The idea of a ‘spoon’: semantics, prehistory, and cultural logic  

Oleh:

Wierzbicka, Anna

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 47 no. Part A (2015), page 66-83.
Topik: Lexicography and conceptual analysis; Cultural logic of artefact concepts; NSM; Relevance of semantics to prehistory; Relevance of semantics to history of food; Semantics as a key to cultural history
Fulltext: 47-Part-A_Wierzbicka.pdf (352.53KB)

Isi artikel

The invention of the spoon may not be quite as ground-breaking in human history as the invention of the wheel or the needle, but arguably it is also a significant conceptual (as well as technological) event. It has been claimed that “all people in the world use spoons”, that “spoons have been used as eating utensils since Paleolithic times”, that chimpanzees in Gombe use “sort-of-spoons”. Can we draw a line, in a principled and precise way, between ‘spoons’ and ‘sort-of’ spoons’? For example, is the so-called “Chinese spoon” (tangchí) a ‘spoon’? Can we explain why a ‘tangchí’ is different in many respects from a (‘European’) ‘spoon’ and similar in others? Most importantly, perhaps, can we reconstruct with any plausibility the conceptual model in the minds of the first prehistoric inventors of ‘spoons’? Can we tell in what part of the world they lived, when they lived, what they wanted to eat with those first ‘spoons’, and why they found ‘spoons’ more suited to their needs than something like ‘tangchí’ (‘Chinese spoons’)? These are some of the questions that this paper will address, using as a tool NSM techniques of semantic and conceptual analysis.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali