The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This ground-breaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them.
Notably, the study presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective, based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent. The book is aimed, first of all, at scholars and students of linguistics. Yet it will also be of interest to researchers in geography, environmental studies, anthropology, cultural studies, Australian Studies, and Australian Aboriginal Studies because of the book’s cultural take.
“In conclusion, Landscape and Culture offers readers something out of the ordinary: semantics studied in an expansive, culturally sensitive way leading to exquisitely formulated analytical statements (the “reductive paraphrases” of NSM). The engagement with cultural context, commitment to an experientialist / anthropocentric agenda, reliance on easily accessible concepts, and a gentle, natural style of writing will all be appreciated by cognitive linguists. One sees on every page a human mind at work, not just the application of an algorithm. It is both refreshing and inspiring.”
John Newman, Monash University, in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 17:2 (2019)
Cited by (19)
Cited by 19 other publications
Bułat Silva, Zuzanna
2024. Natural Semantic Metalanguage Versus Polish Ethnolinguistic School. In The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics [Springer Handbooks in Languages and Linguistics, ], ► pp. 815 ff.
2023. Sustainability and Semantic Diversity: A View from the Malayan Rainforest. Topics in Cognitive Science 15:3 ► pp. 546 ff.
Harvey, Mark
2022. The Wagiman Landscape: Mental Maps and Prototypes. Oceania 92:3 ► pp. 287 ff.
Hill, Clair
2022. The irrelevance of scale and fixedness in landscape terms in two Australian languages. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s1 ► pp. 91 ff.
Mamontova, Nadezhda & Elena Klyachko
2022. ‘Process Toponymy’: A GIS-Based Community-Engaged Approach to Indigenous Dynamic Place Naming Systems and Vernacular Cartography. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 57:3 ► pp. 213 ff.
Rojas-Garcia, Juan
2022. Semantic Representation of Context for Description of Named Rivers in a Terminological Knowledge Base. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Virdis, Daniela Francesca
2022. Ecostylistics, Ecolinguistics and Stylistics: A Theoretical Overview. In Ecological Stylistics, ► pp. 29 ff.
2020. The semantics of bushfire in Australian English. In Meaning, Life and Culture: In conversation with Anna Wierzbicka, ► pp. 115 ff.
Bromhead, Helen
2022. Tensions in talking about disasters: Habitual versus climate-informed – The case of bushfire vocabulary in Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics 42:3-4 ► pp. 207 ff.
Gladkova, Anna
2020. The semantics of verbs of visual aesthetic appreciation in Russian. In Meaning, Life and Culture: In conversation with Anna Wierzbicka, ► pp. 155 ff.
Gladkova, Anna
2023. Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Context. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context, ► pp. 225 ff.
Goddard, Cliff
2020. Prototypes, polysemy and constructional semantics: The lexicogrammar of the English verb climb. In Meaning, Life and Culture: In conversation with Anna Wierzbicka, ► pp. 13 ff.
Goddard, Cliff
2021. Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ► pp. 93 ff.
2020. Postcolonial Prepositions: Semantics and Popular Geopolitics in the Danosphere. In Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, ► pp. 169 ff.
Sadow, Lauren & Kerry Mullan
2020. A Brief Introduction to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach. In Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, ► pp. 13 ff.
O’Meara, Carolyn, Niclas Burenhult, Mikael Rothstein & Peter Sercombe
2018. Representing space and place: hunter-gatherer perspectives. Hunter Gatherer Research 4:3 ► pp. 287 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.