On Pigs and People: The Porcine Semantics of Danish Interaction and Cognition

Abstract

There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and adjectives abound, and the pragmatics of Danish, including its repertoire of abusives, is heavily reliant on porcine phraseology. Despite the highly urbanized nature of the contemporary Danish speech community, semantic structures from Denmark's peasant-farmer past appear to have survived and taken on a new significance in today's society. Unlike everyday English, which mainly distinguishes pig from pork, everyday Danish embodies an important semantic distinction between grise, which roughly speaking translates as ‘nice pigs’, vis-à-vis svin, which, very roughly, translates as ‘nasty pigs’. Focusing on the pragmatics of svin-based language, this paper demonstrates how this concept is utilized in Danish interaction and social cognition. The paper explores systematically the culture-specific porcine themes in Danish evaluational expressions, speech acts and interpersonal relations. The paper demonstrates that ‘pigs in language’ is far from a trivial topic and argues that cultural elaboration of pig-words and the culture-specific ‘meaning of pigs’ in Danish not only sheds light on the diverse linguistic construals of ‘animal concepts’ in the world's languages: it also calls for a cultural-semantic approach to the study of social cognition.

Keywords:

• Danish
• Media Discourse
• Social Cognition
• Conceptual Semantics of Animals
• Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Text examples from media and social media

Table

Notes

¹ Svin is a cognate of English swine. Svin is a basic and indispensible word, unlike the somewhat formal swine, which does not seem to play any crucial role in everyday English, except maybe in the language of disease: swine flu, swine fever, etc. Apart from swine, the contemporary English vocabulary also includes a number of ‘minor’ porcine concepts, such as hog, sow and boar (cf. Stibbe 2003: 376).

² Danish morphosyntax does not allow for diminutive vs. non-diminutive forms, such as piggy vs. pig in English.