The cultural semantics of sociality concepts in Australian English, with contrastive reference to French

2014 Linguistics Seminar Series

Presented by SOPHIA WATERS, Linguistics UNE

12-1pm 11th September 2014

UNE Arts Lecture Theatre 3

All Welcome

Being nice has been identified as number one in a list of Australian cultural assumptions (Béal 1992). Certainly being nice is a deeply ingrained interpersonal value in the speech culture of Australian English, as it is no doubt in some other varieties of Anglo English (cf. Fox 2004; Wierzbicka 2006). But what exactly does it mean for a person to be nice? This presentation is based on my PhD thesis in which I investigated the lexical semantics of nice and a set of other superficially "simple" sociality concepts (rude, polite and manners) in Australian English. When appropriately analysed, these words reveal much about the socially accepted and approved ways of behaving in Australian society.

Using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage methodology (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2002; Wierzbicka, 1996), this paper provides a comprehensive lexical semantic analysis of these three adjectives in a set of collocational and constructional frames, revealing differences and similarities by way of reductive paraphrase explications. Examples are taken from a purpose built corpus of Australian English and French data sourced from the search engine Google.