Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese

by Anna Wierzbicka

Overview

This book develops the dual themes that languages can differ widely in their vocabularies, and are also sensitive indices to the cultures to which they belong. Wierzbicka seeks to demonstrate that every language has "key concepts," expressed in "key words," which reflect the core values of a given culture. She shows that cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key concepts, and that the analytical framework necessary for this purpose is provided by the "natural semantic metalanguage," based on lexical universals, that the author and colleagues have developed on the basis of wide-ranging cross-linguistic investigations. Appealing to anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers as well as linguists, this book demonstrates that cultural patterns can be studied in a verifiable, rigorous, and non-speculative way, on the basis of empirical evidence and in a coherent theoretical framework.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190208431
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/07/1997
Series:	Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics , #8
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dr. Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University. She has lectured extensively at universities in Europe, America, and Japan, and is the author of many books, including Semantics: Primes and Universals (OUP, 1996) and Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Human-Specific Configurations (OUP, 1992).

Editorial Reviews

Seeks to demonstrate that cultural patterns can be studied in a verifiable and nonspeculative way on the basis of linguistic semantics, rooted in empirically established linguistic and conceptual universals, and explores the meanings of words in everyday discourse and cognition. Contains chapters on patterns of "friendship" across cultures;, "freedom" in Latin, English, Russian, and Polish; "homeland" and "fatherland" in German, Polish, and Russian; Australian key words and core cultural values; and Japanese key words and core cultural values. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

"There is a lot to be gleaned from just about anything produced by Wierzbicka-the "key words book"... is no exception...The observations are plentiful and fascinating... [Wierzbicka] has done more than anyone else to really "understand cultures through their key words."— Word, 51 [2000]

From the Publisher