Abstract
This chapter analyses personhood constructs, a particular type of noun whose meanings conceptualize invisible parts of a person. The meaning of personhood constructs originates in cultural discourses, and they can vary considerably across linguistic communities. They are reflective of society’s dominant ethnopsychological ideas, and they co-develop with historical changes in discourse. Drawing on insights from previous studies, a semantic template is developed in order to account for the differences but also the similarities in personhood constructs. With a detailed case study on Danish personhood constructs, the chapter tests the template on the translation-resistant Danish concept of sind, along with two other Danish nouns: sjæl ‘soul’ and ånd ‘spirit’. The case study provides a model for how personhood constructs can be empirically explored with tools from linguistic semantics.
Originalsprog | Engelsk |
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Titel | The Semantics of Nouns : People, Places, and Things |
Redaktører | Zhengdao Ye |
Forlag | Oxford University Press |
Publikationsdato | 2017 |
Sider | 120-144 |
Kapitel | 5 |
DOI | |
Status | Udgivet - 2017 |