The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger

In this chapter we first develop a semantic-conceptual analysis of the English word security , a key word in international geopolitical discourse, contrasting it with English safety . We then investigate the meanings of comparable words in German and in Chinese, i.e. Sicherheit and ānquán , respectively. Our method of lexical semantic description is the NSM (natural semantic metalanguage) approach, which is based on paraphrase into simple, cross-translatable words. The analysis is corpus-assiste