I den här uppsatsen har användningen och betydelsen av ett utvalt antal översättningsekvivalenter av ord och fasta uttryck som betecknar ansiktsuttryck på svenska och mandarin studerats. Uppgiften närmades genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med modersmålstalare av svenska och mandarin, samt genom en korpusbaserad kollokationsundersökning. Analysmetoden Natural Semantic Metalanguage har använts för att beskriva det inre sinnestillståndet hos personer när de handlar på de sätt som orden och uttrycken beskriver, samt vilka känslor och tankar som tillskrivs dessa personer av dem som bevittnar handlingarna. Vissa intressanta skillnader mellan översättningsekvivalenterna har observerats.

In order for communication to take place, there must be a set of core concepts that are universal to all speakers. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) has proposed an inventory of these concepts, called semantic primes, and uses them as universal concepts in the explication and exploration of cultural values. The English semantic primes, while the majority are Anglo-Saxon, contain words that have been borrowed from Latin, Old Norse, and French. Borrowing lexical items into core vocabulary has many implications. First, the primes are not entirely stable or immune to foreign influence, even the Anglo-Saxon primes have been susceptible to the processes of language change. Second, the primes do not reflect the trends of borrowing in English as a whole. And finally, because the primes are core vocabulary, this study opens up a new aspect of English as a mixed language.

This study aims to find out the culturally different conceptualizations of congratulation in British culture and tebrik and kutlama in Turkish culture using a corpus approach and to formulate cultural scripts for these three performative verbs using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach. More specifically, the study aims to reveal the contexts where the target speech act is used and to uncover the kinds of strategies/components employed in these situations. To be able to collect the targeted data, the study begins with the monolingual and bilingual dictionary definitions of the performative verbs (i.e., congratulate, tebrik etmek and kutlamak) and then follows a corpus approach whereby the performative verbs and their various lexical forms are searched for in various corpora (i.e., BYU-BNC, MTC, Google). In total, 47 dictionaries are looked up and 442 contexts of congratulation, 339 contexts of tebrik and 348 contexts of kutlama are collected from the newspaper and blog genres in the three corpora. The analyses of the data aim to uncover the qualitative and quantitative features of congratulation, tebrik and kutlama in British and Turkish cultures. The results of the study show that there are some cultural differences as well as similarities in the conceptualization of the speech act of congratulation in terms of its contexts of use and strategies. The findings also demonstrate the usefulness of the corpus approach in studying speech acts and their conceptualisation. The thesis aims to contribute to the areas of foreign language education, intercultural/cross-cultural communication and pragmatics.

Ce travail porte sur le rôle de la polysémie dans la structuration du lexique. La thèse propose de faire une évaluation qualitative de la polysémie, en la comparant aux autres relations qui structurent le lexique. Cette entreprise doit permettre de vérifier que les liens de polysémie ne doivent pas être modélisés indépendamment des liens de dérivation ou de conversion. Les résultats de l'évaluation montrent que la frontière entre polysémie et conversion est poreuse.Les comparaisons entre relations utilisent les propriétés de l'analogie, bien adaptée pour caractériser les rapports entre relations. Ce sont les liens qui connectent les lexies qui font l'objet d'une comparaison. Un lien de polysémie est ce qui connecte deux lexies en relation de polysémie. Ce lien peut être comparé à un lien qui connecte deux autres lexies en relation de conversion.La langue d'étude est le wolof, langue atlantique d'Afrique de l'ouest. Cette langue est un terrain propice à une telle recherche. Un large éventail de procédés morphologiques structurent le lexique (dérivation par suffixation, dérivation par alternance consonantique, conversion par changement du morphème de classe nominale).L'apport descriptif de ce travail est d'explorer les champs des artefacts et des émotions du wolof, champs jamais décrits auparavant du point de vue de la structuration du lexique pour une langue africaine. La méthodologie consiste à décrire les sens des unités lexicales et les liens sémantiques qui les connectent par un métalangage unique, celui de la métalangue sémantique naturelle (NSM), introduit ici pour le wolof. / Emphasizing on the key role of polysemy in forming the lexicon is the main goal to be achieved in this dissertation paper. The paper suggests a qualitative evaluation of polysemy in comparing it with other relations that form the lexicon. The research confirms that the polysemic links must not be modeled independently from derivative links or conversational links. This evaluation leads us to reveal that the boundary between polysemy and conversation is porous. The properties of analogy has been used to compare the relations, which is well adapted in characterizing the links between the relations. They are the links that connect lexis which form the objects of a comparison. A polysemic link is a link by which two lexis are connected to each other in a polysemic relation. This link can be compared to a link that connects two other lexis in a conversional relation. In this paper, Wolof, an Atlantic language in West-Africa, is studied. This language provides a fertile breeding ground for our explorations. A large scale of different morphological processes form the lexicon (like suffix derivation, derivations from consonant alternation and conversion by changes in nominal class morphemes).The descriptive contribution of this research is to explore the semantic fields of artifacts and emotions in Wolof lexicon. These fields have never been described in an African language taking the lexicon formation into consideration.The methodology applied here is to describe both the meanings of the lexical units and the semantic links by which they are connected by a unique metalanguage. That unique metalanguage is called the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), which is applied here to Wolof.

The present thesis is focused on what linguist Anna Wierzbicka defined as the characteristic features of Japanese language in relation to expressing emotions verbally, which is the essence of expressivity. The research is based on a Japanese speakers' conversations corpus created for the purposes of this thesis and which takes into account factors such as age, social status, gender and various circumstances in which the dialogues are taking place. The thesis examines the area of rather negative emotions. The primary aim of the thesis is to verify the assumptions made by Wierzbicka on the characteristics of Japanese using language analysis of the corpus, and adjust her findings as the case may be. In addition, the thesis will investigate and summarize the most prominent language strategies and means used in expressive communication by Japanese speakers and to determine possible socio-linguistic or cultural factors involved.

Meaning has been established pervasively as a central concept throughout disciplines that were involved in cognitive revolution. Its metaphoric usage comes to be, first and foremost, through the interpreter’s constraint: representational relationships and contents are considered to be in the “eye” or mind of the observer and shared properties among observers themselves are knowable through interlinguistic phenomena, such as translation. Despite the instability of meaning in relation to its underdetermination by reference, it can be a tertium comparationis or “third comparator” for extended human cognition if gauged through invariants that exist in transfer processes such as translation, as all languages and cultures are rooted in pan-human experience and, thus, share and express species-specific ontology. Meaning, seen as a cognitive competence, does not stop outside of the body but extends, depends, and partners with other agents and the environment. A novel approach for exploring the transfer properties of some constituent items of the original natural semantic metalanguage in English, that is, semantic primitives, is presented: FrameNet’s semantic frames, evoked by the primes SEE and FEEL, were extracted from EuroParl, a parallel corpus that allows for the automatic word alignment of items with their synonyms. Large Ontology Multilingual Extraction was used. Afterward, following the Semantic Mirrors Method, a procedure that consists back-translating into source language, a translatological examination of translated and original versions of items was performed. A fully automated pipeline was designed and tested, with the purpose of exploring associated frame shifts and, thus, beginning a research agenda on their alleged universality as linguistic features of translation, which will be complemented with and contrasted against further massive feedback through a citizen science approach, as well as cognitive and neurophysiological examinations. Additionally, an embodied account of frame semantics is proposed.

Diploma thesis, which is based on Anna Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage theory, discusses certain specific features of Czech language worldview and compares them with specific features of English language worldview. This intercultural comparison is made possible by the cultural neutrality of the natural semantic metalanguage which serves as a language in which explications of analyzed words are formulated and compared to their English counterparts. Analyses of Czech keywords are based mainly on the use of dictionaries (explanatory and etymological dictionaries and dictionaries of phrases and idioms) and Czech corpora. The analysis aims to show differences between Czech and English cultural norms and values as reflected in different semantic structures of analyzed concepts, which presumably indicate deeper differences in perceiving and interpreting reality in both languages.