Trapnost and embarrassment as cultural conceptualizations (Czech, British, American)
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper is an exploratory study of the cultural conceptualizations of trapnost/embarrassment in the Czech, British, and American cultures. These will be studied primarily by examining the reflections of the concept in language (in available corpora and other linguistic evidence). The questions the paper would like to answer and use to specify the respective cultural conceptualizations are the following: How is trapnost/embarrassment explicitly referenced in the two languages? (What are the occasions for evoking the concept of trapnost/embarrassment? What do the underlying grammatical structures – found in statements featuring trapnost/embarrassment as a concept – convey about the respective cognitive constructions of this emotion?) What is the pragmatics of expressing feelings of trapnost/embarrassment or observing it? (What is the balance of referring to trapnost/embarrassment in oneself/in others?) What constructions of trapnost/embarrassment in the respective cultures can be identified in the private and what in the public sphere? (How are these related within one culture and across the cultures?) What is the relationship between trapnost/embarrassment and stud/shame in the respective cultures? If possible, also the following question will be explored: How do findings based on language evidence correspond with observations from analytical discourses involving trapnost/embarrassment (in literature and film, in psychology) in the cultures speaking the two languages? The study will also remark on variations (beyond a mere one-to-one equivalent) found in translations featuring the keywords and will conclude with a critical assessment of what can and cannot be achieved in studying the emotional cultural constructs of trapnost/embarrassment through language-based contrastive analysis, in order to gauge what is lost in translating the concepts in a straightforward way. |
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