Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese [= Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics; 8]

Wierzbicka, Anna

ISBN 10: 0195088360 / ISBN 13: 9780195088366

Published by New York - Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997, 1997

About this Item

See photos for the table of contents. /// Paperback, VIII+317 pp., 8° (15.5 x 23 cm), cover slightly worn, back cover folded (creased), ca. 15 pages have pencil marginalia or/and underlining, condition: good Book Language/s: English.

Seller Inventory # A41931

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese [= Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics; 8]
• Publisher: New York - Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195088360
• ISBN 13: 9780195088366
• Binding: Soft cover
• Seller catalogs:
  • Sprachwissenschaft

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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).