to cultural semantics: Postcolonial futures for a cognitive creolistics Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola (eds.), pp. 381–384 | Chapter
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
2017 Chapter 14. Lexicalization patterns in core vocabulary: A cross-creole study of semantic molecules Creole 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
2017 Chapter 13. Cognitive creolistics and semantic primes: A phylogenetic network analysis Creole 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
2017 Chapter 10. An invitation to keyword studies: Guidance for future research Cultural Keywords in Discourse, Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters (eds.), pp. 235–242 | Chapter
2017 Chapter 1. How words do things with people Cultural Keywords in Discourse, Levisen, Carsten and Sophia Waters (eds.), pp. 1–23 | Chapter
2017 Chapter 15. The semantics of Englishes and Creoles: Pacific and Australian perspectives Creole 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
2017 Chapter 1. Introduction Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, Bakker, Peter, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola (eds.), pp. 1–4 | Chapter
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
2015 The Trinidadian ‘Theory of Mind’: Personhood and postcolonial semantics Language 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
2015 Lige, a Danish ‘magic word’? An ethnopragmatic analysis Language 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
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