Chapter 1. “When bad things happen to people”

Abstract

The main challenge for studying the pragmatics of danger in a global context is how to separate pseudo-universals from genuinely shared themes in discourses of danger. To identify common themes, it is important to approach the discourses from a principled perspective that enables a genuine comparison of linguacultural logics that guide language usage. In this chapter, we first elaborate on cultural pragmatics as the shared theoretical standpoint of all the studies in the volume. We then introduce the common method­ological framework employed by all chapters for case analyses – the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach. We also discuss possibilities for modelling core scenarios that generate the discourses of danger and explain how explications of cultural concepts and cultural logics can be formulated. Finally, an overview of each case study in this collection is provided.