What Water Does with Us? Understanding Water in a Multipolar Anglo Community
Abstract
Water is so omnipresent, so vital, and so inescapable, it seems that we take it for granted. But while scientists are discovering exciting new things about water’s composition and forms, in the popular imagination, water remains a primal, ‘simple,’ ‘elemental experience.’ Water attracts us and repels us; water inspires fear in us. What stories do we tell about water in English? How do we understand it? The object of the present paper is to gain an accurate overall impression of the diverse, complex and contradictory ways the ‘Anglo community’ – as a diverse multipolar community living around the world – understands waters and its relation to them. Exploring ‘English waters’ will take us from Scotland to Australia, from the Bible to online linguistic corpora, from Canadian celebrations of lakes and ravines to forest fires in California.
References
Baudelaire, Charles. “Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil.” https://fleursdumal.org/poem/320. Last accessed 03.10.2020.
Bartmiński, Jerzy, editor. Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych: Kosmos (1980). Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Słodowskiej, 1999.
Bartmiński, Jerzy. Aspects in Cognitive Ethnolinguistics, edited by Jörg Zinken, translated by Adam Głaz. Equinox, 2012.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11101/pg11101-images.html. Last accessed 03.10.2020.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Basic Books, 2003.
Goatly, Andrew. Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. John Benjamins Press, 2007.
Goddard, Cliff. “Hati: A key word in the Malay vocabulary of emotion.” Emotions in Cross-linguistic Perspective, edited by Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka. Mouton de Gruyter, 2001, pp. 167-195.
Goddard, Cliff. “Contrastive semantics and cultural psychology: English heart vs. Malay hati.” Culture, Body, and language: Conceptualizations of internal body organs across cultures and languages, edited by Farzad Sharifian, Rene Dirven, Ning Yu, and Susanne Niemeier. (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 7). Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 75-102.
Google ngram viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams. Last accessed 15.01.2021.
Harkins, Jean, and Anna Wierzbicka, editors. Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective. De Gruyter, 2001.
Hymes, Dell. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnolgraphic Approach. University of Pennsylvania, 1989.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. On Language. Translated by Peter Heath, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago University Press, 1987.
Langacker, Ronald W. The Essentials of Cognitive Grammar. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Levinson, Stephen C. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/water. Last accessed 03.10.2020.
Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/whiskey. Last accessed 03.10. 2020.
Rule Britannia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2R24uY5CeU. Last accessed 03.10.2020.
Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project, https://rep.univ-rouen.fr/. Last accessed 03.10.2020.
Sapir, Edward. Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality. University of California Press, 1985.
Underhill, James W. Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: truth, love, hate & war. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Underhill, James W., and Mariarosaria Gianninoto. Migrating Meanings: Sharing Keywords in a Global World. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
Vaňková, Irena, Lucie Saicová Římalová, Iva Nebeská, and Jasňa Šlédrová. Co na srdci, to na jazyku (Kapitoly z kognitivní lingvistiky). Karolinum, 2005.
Wierzbicka, Anna. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Wierzbicka, Anna. Understanding Cultures through their Keywords. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Wierzbicka, Anna, Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Ye, Zhengdao. “Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A Lexical-Conceptual analysis.” Quantitative approaches to problems in linguistics: Studies in honour of Phil Rose, edited by Cathryn Donohue, Shunichi Ishihara, and William Steed, Lincom Europa, 2012, pp. 265-280.
Copyright (c) 2021 Roczniki Humanistyczne
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.