Description
STIAS research fellowship. Conceptafrica.My involvement in the conceptafrica network stems from a long-standing interest in cognitive semantics and African languages. Since a profound understanding of key concepts is at the methodological and theoretical core of conceptual historians’ work, familiarity with historical semantics and pragmatics can be a valuable tool in the investigation of African history. In this context, I want to put this in practice together with Simphiwe. We are interested in learning more about social and economic concepts of African language users reaching back into the 19th century, focusing on South Africa.
Socio-economic concerns characterise much of what has been written on South African 19th and 20th century history. Territorial deprivation, the growing significance of wage labour and labour migration, the changing constitution of households, and often also outright destitution are important economic factors. For a fuller understanding of how individuals acted within these conditions, it is necessary, however, to learn about the specific understandings and notions of (socio-)economic grievances at the respective points in time. By looking at sources written in African languages, we try to gain acces to two linguistic dimensions: (1) language use and the pragmatics of the discourses on economic grievances and poor living conditions; (2) the lexicon of this domain, showing interesting patterns of conventionalised understandings of economic needs. The pragmatic aspects can be accessed by close readings of textual sources, while the lexical-semantic component will encompass corpus-searches of key expressions gleaned from the text sources, and their fine-grained semantic analyses.
| Period | 1 Nov 2013 → 15 Dec 2013 |
|---|---|
| Visiting | Stellenbosch Institute for Advances Study |
| Degree of Recognition | International |