Abstract
The aphorism ‘what is pretty cannot be beautiful’ was written by Wittgenstein (1942/1977) and belongs to his reflections on reality in its various manifestations. Also, this statement is consonant with the reasoning of the Austrian philosopher: apparent contradictions can lead to enlightening conclusions. This aphorism, however, seems to contradict what scholars from various disciplines have traditionally accepted: the true opposite terms in aesthetics are ‘beautiful’ versus ‘ugly’. To delve into what is, or what can be considered ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ we may consider two opposite views: the first relies upon a universalistic ethnological idea by which all humans have similar essential conceptions of both concepts (Cunningham et al. 1995; Dutton, 2009). This approach is related to Wierzbicka´s proposal (1993) who defends the existence of a universal hardwired set of shared perceptions and emotions in humans. The second theoretical tradition considers that the notions of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are more dependent upon the cultural and cognitive interpretation of the individuals (Fenko et al. 2010; Majid and Levinson 2011), with clear implications on a potential individual variation in the conceptualization of these features. In this article we are going to concentrate on the notion of beauty represented by the adjective “beautiful”, therefore leaving the concept of “ugliness” for a future study. For this purpose we will use the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory as the theoretical foundation for the analysis in the Corpus of Language and Nature- CLAN Project (Romero-Trillo 2013). The methodology used for the analysis follows the recent corpus-based pragmatic tradition (Romero-Trillo 2008, 2013, 2014) in an attempt to combine empirical and theoretical approaches to the analysis of data to obtain reliable conclusions, as described in Grisot and Moeschler (2014).
We would like to thank the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain (Project: FFI2016-75160-R) for its support.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
MS 125 58r, in G.H. von Wright’s volume Culture and Value, p. 48.
- 2.
For a complete discussion on the ethnopragmatics of ‘beauty' see Gladkova and Romero-Trillo 2014.
References
Barocas R, Karoly P (1972) Effects of physical appearance on social responsiveness. Psychol Rep 31:495–500
Collins Cobuild Dictionary (1987) William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, London
Cunningham M, Roberts A, Barbee A, Druen P, Wu C-H (1995) Their ideas of beauty are, on the whole, the same as ours. J Pers Soc Psychol 68(2):261–279
Dutton D (2009) The art instinct: beauty, pleasure and human evolution. Bloomsbury Press, New York
Fenko A, Otten JJ, Schifferstein HNJ (2010) Describing product experience in different languages: the role of sensory modalities. J Pragmat 42:3314–3327
Gladkova A, Romero-Trillo J (2014) Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an ethnopragmatic perspective. J Pragmat 60:140–159
Goddard C (2006) Ethnopragmatics: a new paradigm. In: Goddard C (ed) Ethnopragmatics, understanding discourse in cultural context. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–30
Goddard C (2013) The semantic roots and cultural grounding of ‘social cognition’. Aust J Linguist 33(3):245–256
Goddard C, Wierzbicka A (eds) (2002) Meaning and universal grammar: theory and empirical findings, vol 2. John Benjamins, Amsterdam
Goddard C, Wierzbicka A (2014) Words and meanings. Oxford University Press, Croydon (UK)
González-Bernáldez F (1985/2011) Invitación a la ecología humana: la adaptación afectiva al entorno. Fundación Interuniversitaria Fernando González Bernáldez para los Espacios Naturales, Madrid
Grisot C, Moescher J (2014) How do empirical methods interact with theoretical pragmatics? The conceptual and procedural contents of the English Simple Past and its translation into French. In: Romero-Trillo J (ed) Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2014: new empirical and theoretical paradigms. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 7–33
Leibniz GW (1987[1678]) The analysis of languages. In: Dascal M (ed) Leibniz, language, signs and thought: a collection of essays. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 161–165
Majid A, Levinson SC (eds) (2011) The senses in language and culture [Special Issue]. Senses Soc 6(1):5–18
N-gram Viewer Google Books. Accessed 13 Mar 2014
Romero-Trillo J (ed) (2008) Pragmatics and corpus linguistics, a mutualistic entente. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
Romero-Trillo J (2013) Corpus of language and nature: a tool for the study of the relationship between cognition and emotions in language. In: Romero-Trillo J (ed) Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2013: new domains and methodologies. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 203–222
Romero-Trillo J, Espigares T (2012) The cognitive representation of natural landscapes in language. Pragmat Cogn 20:168–185
Romero-Trillo J, Espigares T (2015) Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting the selection of landscapes in the corpus of language and nature. J Res Des Stat Linguist Commun Sci 2:157–179
Walker J (1841) A critical pronouncing dictionary. Thomas Tegg, London
Walster E (1974) Physical attractiveness. Adv Exp Soc Psychol 1:157–205
Wierzbicka A (1996) Semantics: primes and universals. Oxford University Press, Oxford
von Wright GH (ed) (1977) Ludwig Wittgenstein, culture and value. Blackwell, Oxford
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Romero-Trillo, J., Fuentes, V. (2017). What Is Pretty Cannot Be Beautiful? A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Aesthetics of Nature. In: Blochowiak, J., Grisot, C., Durrleman, S., Laenzlinger, C. (eds) Formal Models in the Study of Language. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48831-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48832-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)