Carsten Levisen

On Pigs and People: The Porcine Semantics of Danish Interaction and Cognition

There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and adjectives abound, and the pragmatics of Danish, including its repertoire of abusives, is heavily reliant on porcine phraseology. Despite the highly urbanized nature of the contemporary Danish speech community, semantic structures from Denmarks peasant-farmer past appear to have survived and taken on a new significance in todays society. Unlike everyday English, which mainly distinguishes pig from pork, everyday Danish embodies an important semantic distinction between grise, which roughly speaking translates as ‘nice pigs’, vis-à-vis svin, which, very roughly, translates as ‘nasty pigs’. Focusing on the pragmatics of svin-based language, this paper demonstrates how this concept is utilized in Danish interaction and social cognition. The paper explores systematically the culture-specific porcine themes in Danish evaluational expressions, speech acts and interpersonal relations. The paper demonstrates that ‘pigs in language’ is far from a trivial topic and argues that cultural elaboration of pig-words and the culture-specific ‘meaning of pigs’ in Danish not only sheds light on the diverse linguistic construals of ‘animal concepts’ in the worlds languages: it also calls for a cultural-semantic approach to the study of social cognition.

Creole Studies: Phylogenetic Approaches

This book examines the place of creoles from a typological perspective using modern phylogenetic modeling tools. Exploring the similarities and differences that exist among creoles and between creoles and their input languages, the authors aim to generate new insights into persistent and at times hotly debated topics such as creole genesis and the relationships among creoles and between creoles and other languages, most specifically their input languages. The volume casts a very wide net. It investigates creoles from the Atlantic, Asian, Pacific and Africa region and also considers creoles associated with a range of so-called lexifiers (Arabic, Dutch, English, French and Iberian), common superstrates and some of the substrate inputs. But diversity does not stop there either. The authors also examine data from a range of linguistic levels, including phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic phenomena.

Cognitive creolistics and semantic primes: A phylogenetic network analysis

This book examines the place of creoles from a typological perspective using modern phylogenetic modeling tools. Exploring the similarities and differences that exist among creoles and between creoles and their input languages, the authors aim to generate new insights into persistent and at times hotly debated topics such as creole genesis and the relationships among creoles and between creoles and other languages, most specifically their input languages. The volume casts a very wide net. It investigates creoles from the Atlantic, Asian, Pacific and Africa region and also considers creoles associated with a range of so-called lexifiers (Arabic, Dutch, English, French and Iberian), common superstrates and some of the substrate inputs. But diversity does not stop there either. The authors also examine data from a range of linguistic levels, including phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic phenomena.

From basic to cultural semantics: Postcolonial futures for a cognitive creolistics

This book examines the place of creoles from a typological perspective using modern phylogenetic modeling tools. Exploring the similarities and differences that exist among creoles and between creoles and their input languages, the authors aim to generate new insights into persistent and at times hotly debated topics such as creole genesis and the relationships among creoles and between creoles and other languages, most specifically their input languages. The volume casts a very wide net. It investigates creoles from the Atlantic, Asian, Pacific and Africa region and also considers creoles associated with a range of so-called lexifiers (Arabic, Dutch, English, French and Iberian), common superstrates and some of the substrate inputs. But diversity does not stop there either. The authors also examine data from a range of linguistic levels, including phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic phenomena.