Basic Kala Terms and the End of History: An Invitation to Visual Semantics

Activity: Talk or presentationLecture and oral contribution

Description

In this keynote talk, the aim is to provide a state-of-the art overview of ‘Visual Semantics’ –
as an alternative to Berlin and Kay’s “basic color term”-paradigm. Visual Semantics, originated by Anna Wierzbicka, draws on insights from cognitive, cultural and postcolonial approaches to semantics and aims to study the wealth of visual-semantic construals of meaning in and across global linguacultures, including historical linguacultural settings.

The global spread of the European and Eurocolonial visual-semantic system in recent times has led to a certain amount of semantic homogenization and loss of visual diversity in the world’s languages. Imported words like kala ‘colour’ (or similar), along with kala terms (e.g. grin ‘green’ and yelo ‘yellow’) are now common in many linguacultures that did not traditionally have “color” in the Western sense of the word. But underneath the apparent homogenization, we can still find a rich and diverse visual language, if we look carefully, and the principle of linguistic relativity is still alive. With case studies from three different world areas, the South Pacific (Bislama), South-East Ethiopia (Hamar) and Southern Scandinavia (Danish), this talk explores the diversity of linguistic visuality, and shows how Visual Semantics can enrich, expand and open up locally founded construals of “what they eyes can see”.

Visual Semantics offers (i) a practical semantic approach based on a high-resolution method of paraphrase called NSM (natural semantic metalanguage), a method that allows for a high-resolution analysis of the multitude of visual meanings in the world’s linguacultures. Crucially, it also allows for (ii) a new question space founded on emic concerns, and a conceptually-oriented study of visual meaning including meanings without counterparts in English/European languages, and finally, (iii) a metalinguistic critique of Anglocentric and Eurocolonial terminologies that continue to exercise a form of conceptual colonialism that hinders the progress of visual science and semantics.
Period9 Sept 2022
Event titleProgress in Colour Studies
Event typeConference
LocationTallinn , EstoniaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Visual Semantics
  • Color Studies
  • Color Semantics
  • Danish Semantics
  • Bislama
  • NSM semantics