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Article published In:
The Conceptualization of ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Ugly’ across Languages and Cultures
Edited by Anna Gladkova and Jesús Romero-Trillo
[International Journal of Language and Culture 8:1] 2021
► pp. 147–168

The good, the bad… and the ugly?

The conceptualization of aesthetics in Spanish

ORCID logo | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

The present article describes the conceptualization of aesthetics in Spanish through the analysis of the two prototypical terms that describe positive and negative sensory appreciation, i.e., “bonito” (beautiful) and “feo” (ugly). Following a mixed-approach methodology combining Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Corpus Pragmatics, the article compares the use of these adjectives in spoken and written language, analyzes their realization in the corpora under analysis, provides the explications that support their polysemy, and describes their distribution in different contexts. The final part of the paper is devoted to the comparison of the use of these adjectives with their counterparts in English, as evidenced by another paper in this special issue.

Keywords: “bonito”, “feo”, natural semantic metalanguage, corpus pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • Shape
  • 2.“Bonito” and “feo” in theory and practice
  • 3.Methodology and data analysis
    • 3.1Analysis of “bonito/a”
      • Bonito/a1
      • Bonito/a2
      • Bonito/a3
    • 3.2Analysis of “feo/a”
      • Feo/a1
      • Feo/a2
      • Feo/a3
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 7 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00039.rom
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