Dear colleagues

Apologies for the short notice on this one:

Next week we will be holding a book launch for the book Langue, Culture, et Valeurs : vers une ethnolinguistique appliquée et applicable by Bert Peeters, edited by Lauren Sadow, Kerry Mullan, and Christine Béal.

The launch will be on Thursday 26^th September at 12:30pm in 1481-568. If you would like to attend, please email Lauren l.sadow@cc.au.dk by Friday 20^th for catering purposes.

Using APPLIED ETHNOLINGUISTICS and illustrations of French, Langue, Culture et Valeurs illustrates how the detailed study of words, metaphors, turns of phrase, productive syntactic structures and culturally salient communicative behaviors can lead to the discovery of presumed cultural values commonly associated with a language-culture. This is the first book-length publication in French on Applied Ethnolinguistics (see below for more details).

Bert Peeters was a member of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage research community, until he passed away in 2021. Along with two other colleagues, I have worked to finish his monograph posthumously.  

This book launch takes advantage of the fact that his close collaborators, Professor Cliff Goddard and Associate Professor Kerry Mullan, are visiting from Australia, and that his wife and sister can also be present.

Before his death in 2021, Bert Peeters had written 75% of his manuscript of Langue Culture et Valeurs: vers une ethnolinguistique appliquée et applicable. The book is intended to introduce the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to the French linguistic world through a detailed semantic and ethnolinguistic exploration into a number of French cultural expressions. The book has a particular focus on how NSM can be applied to teaching French as a Second or Foreign language (FLE).

NSM, an approach to semantics and pragmatics, was conceived in the 1960s by Anna Wierzbicka who was joined from the 1980s by Cliff Goddard and Bert Peeters.  These three researchers have made the most significant theoretical contributions to the development of the NSM. Bert Peeters was the principal architect of NSM in Romance languages, particularly French. The first publication on NSM to appear in French (Wierzbicka, 1988) was followed by Volume 98 of the journal Langue française (Peeters, 1993). The current work is the first full-length manuscript both in French and applying NSM to the French language-culture.

NSM consists of a set of 65 universal primes (called semantic primitives) with which it is possible to define words and concepts from any language-culture and is founded on the following basic principles: semantic simplicity, universality, and translatability. These semantic primitives are combined into explications of specific words or concepts, which can be understood cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, avoiding any ethnocentricity in the process. These explications can then also be accompanied by cultural scripts and/or pedagogical scripts, describing cultural values, attitudes, and ways of speaking.

The approach, and this book, also takes to heart the following postulates about the connection between language and culture (as articulated in Wierzbicka 2005: 593):

                1.            In different societies, and different communities, people speak differently

                2.            These differences in ways of speaking are profound and systematic

                3.            Different ways of speaking reflect different cultural values, or at least different hierarchies of values

                4.            Different ways of speaking, different communicative styles can be explained and made sense of, in terms of independently established different cultural values and cultural priorities

These postulates form the basis of APPLIED ETHNOLINGUISTICS. APPLIED ETHNOLINGUISTICS, as proposed by Bert Peeters in a number of previous publications consists of six protocols (or ethnoprotocols) which closely examine the manifestations of culture in language: ETHNOLEXICOLOGY, ETHNOMETAPHOROLOGY, ETHNOPHRASEOLOGY, ETHNOSYNTAX, ETHNOPRAGMATICS and ETHNOAXIOLOGY

Using APPLIED ETHNOLINGUISTICS and illustrations of French, Langue, Culture et Valeurs illustrates how the detailed study of words, metaphors, turns of phrase, productive syntactic structures and culturally salient communicative behaviors can lead to the discovery of presumed cultural values commonly associated with a language-culture.