Linguistic views of friendship in Danish Cover Image

Językowe obrazy przyjaźni w języku duńskim
Linguistic views of friendship in Danish

Author(s): Aleksander Kacprzak, Andrzej Szubert
Subject(s): Language studies, Cognitive linguistics
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej
Keywords: linguistic worldview; linguistic worldviews; friendship; friend; venskab; ven; lexical-semantic fields; Danish semantics

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to describe two images or views of friendship in Danish. The data, excerpted from dictionaries (lexical definitions, synonyms, antonyms, hyperonyms, derivatives, and compounds) and from the National Corpus of Danish, show that there exist two parallel images of friendship in the language: one is connected with a more traditional understanding of friendship as a strong and close bond, the other is based on the idea of many acquaintances/friends. Corpus data suggest that it is the other, more recent image of friendship that is now most frequently evoked by speakers of Danish, although the traditional view is still present in their consciousness. This conclusion is corroborated by an analysis of the word ven, the main lexical exponent of the cultural concept being investigated.

  • Issue Year: 31/2019
  • Issue No: 31
  • Page Range: 147-163
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Polish