“It’s the Economy, Stupid”: The Everyday Semantics of a Geopolitical Key Word
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Author(s)
Goddard, Clifford
Sadow, Lauren
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2021
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Despite its Anglo/Euro origins, there can be no doubt that ‘(the) economy’ is a key word in the discourse of global geopolitics. This study explicates the lexical/conceptual semantics of the expression in everyday English, using the NSM approach to meaning description. Unlike most dictionaries, we draw a distinction between two different senses: a “people-focussed”, experience-near sense (‘economy-1’), and a broader, more “educated” concept (‘economy-2’). Both senses can be regarded as folk concepts designating what philosopher Jeremy Bentham termed “fictitious entities” which belong to a certain mental ontology and support ...
View more >Despite its Anglo/Euro origins, there can be no doubt that ‘(the) economy’ is a key word in the discourse of global geopolitics. This study explicates the lexical/conceptual semantics of the expression in everyday English, using the NSM approach to meaning description. Unlike most dictionaries, we draw a distinction between two different senses: a “people-focussed”, experience-near sense (‘economy-1’), and a broader, more “educated” concept (‘economy-2’). Both senses can be regarded as folk concepts designating what philosopher Jeremy Bentham termed “fictitious entities” which belong to a certain mental ontology and support certain kinds of discourse. The results shed light on how and why ‘the economy’ has such a totalising power over many discourses: national, international and global.
View less >
View more >Despite its Anglo/Euro origins, there can be no doubt that ‘(the) economy’ is a key word in the discourse of global geopolitics. This study explicates the lexical/conceptual semantics of the expression in everyday English, using the NSM approach to meaning description. Unlike most dictionaries, we draw a distinction between two different senses: a “people-focussed”, experience-near sense (‘economy-1’), and a broader, more “educated” concept (‘economy-2’). Both senses can be regarded as folk concepts designating what philosopher Jeremy Bentham termed “fictitious entities” which belong to a certain mental ontology and support certain kinds of discourse. The results shed light on how and why ‘the economy’ has such a totalising power over many discourses: national, international and global.
View less >
Journal Title
Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics
Volume
5
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
Subject
Political economy and social change
Sociology
Linguistics