Cultural Keywords in Discourse

Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse.
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.

Adam Glaz, UMCS, Lublin, Poland, in LaMiCuS 2 (2018):
Both the chapter authors and (especially) the editors must be congratulated on a solid contribution to cultural linguistics/ethnolinguistics, especially to Anna Wierzbicka's highly original, unique NSM framework. Given the fact that both Levisen and Waters have many years of scholarly career ahead of them, the future of the field looks promising.