Abstract

Grammar is thick with cultural meaning. The grammars we live by are powerful, partly because they help establish and maintain particular cultural logics, but also because these grammars tend to go under the radar of our conscious awareness. In this talk, I will lay out the contours of a “Cultural Construction Grammar”, which is a new way inquiring into the wild, idiosyncratic, and contradicting ways in which grammars operate. Rich in example, the talk draws broadly on insights into grammars globally, but gives special treatment to a language near you: Danish.

Short Bio

Carsten Levisen works in the fields of sociocultural linguistics and linguistic anthropology. He specializes in semantics and pragmatics, discourse studies and enjoy doing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work. He is an associate professor at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is the author of two monograhps “Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition”, and “Postcolonial Semantics: Meaning and Metalanguage in a Multipolar World”, both published by DeGruyter Mouton.

What is an AIAS Seminar?

The AIAS Seminar Series is a session of seminars held by the AIAS fellows, AIAS Visiting or Tandem Fellows or by other speakers proposed by the fellows. In each seminar, a fellow will present and discuss her/his current research and work-in-progress to an interdisciplinary audience for 30 minutes, closing off with 30 minutes for questions, comments and discussion.

All seminars are in-person and held in English. To attend online, please contact Sofia Bentsen at sofia@aias.au.dk by 9:00am on the day of the semimar as the latest to request a link.