Ain't It Beautiful The Conceptualization of Beauty From An

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Journal of Pragmatics 60 (2014) 140--159
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Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an

ethnopragmatic perspective
Anna Gladkova a,*, Jesús Romero-Trillo b
a
Linguistics, School of Behavioral, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia
b
Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain
Received 18 March 2013; received in revised form 8 September 2013; accepted 2 November 2013
Abstract
This study addresses the question of the ethnopragmatic conceptualization of ‘beautiful’ in three European languages -- English,
Russian and Spanish. Specifically, it investigates the polysemy and the spheres of application of the following words: English beautiful,
Russian krasivyj, Spanish bonito/a, as the words that better represent aesthetic positive appraisal in these languages.
The data for the study comes from three online corpora: Russian National Corpus (Russian), Cobuild Wordbanks Online (English) and
Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (Spanish). Through corpus analysis methodology we investigate the most common
collocations and the pragmatic and contextual uses of these terms.
On the basis of this analysis our study proposes semantic explications of the words beautiful, krasivyj, and bonito/a in universal human
concepts within the theoretical framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). In particular, we investigate the presence of the
perception universals identified by NSM: SEE, HEAR, and FEEL, which in our data are central to the analysis of the aesthetics vocabulary
along with the primitives GOOD, SOMEONE, SOMETHING and THINK.
To sum up, the article elaborates, describes and reveals similarities and differences in their perceptions of ‘beautiful’ across the three
languages in relation to the nouns modified by this concept.
© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Aesthetics; Corpus linguistics; Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM); Beautiful; Contextual sifting; Ethnopragmatics
1. Introduction
The question of universal and culture-specific elements in aesthetic perception is of concern to several disciplines,
including philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, anthropology and history of art. The conceptual understanding of aesthetic
perception ranges from the idea that humans are fundamentally similar in their understanding of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’
(Cunningham et al., 1995; Dutton, 2009) to the acknowledgement of a considerable cultural variation and influence in their
aesthetic appreciation (Bjerke and Polegato, 2001; Fenko et al., 2010; Furnham and Alibhai, 1983; Guendouzi, 2004;
Howes, 1991, 2007; Majid and Levinson, 2011; Strauss, 2005). Nevertheless, the linguistic conceptualization of this
domain has not received much attention in the literature, with the exception of a significant interest in the linguistics of
sensory perception (e.g., Hooper, 2004; Iordanskaja, 1979; Paradis and Eeg-Olofsson, 2013; Viberg, 1983; Whitt, 2011).
In fact, Wittgenstein observed the limitations of linguistic means in the expression of aesthetic experience: ‘‘You might
think Aesthetics is a science telling us what’s beautiful -- almost too ridiculous for words. [. . .] It is hard to find boundaries’’
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: anna.gladkova@une.edu.au (A. Gladkova), jesus.romero@uam.es (J. Romero-Trillo).
0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.005
A. Gladkova, J. Romero-Trillo / Journal of Pragmatics 60 (2014) 140--159 141
(Wittgenstein, 2007[1967]:11). However, he also acknowledged that the study of aesthetics does not only entail the study
of perception but also the study of cognition:
I wish to make it clear that the important problems in aesthetics are not settled by psychological research. These
problems are answered in a different way -- more in the form ‘What is in my mind when I say so and so?’
(Wittgenstein, 2007[1967]:17)
Linguistics can help speakers understand how language encodes concepts, and this understanding can be
achieved through the study of the meaning and use of language in context. In the Western philosophical and theological
tradition, the concept of beautiful has been recognized as a primary value along with the concepts of true and good
(Boylan, 2008). Yet, how universal is this concept? And, are there cultural influences that shape it in different languages
and cultures?
The purpose of this article is to describe the conceptualization of ‘aesthetics’ in the perception of beauty in English,
Russian and Spanish, aided by the description of the senses involved in its appreciation. In fact, aesthetics alone cannot
be held responsible for the conceptualization of beauty as linguistics and other disciplines, like psychology, anthropology
and sociology, also play an important role in the language representation. In our opinion, the conceptualization of beauty,
as in the case of other subjective concepts, varies from culture to culture, and we believe that through the study of corpora
can we find a coherent pattern of use in real context.
In this sense, one of the models that can shed light on the multifaceted approach to conceptualization is the theory of
stance. Stance can be defined as:
A public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture, and other
symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and
others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of value in the sociocultural field (Du Bois,
2007:169).
In other words, stance can be considered the public linguistic realization of a concept by a speaker (social actor) in a
conversation (dialogically). This is the reason why our study is based upon the use of beautiful, and its counterparts in
Russian and Spanish, in several corpora, and does not rely upon the contrastive meaning of the concept in abstract.
Furthermore, the study, as will be shown below, will take different sociocultural fields of use (human actions, nature,
perception, etc.) in which the salient linguistic meanings of ‘beautiful’, both literal and figurative, will be considered for the
analysis (Giora, 1997). In her approach, Giora interprets salience as an independent phenomenon that may or may not be
influenced by context: ‘‘salient meanings are processed automatically (though not necessarily solely), irrespective of
contextual information’’ (Giora, 2003:24).
Following the notion of salience as the starting point, we have applied the ‘contextual sifting’ method (Romero-Trillo
and Maguire, 2011:234), defined as ‘‘the process of cognitive filtering that leaves out the incorrect assumptions in a given
communicative situation, and sieves through the correct elements to guarantee successful communication’’. We believe
that contextual sifting can be very useful for contrastive studies because it allows the researcher to study concepts bearing
the possible meanings in all the languages under analysis in mind, but filtered through the actual use in real contexts.
As mentioned above, the aim of this study is to conduct a contrastive analysis of the semantics of ‘beautiful’ in three
languages: beautiful in English, krasivyj in Russian and bonito in Spanish from an ethnopragmatic perspective (Goddard,
2006, 2012; Gladkova, 2013a,b). Also, our study intends to compare the sociocultural domains characterized by these
words in the three languages to elaborate on the contextual implications of their respective use.
2. Theoretical background: the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)
The research methodology used for the analysis of cross-linguistic conceptualization needs to account for the
specificity of meanings embedded in the realization of concepts. Empirical research over the last forty years suggests that
such methodology can be found in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM).
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a research programme was inspired by Leibniz’s view that all languages have
a limited number of concepts by means of which other concepts can be explained (Wierzbicka, 1972). Leibniz recognized
that some words are more basic and simple in meaning than others: ‘‘Amongst the words, some are frequently used and
serve as auxiliary to the others’’ (Leibniz, 1987[1678]:162). He called these words ‘‘the alphabet of human thoughts’’
(cf. Wierzbicka, 1972:6).
NSM is a contrasted and well-documented technique for semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis. It comprises sixty-five
semantic universals (Table 1) and their universal syntactic properties have been identified on the basis of empirical
studies (Wierzbicka, 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2002a). These semantic universals, or ‘primes’, are meanings that
are semantically simple, i.e., they cannot be defined further, and are accepted as indefinable. For this theory, primes
constitute the core of human lexicon and can be used to explicate more complex meanings. Apart from words, these
142 A. Gladkova, J. Romero-Trillo / Journal of Pragmatics 60 (2014) 140--159
Table 1
Exponents of semantic primes in English, Spanish and Russian (after Goddard and Wierzbicka, in press; Travis, 2002; Gladkova, 2010a).
English Spanish Russian
Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING THING, YO I, you, ALGUIEN someone,

TU JA I, TY you, KTO-TO someone, ČTO-
PEOPLE, BODY ALGOCOSA somethingthing, GENTE TOVEŠČ’ something/thing, LJUDI
people, CUERPO body people, TELO body
Relational substantives: KIND, PART TIPO kind, PARTE part RODVID kind, ČAST’ part
Determiners: THIS, THE SAME, OTHERELSE ESTO this, LO MISMO the same, OTRO ĖTOT this, TOT ŽE the same, DRUGOJ
other other
Quantifiers: ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH MANY, UNO one, DOS two, ALGUNOS some, ODIN one, DVA two, NEKOTORYE some,
LITTLEFEW TODO all, MUCHOMUCHOS muchmany, VSE all, MNOGO muchmany, NEMNOGO
POCOPOCOS littlefew littlefew
Attributes: GOOD, BAD BUENO good, MALO bad XOROŠIJXOROŠO good, PLOXOJPLOXO
bad
Descriptors: BIG, SMALL GRANDE big, PEQUEÑ O small BOL’ŠOJ big, MALEN’KIJ small
Mental predicates: KNOW, THINK, WANT, DON’T WANT, FEEL, PENSAR think, SABER know, QUERER DUMAT’ think, ZNAT’ know, XOTET’ want,
SEE, HEAR want, NO QUERER don’t want, SENTIR NE XOTET’ don’t want, ČUVSTVOVAT’ feel,
feel, VER see, OÍR hear VIDET’ see, SLYŠAT’ hear
Speech: SAY, WORDS, TRUE DECIR say, PALABRAS words, VERDAD GOVORIT’SKAZAT’ say, SLOVA words,
true PRAVDA true
Actions, events, DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH HACER do, PASAR happen, MOVERSE DELAT’ do, PROISXODIT’SLUČAT’SJA
movement, contact: move, TOCAR touch happen, DVIGAT’SJA move, KASAT’SJA
touch
Location, existence, BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, HAVE, BE ESTAR be (somewhere), HAY there is, BYT’ (GDE-TO) be (somewhere),
possession, specification: (SOMEONE/SOMETHING) TENER have, SER be (someone/ BYT’EST’ there is, BYT’ U have, BYT’
something) (KEM-TO/ČEM-TO) be (someone/
something)
Life and death: LIVE, DIE VIVIR live, MORIR die ŽIT’ live, UMERET’ die
Time: WHENTIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG CUÁNDOTIEMPO whentime, AHORA KOGDAVREMJA whentime, SEJČAS
TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, now, ANTES before, DESPUÉS after, now, DO before, POSLE after, DOLGO a
MOMENT MUCHO TIEMPO a long time, POCO TIEMPO long time, KOROTKOE VREMJA, a short
a short time, POR UN TIEMPO for some time, NEKOTOROE VREMJA for some
time, MOMENTO moment time, MOMENT moment
Space: WHEREPLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, DÓNDESITIO whereplace, AQUÍ here, GDEMESTO whereplace, ZDES’ here,
NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE ARRIBA above, DEBAJO below, CERCA NAD above, POD below, DALEKO far,
near, LEJOS far, LADO side, DENTRO BLIZKO near, STORONA side, VNUTRI
inside inside
Logical concepts: NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF NO not, TAL VEZ maybe, PODER can, NE not, MOŽET BYT’ maybe, MOČ’ can,
PORQUE because, SI if POTOMU ČTO because, ESLI if
Intensifier, augmentor: VERY, MORE MUY very, MÁS more OČEN’ very, BOL’ŠEEŠČE more
Similarity: LIKEWAY COMO like KAKTAK like
meanings can be expressed by bound morphemes or phrasemes, which equal lexical units (cf. Apresjan, 1992; Mel’čuk,
1988; Goddard, 2001).
Along with primes, NSM also relies on a limited number of semantic molecules: the intermediate concepts that are
found necessary for certain explications and can be explicated in terms of primes or other molecules (Goddard,
2010:467--469). Some examples of such words are: hands, head, men, women, children, mother, water, sky, among
others (Goddard, 2010, 2011).
Certain syntactic qualities of the primes have also been shown to be universal and can be listed as universal canonical
combinations of primes. Therefore, primes combine with each other and form a metalanguage that lies at the core of every
language. For example, the following syntactic properties of the prime FEEL are considered universal (cf. Goddard and
Wierzbicka, 2002b):
someone feels something (good/bad) (in part of the body),

someone feels like this,
someone feels something good/bad towards someone else.
Therefore, at a universal level, FEEL can distinguish between emotional experience (positive or negative) and bodily
feelings. It can also express emotional attitude to another person. It is important to highlight that other uses of English to
feel are not universal, such as to feel good/bad, this fabric feels good, among others, and should be explicated in terms of
semantic primes.
The conceptual primes and their universal syntactic properties have been identified on the basis of empirical
research in a number of typologically divergent languages: Lao, Mangaaba-Mbula, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, Polish,
Spanish (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2002a), Hawaii Creole English (Stanwood, 1997), Korean, Amharic, Cree (Goddard,
2008), French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Peeters, 2006), Russian (Gladkova, 2010a), Hebrew and Arabic (Habib,
2011).
The meanings of concepts are represented in the form of explications or semantic paraphrases. For example,
Gladkova (2010b:272) defines sympathy as follows:
sympathy
(a) person X thought about person Y like this:

(b) something bad happened to this person
(c) this person feels something bad because of this
(d) it is not good
(e) I don’t want people to feel bad things like this
(f) when X thought like this X felt something
(g) like people feel when they think like this about someone
Goddard (2010:464) formulates two major requirements to developing a good NSM explication:
The validity of NSM explications can be tested on the basis of two main conditions. The first is substitutability in a
broad sense: explications have to make intuitive sense to native speakers when substituted into their context of use,
and to generate the appropriate entailments and implications. The second condition is well-formedness: they have
to be framed entirely in semantic primes or molecules, and to conform to the syntax of the natural semantic
metalanguage. In addition, explications have to conform to a coherence condition, i.e., they have to make sense as
a whole, with appropriate chains of anaphora, co-reference, causal links, etc.
The advantage of the NSM methodology over other cognitive methods of analysis is that it guarantees the absence of
any terminological distortions from the specific descriptions of any of the languages under study. For example, the
approaches of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 2006; Gawron, 2011) or Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff, 1983, 1990,
2007, 2011) rely on abstract and technical metalanguages which are based on English. As a result, their representations
of meaning need to be ‘translated’ into natural English in order to be interpreted and verified (Goddard, 2011:75--76). To
avoid a possible Anglo-centric perspective in the analyses, NSM employs universal and semantically simple words in its
definitions. Moreover, the universality of the metalanguage guarantees the translatability of its explication into any
language.
3. Analysis of the data: the semantics of beautiful, krasivyj and bonito
In this section we will explore, compare and contrast the cultural and aesthetic differences represented by the
three words under analysis, and we will describe the implications on the ethnopragmatic scope of the three
languages. We believe that the idea of ‘beautiful’ is closely linked with three essential phenomena in the human
experience: evaluation, emotion and perception. These phenomena can be explained through the NSM inventory of
primes as follows:
1. Evaluation: through the use of GOOD and BAD, with the possibility of an intensifier VERY.
2. Emotion: with the use of FEEL as a universal concept within the universal syntactic properties discussed
above.
3. Perception: although this concept is not among the primes due to its technical nature and semantic complexity, NSM
posits SEE, HEAR, and TOUCH as universal. Therefore, primes can express the three senses of perception: vision,
hearing and touch. Our work demonstrates that the inventory of the NSM primes provides sufficient explanatory
power to explicate the concepts of ‘beautiful’ and that the primes SEE and HEAR appear to be the most salient in
realizing these senses.
In order to obtain contextualized data we carried out our study based on the following corpora:
- Cobuild Wordbanks Online [CWO] for English,

- Russian National Corpus [RNC] for Russian,

- Real Academia Española -- Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual [CREA] for Spanish.1
The three corpora include written and spoken data. CWO has around 550 million words dating between 2001 and 2005.
CREA comprises 81.5 million words, circa, between 1975 and 2004. RNC contains around 300 million words from the 18th
century to present. To balance the data with CREA, data from 1975 to present were used in the RNC (103 million words).2
The words discussed in this study are polysemous. In treating their polysemy we rely on the approach to polysemy
taken within the NSM school. NSM adopts the traditional ‘definition’ approach to lexical polysemy (Goddard, 2000:132;
Geeraerts, 1994). According to this approach, polysemy is established when it is impossible to propose a definition
(worded as a reductive paraphrase in NMS) that could cover all the uses of the word. When such an attempt fails,
polysemy is hypothesized and two meanings are tested. If in the process of further testing it becomes clear that two
meanings are not sufficient, further meanings are proposed. In this fashion the process continues till it is possible to
propose adequate definitions representing different senses of the word (Goddard, 2000:132). Diagnostic tests of
difference in syntactic frames, collocations, synonyms and antonyms are also used in helping to posit polysemy. In
establishing polysemous meanings, the requirements to NSM definitions need to be met. Consequently, obscure and
circular formulations need to be avoided and maximum explicitness needs to be aimed at (Goddard, 2000:139).
3.1. Beautiful
The use of beautiful in English ranges from reference to humans and objects to landscape, action, and the description
of sensual experiences. In this study we distinguish four main senses of beautiful3:
beautiful1 refers to the visual appreciation of humans and objects and it is the basic and most prototypical meaning;
beautiful2 refers to the aural appreciation;
beautiful3 extends to the domain of categorizing human actions;
beautiful4 describes pleasant personal experience and can refer to the perception of objects via proximity senses,
i.e., smell, taste and touch.
We propose the following semantic explications for the four uses of beautiful:
[A] something/someone is beautiful1 (This woman is beautiful. This vase is beautiful.)

(a) this thing [this someone] is like this:
(b) at many times, when someone sees this thing
(c) this someone can’t not feel something very good because of this
(d) at the same time, this someone can’t not think something very good about it
[B] beautiful2 singing/voice/tune

(a) this thing is like this:
(b) at many times, when someone hears this thing
(c) this someone can’t not feel something very good because of this
(d) like people can’t not feel something very good at some times
when they see some things
(e) at the same time, this someone can’t not think something very good about it
[C] someone does beautiful3 something (Barcelona play beautiful football, he had a beautiful idea)
(a) it can be like this:
(b) someone does something at some time
(c) when someone else thinks about it, this someone can’t not feel something very good because of this,
(d) like people can’t not feel something very good at some times when they see some things
(e) at the same time, this someone can’t not think something very good about it
1
Only Peninsular Spanish was used in the analysis.
2
In this study we use data from Standard modern Russian as spoken across Russian Federation and represented in the RNC main written and
oral subcorpora. Historically, it is the main standardized language variety used across Russia (Beyer, 2001). Dialectal differences in Russian are
primarily distinguished by pronunciation and some grammatical and lexical variation. In RNC they are represented in the dialectal subcorpus, and
this data was not included in our study.
3
In our study we have not considered multi-word units (such as beautiful people, among others), as their discourse and pragmatic functions are
not necessarily related to the analysis of their elements in isolation (Erman et al., 2013; Lin, 2013).
[D] something is beautiful4 (It’s beautiful flavour. This tastes beautiful. It was a beautiful experience.)
(a) someone can think like this at some time:
(b) ‘‘something is happening to me now, I can’t not know it
(c) I can’t not feel something very good because of this,
(d) like people can’t not feel something very good at some times when they see some things
(e) at the same time, I can’t not think something very good about it’’
The following analysis presents each meaning in detail.

beautiful1
Beautiful1 refers to visual perception (defined via SEE) in explication [A]. In this use it extends from characterizing
people to the description of human features and parts of body, objects, places and landscapes:
(1) My mother was beautiful and never washed dishes. . .

(2) And it’s a beautiful basket, too, she agreed graciously.
(3) I remembered how, when I was eight, we left our beautiful home in the country and moved to London.
(4) Finland is a beautiful country.
(5) Our lakes are beautiful and serene.
Beautiful1 involves a positive emotional experience resulting from observing an object, a landscape or a human being.
The characteristics of the objects that evoke such experience are essentially permanent. As it is an experience derived
from some external input, such experience can be shared by other people who observe this object or human being.
However, this cognitive experience does not necessarily entail that the object, landscape or being can be objectively
characterized as beautiful. In these cases, we assume that emotion and affection can play an important role, e.g., when
seeing a beloved person or a favourite pet.
In this sense, we may say that there is a fundamental cognitive and emotional element in the appreciation of a beautiful
entity. For example, the cognitive model of the representation of nature in language (Romero-Trillo and Espigares, 2012)
tries to determine how speakers of a language perceive and verbalize the emotions triggered by the physical features of
landscapes via the ‘‘stimuli that evoke aesthetically relevant psychological responses through relatively direct sensory-
perceptual processes and/or through intervening cognitive constraints’’ (Daniel, 2001:268).
In fact, this socializing feature of beautiful was already noted by Kant (2007[1790]:34--35):
The case is quite different with the Beautiful. It would [. . .] be laughable if a man who imagined anything to his own
taste, thought to justify himself by saying: ‘‘This object (the house we see, the coat that person wears, the concert we
hear, the poem submitted to our judgment) is beautiful for me.’’ For he must not call it beautiful if it merely pleases
himself. Many things may have for him charm and pleasantness; no one troubles himself at that; but if he gives out
anything as beautiful, he supposes in others the same satisfaction---he judges not merely for himself, but for every
one, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. Hence he says ‘‘the thing is beautiful’’; and he does not
count on the agreement of others with this his judgment of satisfaction, because he has found this agreement
several times before, but he demands it of them. He blames them if they judge otherwise and he denies them taste,
which he nevertheless requires from them. Here then we cannot say that each man has his own particular taste. For
this would be as much as to say that there is no taste whatever; i.e. no aesthetical judgment, which can make a
rightful claim upon every one’s assent.
To summarize, the first meaning of beautiful1 appears in contexts in which it can be applied to people, objects and
landscapes. This experience involves an -- almost -- inevitable positive reaction that can be shared, as it evaluates the
object or subject as good for emotions or aesthetic appraisals.
beautiful2
Beautiful2 is also used with reference to a pleasant experience evoked, in this case, via hearing (explication [B]).
Hence, it can characterize things that people can hear, e.g. voices, music, tune, sound, a song or language:
(6) I’m charmed to make your acquaintance, Lorenzo said in a beautiful deep voice.
(7) Frank listened to Guapo’s voice, enjoying the sound of the beautiful words he was saying.
(8) The ice makes a beautiful sound.
In this case the perception needs to be explicated via HEAR. In the explication we also show that this characteristic is
applicable to things, not people.
Beautiful3
The third meaning of beautiful extends to the domain of human actions (explication [C]). Beautiful in this sense can be
applicable to deeds or actions that can be observed physically (for example, playing football, dancing) or intellectually
(producing an idea or writing):
(9) Barcelona play beautiful football.

(10) It is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful games.
(11) . . . the SCOTSMAN argues that the British no longer play the beautiful game which they gave to the world.
(12) All my life I fought for peace, I believed it was the most beautiful idea in the world, and they stoned me . . .
(13) France have been linked with him but I read a beautiful article where he spoke of signing a new deal with
Arsenal because he felt so happy.
In these cases, the evaluation of someone else’s action as beautiful equals to saying that this someone does it very well.
This evaluation is eventually associated with a positive feeling.
Therefore, beautiful3 is used to characterize actions that are perceived visually or intellectually. In the two cases the
evaluation comes from thinking about this action and evaluating it as a very good one.
beautiful4
The fourth meaning (explication [D]) is different from (1) and (2) in that it describes a personal experience that evokes
positive thoughts and associated positive feelings. This meaning of beautiful applies to the senses and complements the
meanings of beautiful1 and beautiful2, which characterize visual and aural perception. In this case beautiful4 is applicable
to the other senses: taste, smell and touch:
(14) Oh yes garlic in things is wonderful. It’s beautiful flavour.

(15) For a start the mangoes were huge and smelled beautiful.
(16) A couple of schoolboys said the hamburgers tasted beautiful.
(17) This kaftan is made with a delicate knitted fabric. It is stretchy, soft and feels beautiful to wear.4
In our opinion there is a clear difference in terms of cognitive processing between the use of beautiful1 and beautiful4 in
relation to perception. In the case of the first meaning of the adjective (seeing) ‘‘these mangoes are beautiful’’, the salient
cognitive meaning implies that the mangoes are visually pleasing for the speaker, it is a characteristic that stems from the
object. However, when the characteristics of beautiful relate to the perception via olfactory, gustatory and/or tactile
perception, the fourth category, the salient meaning relates to the actual bodily experience of the speaker. This
experience requires the use of the first person perspective in the explication of the meaning.
Other common collocations in this use are experience, time and meal:
(18) The giving of a massage to someone you care for, whether partner, friend or child, is a beautiful experience,
both for the giver and the receiver.
(19) After a good night’s sleep, waking up in the morning should be the most beautiful experience of each day
of your life.
(20) I love having babies. It can be the most beautiful experience a woman can ever have.
(21) ‘That was a beautiful meal,’ she said. ‘I feel completely spoiled. Thank you for going to so much trouble.’
(22) ‘Something wrong, sir?’ ‘Eh? No. No, everything’s fine, thank you. Beautiful meal.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’
(23) Did you enjoy your time down in Torquay? Er very nice excellent. Yes we had a beautiful time.
The personal character of this kind of experience comes from the fact that perceiving something happening as beautiful
presupposes the uniqueness of this person’s experience. In the examples mentioned above, the experiencer is often the
only person undergoing some process -- having a massage or having a meal. In this regard the kind of experience is
expected to be individualistic and context dependent; it happens to a particular person or people at a particular time and a
particular place. In this regard it is different from the first sense of beautiful, when an object or a person are perceived via
4
Source: http://www.getprice.com.au/Stunning-Monaco-Black-Maxi-Maternity-Kaftan-Dress-One-Sleeve-Gpnc_327--67213869.htm (accessed
24/10/2012).
seeing, because the kind of experience associated with this perception can be repeated on other occasions and in other
places by the speaker him/herself or by other people.
From a historical perspective, this particular meaning of beautiful is associated with the meaning of the word
experience. According to Wierzbicka (2010:39) one of the senses of experience developed after the 17th--18th century
with the following meaning: ‘‘experience3 refers to people’s subjective awareness of something that is happening to
them’’. This subjective awareness and perspective are reflected in the meaning of beautiful4.
As regards antonyms of beautiful, we believe that we can generally speak of tendencies and not of fixed patterns, as
Dixon (1982:20) rightly observes. This indeterminacy is especially significant with human appreciation adjectives, as in
the case of beautiful, in which speakers tend to agree less than in the case of adjectives of dimension or speed (see also
Demonte, 2011:1325).
In fact, we can observe how beautiful varies in the prototypicality of opposites according to its different meanings, in
what Kennedy (1999, 2007) and Kennedy and Levin (2008) denominate ‘scales’ of measure:
For beautiful1 (seeing) the prototypical opposite is ugly:
(24) He was short, stout and ugly with thick lips, bulging eyes and a flat nose.
(25) There was a rather ugly Victorian church in red brick [. . .].
Beautiful2 (hearing) also has the prototypical opposite in ugly:
(26) It was an ugly sound.
While in the third meaning ugly can also be used as an opposite of beautiful3 (human action), the meanings bad or dull
can also be treated as opposites:
(27) Graham thought Arsenal should begin to win by playing ugly football [. . .].
(28) [. . .] it’s a bad idea.
(29) [. . .] I would bet that watching dull football probably has the same effect [. . .]
Beautiful4 (reference to human experience) would choose between ugly, awful or bad:
(30) There was the bitter ugly smell of smoke everywhere [. . .].
(31) It has reconnected him with the ‘‘band of brothers’’ the Vietnam veterans who shared the ugly experience of
serving in an unpopular war.
(32) They’ve had an awful time from foreigners over the years.
(33) I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth.
As regards the gradability of the concept, ‘beautiful’ is a gradable adjective in the three languages under study. In
English this quality is manifested through comparison (beautiful -- more beautiful -- most beautiful) and also through
modification by intensifiers (or degree modifiers) (Quirk et al., 1985:435; Kennedy, 1999, 2012). In fact, beautiful
collocates with a variety of modifiers: it eagerly combines with amplifiers, (e.g., very, so, most, utterly) and downtowners
(e.g., fairly, pretty, rather).5 Within downtowners the combinations with diminishers (a bit, a little) are not impossible but are
very rare in our data (there is only one example of use of beautiful with a bit in the English data).6 Also, beautiful can be
modified by emphasizers (e.g., really, just). These patterns are consistent with the fact that beautiful is an adjective of
positive evaluation.
According to the English corpus data, the most frequent modifiers of beautiful are those of degree, being the five most
frequent so, very, really, absolutely and quite (see Table 2). The modifiers of degree emphasize the cognitive evaluative
aspect of the meaning, and/or the emotional component attached to it.
Apart from the degree modifiers beautiful also combines with modifiers that add an affective or emotive meaning
(e.g., stunningly, achingly, breathtakingly). It is interesting to notice that such ‘affective’ modifiers are some of the most
salient modifiers of beautiful -- with the highest MI score -- in the data (see Table 3).
5
The classification of modifiers into intensifiers (amplifiers and downtowners) and emphazisers is taken from (Quirk et al., 1985).
6
Paradis (1997:153) also lists the combination ?a bit beautiful as abnormal.
Table 2
Five most frequent modifiers of beautiful in the Collins Wordbanks Online corpus.
Modifier Number of occurrences MI score
so 865 4.73
very 763 4.9
really 189 3.52
absolutely 126 6.17
quite 97 3.91
Table 3
Five most salient modifiers of beautiful in the Collins Wordbanks Online corpus.
Modifier Number of occurrences MI score
stunningly 81 8.87
breathtakingly 58 8.52
hauntingly 41 8.05
strikingly 47 7.82
achingly 30 7.56
This shows that there is a different pattern in the distribution of modifiers across the various uses of beautiful, i.e., there
are different scales of meaning. The modifiers of degree collocate with the four described meanings of beautiful:
a very beautiful1 woman

a very beautiful2 voice
most beautiful3 idea
a very beautiful4 experience; most beautiful4 smell.
This fact emphasizes the positive cognitive evaluation in the proposed explications. The affective modifiers, however, are
only found along the uses of beautiful in the first meaning with reference to people or objects perceived via seeing:
stunningly beautiful woman

breathtakingly beautiful scenery.
This may suggest a slight difference in the emotive component of meaning of beautiful in its different senses. In the first,
prototypical meaning, the emotive component is formulated as ‘this someone can’t not feel something very good because
of this’. In all other meanings the emotive components are worded in such a way that they refer to the emotion associated
with seeing beautiful objects as a prototype: ‘this someone can’t not feel something very good because of this, like people
can’t not feel something very good at some times when they see some things.’
3.2. Krasivyj
The adjective krasivyj ‘beautiful’ is also polysemous in Russian, but the scope of its use does not fully correspond to the
use of beautiful in English. In Russian krasivyj is only used in reference to seeing and hearing and also in the evaluation of
human actions. Therefore, we propose meanings krasivyj1, krasivyj2 and krasivyj3 that correlate with the meanings
beautiful1, beautiful2 and beautiful3. The adjective has three gender forms: krasivyj (masculine), krasivaja (feminine),
krasivoe (neuter).7
Like beautiful1, krasivyj1 is used in the domain of aesthetic appreciation when seeing an object or a person evokes a
positive feeling. The range of use of beautiful1 and krasivyj1 is very similar and it can include people, parts of human body,
objects, places, and landscapes:
(34) Tamara, vy očen’ krasivaja ženščina. ‘Tamara, you are a very beautiful woman.’
7
In this study we disregard the use of short forms of the Russian adjectives under consideration (krasiv, krasiva, krasivo) due to their specificity
of use and to the additional elements of meaning associated with them (see e.g., Siegel, 1980).
(35) Davaj, ja xoču krasivoe plat’e kupit’, šikarnoe, na tvoju svad’bu. ‘Ok, I want to buy a beautiful dress for your
wedding, a splendid one.’
(36) Ja voobšče slyšala, čto London krasivyj gorod [. . .]. ‘I heard that London is a beautiful city [. . .].’
There is no evidence to suggest that this meaning of krasivyj1 in Russian is different from beautiful1 in English. Therefore,
a similar explication [A] can be proposed.
The second use of krasivyj in Russian is associated with perception via hearing:
(37) Tembr golosa u tebja krasivyj. Devuškam ponravitsja. ‘The timbre of your voice is beautiful. Girls will like it.’
(38) On daval svoim vozljublennym krasivye imena ‘He gave beautiful names to his lovers.’
This meaning is also covered by explication [B].

Unlike beautiful, the use of krasivyj is restricted to visual and aural perception and cannot be applied to smell, taste and
touch. The following sentences would be semantically abnormal:
(39) ?
Ėti rozy krasivo paxnut. ‘These roses smell beautiful’.
(40) ?
Ėti ustricy krasivy na vkus. ‘These oysters taste beautiful’.8
(41) ?
Ėta tkan’ krasiva na oščup’. ‘This fabric feels beautiful’.
Krasivyj3, like beautiful3, can be used to characterize human actions as the following examples illustrate:
(42) Davno ja ne videl takoj krasivoj igry! ‘I haven’t seen such a beautiful game for a long time.’
(43) Kapitan ‘‘Dinamo’’ posle ėtogo reabilitirovalsja, otkryv sčet krasivym udarom so štrafnogo. ‘The captain of
‘Dinamo’ got rehabilitated after that by opening the count with a shot from the penalty spot.’
(44) Pridumat’ krasivuju zadaču -- delo neprostoe. ‘To invent a beautiful [mathematical] problem is not an easy task.’
(45) Krasivaja teorija, pravda? ‘It’s a beautiful theory, isn’t it?’
(46) Ved’ Maša ne tol’ko roždaet krasivye idei, ona vzvalivaet na sebja vse xlopoty, svjazannye s ix voploščeniem.
‘Masha not only comes up with beautiful ideas, she also takes responsibility for their implementation.’
This range of use can be covered by explication [C], as proposed for beautiful3.
Unlike beautiful, krasivyj cannot be used to describe a subjective pleasant experience and cannot occur in the following
collocations: ?krasivyj opyt/vremja/eda ‘beautiful experience/time/meal’ -- such examples were not found in the Russian
corpus. Moreover, Russian does not have a conceptual equivalent of the English word experience (Wierzbicka, 2010:26),
which could be a good reason to explain this phenomenon.
Krasivyj, like beautiful, as a gradable adjective has comparative forms (krasivyj ‘beautiful’ -- krasivee/bolee krasivyj
‘more beautiful’ -- krasivejšij/samyj krasivyj ‘most beautiful’) and collocates with a variety of modifiers. It combines with
amplifiers (očen ‘very’, tak ‘so’) and downtowners (dovol’no ‘quite’, dostatočno ‘fairly/sufficiently’). As is the case with
beautiful, krasivyj collocates with a range of modifiers with an emotive element of meaning ( potrjasajušče ‘stunningly’,
izumitel’no ‘amazingly’, fantastičeski ‘fantastically’, etc.). This range of modifiers is found in the first sense of krasivyj, but
not in its second and third senses while the use of non-emotive modifiers (e.g., očen’ ‘very’) is common across all senses.
3.3. Bonito/a
The adjective bonito/a ‘beautiful’ is polysemous in Spanish -- like in English and Russian. As in the latter language, its
use does not fully correspond to the use of beautiful in English, as we shall see below. The adjective has two gender forms:
bonito (masculine) and bonita (feminine).
Like beautiful1, bonito/a1 is used for aesthetic appreciation in the cases in which the observation of an object, a person
or a landscape triggers a positive feeling. The range of use of beautiful1 and bonito/a1 is very similar and it can include
people, parts of human body, objects, places, and landscape. Some examples of this use are the following:
(47) Y la mujer española es muy bonita. Es más guapa que la mujer europea. ‘And the Spanish woman is very
beautiful. She’s more beautiful than the European woman.’
8
Russian lacks direct equivalents for the English verbs to taste and to feel (touching) (Viberg, 1983). It uses the expressions na vkus (literally
‘on taste’) and na oščup’ (literally ‘on touch/pinch).
(48) Antonio Pérez Suárez que es el alcalde de esta bonita localidad. ‘Antonio Pérez Suárez, who is the mayor of this
beautiful town.’
mira mira este vestido qué bonito! A que sí? ‘Look, look at this dress, how beautiful! Isn’t it?’
! ?
(49)
Bonito/a2 in Spanish is associated with perception via hearing as presented for English in explication [B] (see above):
(50) Pero era muy bonita</OVERLAP>, la voz. ‘But it was beautiful, the voice.’
The third meaning of bonito/a, which includes human activities, can be applied to actions that can be appreciated
physically (for example, playing football, dancing) or intellectually (producing an idea or writing). This meaning is also
shared by English and Russian, and follows the pattern of explication [C]:
(51) el último libro que ha escrito es muy bonito muy bonito. ‘the last book [s/he] has written is very beautiful very
beautiful’
(52) La idea era bonita pero la realización no llegó ‘the idea was beautiful but it was never carried out’
(53) (On a football match TV broadcast) qué inteligencia, qué jugada tan bonita! ‘How intelligent, what a beautiful
move!’
The fourth meaning of bonito/a, as described in explanation [D], summarizes a positive experience in which typical
collocations in English are, amongst others, experience, time, meal, and does not occur in Russian, as we mentioned in
the previous section. In Spanish, however, this meaning is possible9:
(54) Y fue una experiencia, en ese sentido fue muy bonita ‘and it was, in that sense, a very beautiful experience.’
(55) He pasado una velada bonita. ‘I have spent a beautiful evening.’
Unlike beautiful, the use of bonito/a -- like krasivyj -- is limited to visual and aural perception and cannot be applied to
smell, taste, and touch. The following sentences would be semantically abnormal:
(56) ?
Estas rosas huelen bonito / el olor de estas rosas es bonito. ‘These roses smell beautiful’ / ‘The smell of these
roses are beautiful’.
(57) ?
Estas ostras saben bonito / el sabor de estas ostras es bonito. ‘These oysters taste beautiful’ / ‘The taste of these
oysters is beautiful’.
(58) ?
Esta tela se siente bonita / el tacto de esta tela es bonito. ‘This fabric feels beautiful’ / ‘The touch of this fabric is
beautiful’.
In sum, the use of Spanish bonito/a behaves like English in many respects, although for some uses that involve some
of the senses, touch, taste and smell, its use is similar to Russian. In this sense, we can say that the use of bonito/a in
Spanish is based on examples that relate to hearing and seeing, or to personal and emotional positive experiences.
4. Corpus analysis of the domains of the concept ‘beautiful’ in English, Russian and Spanish
In order to study the relationship of the different domains characterized as ‘beautiful’ across the three languages we
have formulated the following research questions:
Do the three languages vary in the domains that are characterized as ‘beautiful’?
Do these domains have different salient contextual representations in English, Russian and Spanish?
These questions are consonant with Wittgenstein’s statement: ‘‘In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to
describe ways of living’’ (2007[1967]:11). In other words, there is an intrinsic relationship between aesthetic vocabulary
and culture.
Following the theoretical principles of corpus linguistics as a tool to describe delicate semantic and pragmatic
meanings formulated in Romero-Trillo (2008) we compared 100 nouns that are most frequently modified by beautiful,
9
The example of ‘beautiful meal’ used in the English description cannot be used in Spanish with the expression ‘comida bonita’, if we refer to the
quality of the food.
Table 4
100 most frequent nouns modified by beautiful grouped into categories.
People Nature (natural Time Artefacts Human actions Sound Characteristics Unclassified
phenomena and objects) and mental constructs
People Human features Objects Buildings, places
and parts of body (human-made) created by people
woman 1581 mind 250 place 405 day 322 thing 479 house 240 game 283 music 171 colour 59 part 85
girl 630 eye 195 garden 239 morning 65 book 136 city 240 work 65 voice 146 set 38
A. Gladkova, J. Romero-Trillo / Journal of Pragmatics 60 (2014) 140--159

people 352 face 164 country 178 moment 53 piece 105 building 138 life 45 song 73 example 31
daughter 224 hair 103 beach 143 night 46 image 103 home 132 sound 59
wife 186 body 83 countryside 133 evening 33 picture 75 town 88 word 51
child 167 smile 74 view 108 dress 71 room 74 story 45
man 147 hand 42 flower 103 car 55 church 70 name 37
boy 103 skin 40 lake 103 object 53 village 55
lady 92 island 101 clothes 48
baby 87 landscape 86 painting 47
actress 66 scenery 83 film 47
princess 63 setting 81 design 41
model 61 creature 80 gift 39
person 51 area 75 photograph 36
son 45 spot 67
bride 40 valley 65
girlfriend 35 sight 61
mother 34 tree 59
bird 57
surroundings 55
park 47
way 46
land 45
light 40
star 40
world 38
sunset 36
location 36
horse 36
animal 36
weather 35
ground 34
plant 48
3964 951 2799 519 1335 654 393 582 59 154
151
152
Table 5
100 most frequent nouns modified by krasivyj grouped into categories.
People Nature (natural Time Artefacts Human actions Sound Characteristics Unclassified

phenomena and mental
People Human features Objects Buildings and
and objects) constructs
and parts of body (human-made) places created
by people
ženščina (woman) 131 glaza (eyes) 36 mesto (place) 29 vešč’ (thing) 30 gorod žizn’ (life) 34 slovo (word) 53 forma nomer (number) 8
(city/town) 36 (form) 11
mužčina (man) 37 lico (face) 26 cvetok (flower) 19 kartina (picture) 27 dom (house) 31 žest (gesture) 12 imja (name) 21 sočetanie bukva (letter) 5
(combination) 4
devočka (girl) 33 ruki (hands) 10 vid (view) 12 plat’e (dress) 18 kvartira (flat) 22 ideja (idea) 10 nazvanie kombinacija
(title/name) 21 (combination) 4
paren’ (guy) 18 volosy (hair) 9 derevo (tree) 9 mašina (car) 14 zdanie (building) 18 teorija (theory) 7 fraza (phrase) 17 linija (line) 4
mal’čik (boy) 16 grud’ (breast) 9 list (leaf) 9 odežda (clothes) 10 inter’er (interior) 6 igra (game) 6 golos (voice) 16
devuška (girl) 15 nogi (legs) 9 rastenie (plant) 8 fotografija (photo) 10 most (bridge) 5 udar (shot) 6 skazka (tale) 10
ljudi (people) 12 telo (body) 9 priroda (nature) 7 upakovka (wrap) 9 osobnjak počerk muzyka (music) 10
(mansion) 4 (handwriting) 5
deti (children) 7 golova (head) 5 plod (fruit) 6 kniga (book) 8 fasad (facad) 4 zrelišče pesnja (song) 8
(spectacle) 5
čelovek (person) 6 brov’ (eyebrow) 5 strana (country) 6 rama (frame) 7 nič’ja (draw istorija (story) 8
game) 3
žena (wife) 5 zub (tooth) 3 pejzaž (landscape) 5 korobka (box) 6 rol’ (part/role) 3 legenda (legend) 7
mama (mom) 5 koža (skin) 3 doroga (way) 4 igruška (toy) 5 pravda (truth) 3 lozung (motto) 7
para (couple) 5 palec (finger) 3 kamen’ (stone) 4 obertka (cover) 5 melodija (melody) 4
akter (actor) 4 gora (mountain) 4 risunok (drawing) 5 stix (poem) 3
dama (lady) 4 alleja (alley) 4 illustracija (illustration) 4
sad (garden) 4 mebel’ (furniture) 4
jabloko (apple) 3 obložka (cover) 4
babočka (butterfly) 3 bant (ribbon) 3
predmet (object) 3
ornament (ornament) 3
298 127 172 0 175 126 74 185 15 21
Table 6
100 most frequent nouns modified by bonito/a grouped into categories.
People Nature Time Artefacts Human actions and Sound Characteristics Unclassified
(natural phenomena mental constructs
People Human features and natural objects) Objects Buildings
and parts of body (human-made)

mujer (woman) 29 cara (face) 35 vista (view) 7 momento cosa (thing) 22 casa (house) 39 sueño (dream) 18 historia (story) 60 colour suma (addition) 8
(moment) 9 (colour) 36
niña (girl) 22 cuerpo (body) 11 paisaje (landscape) 6 noche (night) 8 libro (book) 10 pueblo (village) 17 idea (idea)18 voz (voice) 31 personaje (character) 4
niño (boy)18 boca (mouth) 5 puerto (harbour) 4 etapa (stage) 4 traje (suit) 7 ciudad (city)14 verdad (truth) 15 nombre (name)22 coincidencia (coincidence) 4
chica (girl) 16 sonrisa (smile) 5 planta (plant) 4 época (age) 3 disco (record) 5 iglesia (church) 6 fútbol (football) 14 canción (song)21 combinación (combination) 4
muchacha (lass) 8 nariz (nose) 3 salmón (salmon) 4 regalo (present) 5 teatro (theatre) 6 vida (life) 13 frase (sentence) 13
esposa (wife) 3 nuca (nape) 3 parque (park) 3 carta (letter) 4 villa (villa) 6 manera (way) 10 música (music) 12
general (general) 3 colección chalet (cottage) 4 proyecto (project) 10 titulo (title) 6
(collection) 4
gente (people) 3 corbata (tie) 4 plaza (square) 4 jugada anécdota (anecdote) 4
(move -in games) 9
mamá (mum) 3 cuadro (painting) 4 rincón (corner) 4 película (film) 8 poesía (poem) 4
letra (letter) 4 Barcelona 3 juego (game) 8 tema (theme) 4
vestido (dress) 4 final (end) 8 timbre (pitch) 3
escrito (document) 4 jugada (move) 7
dibujo (drawing) 3 experiencia
(experience) 7
foto (photograph) 3 trabajo (work) 6
película (fllm) 3 imagen (image) 6
regalo (present) 3 obra (work) 9
reloj (clock/watch) 3 reto (challenge) 5
retrato (portrait) 3 tema (theme) 4
ropa (clothes) 3 papel (role) 4
expresión (expression) 4
aventura (adventure) 4
parte (part) 4
acción (action) 3
celebración
(celebration) 3
deporte (sport) 3
producción (production) 3
teatro (play) 3
pugna (struggle) 3
105 62 28 24 94 103 209 180 36 20
153
Fig. 1. Noun categories modifying beautiful.
krasivyj and bonito/a. The nouns were grouped into eight categories: people (consisting of people and parts of body and
human features), nature (natural phenomena and objects), time, artefacts (consisting of human-created objects and
buildings and places created by people), human action and mental categories, sound, characteristics and unclassified.10
In the analysis we counted the number of occurrences for each noun in the corpora and then assigned the occurrences
to each of the selected categories. Tables 2--4 show the 100 most frequent nouns in each corpus (see Tables 5 and 6).11
In English the most numerous category is ‘people’ with 3964 examples of people reference and 951 examples of
reference to parts of the human body. It is then followed by the ‘nature’ category with 2799 examples. ‘Artifacts’ is the third
most numerous group, with 1335 references to human-made objects and 654 references to buildings and places created
by people. The following groups are ‘sound’ (582 examples) and ‘time’ (519 examples). Human actions and mental
constructs attracted 393 examples, ‘unclassified’ and ‘characteristics’ have 154 and 59 examples respectively.
In Russian, like in English, the most numerous group refers to ‘people’, with 298 examples of people reference and
127 examples of reference to parts of the human body. The second group most represented in the examples is ‘artifacts’
with 175 examples of reference to human-made objects and 126 examples of reference to buildings and places created by
people. The third group is ‘sound’ with 185 examples. The fourth group is ‘nature’ with 172 examples. ‘Unclassified’ has
21 examples and ‘characteristics’ -- 15. The category ‘time’ was not represented in the sample we searched, but it does not
mean that the combination of krasivyj with reference to time is impossible; it is relatively rare.
In Spanish ‘human actions and mental constructs’ is the most numerous group of nouns characterized as bonito/a with
209 examples of use. The second group is ‘artifacts’ with 103 examples of buildings and places created by people and
94 examples of human-made objects. The third group is ‘sound’ (180 examples). The fourth group is ‘people’ with
105 examples of reference to people and 62 examples of reference to parts of the human body. ‘Characteristics’ attracts
36 examples, ‘time’ -- 24 examples and ‘unclassified’ -- 20 examples.
In Figs. 1--3 we show the proportion of use of the categories associated to the uses of ‘beautiful’ in the three languages.
The data suggest that slightly different patterns emerge for the three languages. In English and Russian, the most
common group of words described as beautiful / krasivyj are people (with the word woman/ ženščina at the top of the list),
particularly if reference to people and parts of human body to be counted together. In English the following most salient
categories are nature and artefacts. In Russian this order is different. Reference to people is followed by artefacts and then
by words referring to sound and only then nature. In Spanish reference to human actions and mental constructs appears to
be most common. It is then followed by reference to artefacts, then sound and then people. In broader terms, in English
beautiful most commonly characterizes subjects and phenomena that are not created by people (people themselves and
nature in a broad sense). In Spanish, there is a clear preference for reference to human-created phenomena (artefacts,
action, abstract concepts and sound). Russian falls in between with overall balance between the two types. This might
suggest that these languages have slightly different models of cognitive representations for beauty, and that the
10
The group ‘unclassified’ contains items that could not be categorized in any of the groups.
11
We used slightly different search techniques for the three corpora. CWO automatically produces a list of nouns modified by beautiful in the
whole corpus. We were able to use the number of occurrences of 100 nouns across the size of the whole corpus. For RNC and RAC such search
possibilities do not exist and we created a list of nouns collocating with the words under analysis. For the Spanish corpus we used Peninsular
Spanish data; for the Russian corpus we randomly selected 1500 examples based on searches for krasivyj (all forms) + noun from two
subcorpora (written data 2000--2011, around 58 million words and oral data 1975--2011, around 8 million words).
Fig. 2. Noun categories modifying krasivyj.
Fig. 3. Noun categories modifying bonito/a.
dimensions ‘created by people’ and ‘not created by people’ play a major role in such distinction. This could be important for
the understanding of aesthetics in general, and specifically for some areas of applied aesthetics like the cognitive and
linguistic appraisal of natural landscapes (Romero-Trillo and Espigares, 2012), advertisement (Bjerke and Polegato,
2001; Fenko et al., 2010; Strauss, 2005), fashion (Mears, 2010), landscape design (Naveh, 1995) and website design
(Cyra et al., 2010; Hillier, 2003).
5. Discussion
The results of our analysis show that beautiful, and its equivalents krasivyj and bonito/a, are words with multiple
meanings, and the three languages present significant differences in the patterns of use.
Specifically, the three languages share the basic and primary sensory meaning of beautiful, a characteristic of objects,
landscapes and living beings whose observation is pleasant. The meaning extending to the hearing domain is also shared
across the three languages.
The main difference between the use of the concept in the three languages is that in English beautiful is applicable to
the five senses -- seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, while in Russian and Spanish the use is restricted to
seeing and hearing, possibly due to linguistic and cultural reasons.
From a linguistic perspective we would like to note that sense and senses are important cultural and cognitive concepts
with a relatively high frequency of use in English (Wierzbicka, 2010). In Russian, however, the vocabulary for talking about
‘senses’ is less common than in English and also slightly different, as senses are usually represented as čuvstva
‘feelings’. Two other words are also used to render perception -- oščuščenie ‘feeling/perception/sense’ and vosprijatie
(roughly, ‘perception’), but their meanings do not fully match with senses either. Iordanskaja (1979) on the basis of the
analysis of the semantics of corresponding verbs in Russian čuvstvovat’ ‘feel’, oščuščat’ ‘feel/perceive/sense’ and
vosprinimat’ ‘perceive’ argues that in the Russian ‘naïve’ model of perception smelling, touching and taste are opposed to
sight and hearing. In particular, she demonstrates that the verb vosprinimat’ ‘perceive’ is applicable to any mental ability,
including reason, sight and hearing, while the verbs čuvstvovat’ ‘feel’ and oščuščat’ ‘feel/perceive/sense’ are applicable to
olfaction, touch, taste, kinaesthetic and other internal senses, but not seeing and hearing. Therefore, in the Russian
conceptual world the distinction between seeing and hearing, on the one hand, and touching, smelling and tasting on the
other, is more distinct than in English. This may have a clear effect in the conceptualization of evaluative aesthetic
vocabulary.
From a sociological perspective we believe that some economic factors could also play a role in this linguistic
development. Howes (2005), for instance, argues that in modern culture consumerism is associated with the involvement of
all senses. In particular, he associates the emergence of departmental stores and the related practice of displaying goods
approachable and freely touchable for the public in the mid-nineteenth century with the transformation of the nature of
capitalism from ‘industrial’ to ‘consumerist’ (Howes, 2005:284). Based on this fact, Howes observes a significant increase in
the appeal to the five senses since the mid-nineteenth century, with a particular increase in the past decades. This opinion is
also shared by Bauman (1998), who avers that the value of the individual in recent times has changed from being part of the
labour force to being a prospective consumer of goods. The revitalization of the senses vis-à-vis consumerism has been a
typical phenomenon between the 1890s and the first years of the 20th century. In this period, and in order to maintain the level
and cycle of consumerism, firms promoted the appeal to the senses by the socialization of luxury goods, with its aesthetic
attraction, no matter how superfluous their function might be in comparison with other more economical objects that realize
the same function, e.g. luxury penmanship instruments (Lipovetsky and Roux, 2003).
From the point of view of three cultures discussed in this paper, consumer capitalism was particularly associated with
Anglo culture (in countries such as UK and USA and also Australia and Canada). The economic development of Russia and
Spain, on the contrary, was associated with a significantly smaller impact on consumerism. In particular, Russia’s nascent
consumerism in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century was limited to a very
narrow upper class (Stearns, 2006). This was followed by communist rule in the twentieth century that cut short the
development of consumerism. In the case of Spain, industrialization was slow relative to that of Britain and the USA in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Landes, 1999; Bhattacharyya, 2011). This fact led to a weaker development of
consumerism and, possibly, to a more reduced attention to the ‘commercialization’ of the five senses. Our hypothesis is that
this difference in historical and economic development across three cultures could be the reason for the enlargement of the
meaning of beautiful to the five senses in English and the absence of a similar phenomenon in Russian and Spanish.
Although we are aware that the connection between consumerism and the linguistic representation of aesthetics
through the five senses would require a separate in-depth study, we would like to provide some linguistic data to support
our approach. A historical account from Google books data (as reported in Google books Ngram Viewer) already reports
instances of use of the expressions beautiful smell and feels beautiful in the 1840s. With taste we also found one instance
of tastes beautiful in 1799, with a subsequent steady use from 1871 onwards. This confirms the association of beautiful
with senses other than sight and hearing since around the mid-nineteenth century in English. These findings correspond
with the moment in history indicated by Howes (2005) when the appeal to the senses and the development of consumer
capitalism began. In the case of Russian and peninsular Spanish, there is no use of krasivyj or bonito with proximity
senses in the data, i.e. smell, taste and touch, as has been described in this article.
As regards the distribution of nouns in the categories, we can observe that the three languages show different
distribution of the nouns that can be characterized as ‘beautiful’. In English the majority of uses falls into the category of
‘people’ (43%) and ‘nature’ (25%). In Russian the majority of the use falls under the domains of ‘people’ (36%) and
‘artifacts’ (25%), while in Spanish the majority of nouns belong to the categories of ‘human actions’ (24%) and ‘artifacts’
(23%).12
In this sense, it is very interesting to notice that while in English 67% of the examples fall under the two categories
mentioned above (‘people’ and ‘nature’), leaving the remaining 33% to be distributed amongst the rest, the distribution in
Spanish is more evenly with ‘sound’ (21%) and ‘people’ (20%) immediately after the two most frequent of ‘human actions’
and ‘artifacts’. We could say that Russian behaves in between these two extremes, as Fig. 2 shows. These differences
reaffirm the existence of different models of perception of ‘beauty’ embedded in these languages.
6. Conclusion
In our study we have proved that ‘beautiful’ represents a salient cognitive concept primarily related to emotions,
evaluation and perception. The study of its linguistic context offers some observations that can be of value to linguistics
12
In this sense, it is interesting to highlight that the Spanish use bonito/a for the esthetics of nature is much more reduced than the English or
Russian equivalents. Specifically, the Spanish use is 3%, while in Russian it is 14%, and in English it is 25%, which is the second most frequent
category in the data.
and aesthetics, both from a theoretical and from an applied perspective (Bjerke and Polegato, 2001; Fenko et al., 2010;
Strauss, 2005).
The linguistic evidence from English beautiful, Russian krasivyj and Spanish bonito/a, observed in our data suggests
that the three words are polysemous, although different patterns of polysemy emerge. To start, the three languages share
the meaning of ‘pleasure derived from observing other living beings, objects or natural phenomena and objects’. The
meaning extending to the domain of hearing is also shared across these languages. Similarly, all the languages share the
meaning reflecting evaluation of human actions deriving from observing them physically or intellectually.
The patterns of polysemy diverge when the meaning refers to a pleasant personal experience. This is found in English
and Spanish but it is absent from Russian. A close semantic link between this meaning of beautiful and experience, on the
one hand, and bonito/a and experiencia, on another hand, leads us to suggest that the absence of a concept similar to
‘experience’ in Russian may explain the absence of this meaning in Russian.
The three languages also diverge in the applicability of these words to the description of perception evoked by different
senses. English is the only language in which beautiful is applicable to all five senses. In Russian and Spanish krasivyj
and bonito/a can only refer to seeing and hearing.
The different distribution of meaning across different lexical domains suggests the presence of different models of
cultural and contextual patterns in these three languages. The analyses seem to differ in the association of ‘beautiful’ to
natural or human-made phenomena and objects. English shows a preference for the use of beautiful with natural (non
human-made) phenomena, in Spanish there is a tendency for the use of bonito/a with human-made phenomena and
Russian falls in between English and Spanish with a balanced representation between natural and human-made
phenomena.
In sum, this study has offered a new framework for the cross-linguistic conceptual analysis of beauty as a prototypical
element in the description of aesthetic perception, with an emphasis of its cultural significance. We believe that this
methodology can be further applied in the analysis of the ‘aesthetics’ domain across different languages.
Acknowledgements
We thank the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) for its support (Project FFI2012-30839). We would like
to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve our article. We are grateful to Anna
Wierzbicka for her helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank the organizers and participants of the workshop
‘‘Sensory Perceptions in Language and Cognition’’ within the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
(August 2012) for their feedback on an earlier version of the paper.
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Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an

2. Theoretical background: the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

English Spanish Russian

Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING THING, YO I, you, ALGUIEN someone,

someone feels something (good/bad) (in part of the body),

(a) person X thought about person Y like this:

3. Analysis of the data: the semantics of beautiful, krasivyj and bonito

- Cobuild Wordbanks Online [CWO] for English,

- Russian National Corpus [RNC] for Russian,

[A] something/someone is beautiful1 (This woman is beautiful. This vase is beautiful.)

[B] beautiful2 singing/voice/tune

The following analysis presents each meaning in detail.

(1) My mother was beautiful and never washed dishes. . .

(9) Barcelona play beautiful football.

(14) Oh yes garlic in things is wonderful. It’s beautiful flavour.

 For beautiful1 (seeing) the prototypical opposite is ugly:

 Beautiful2 (hearing) also has the prototypical opposite in ugly:

(26) It was an ugly sound.

Modifier Number of occurrences MI score

Modifier Number of occurrences MI score

 a very beautiful1 woman

 stunningly beautiful woman

This meaning is also covered by explication [B].

A. Gladkova, J. Romero-Trillo / Journal of Pragmatics 60 (2014) 140--159

A. Gladkova, J. Romero-Trillo / Journal of Pragmatics 60 (2014) 140--159

A. Gladkova, J. Romero-Trillo / Journal of Pragmatics 60 (2014) 140--159

Fig. 1. Noun categories modifying beautiful.

Fig. 2. Noun categories modifying krasivyj.

Fig. 3. Noun categories modifying bonito/a.

Cobuild Wordbanks Online [CWO]. http://www.collinslanguage.com/content-solutions/wordbanks (accessed May 2012--September 2013).

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING THING, YO I, you, ALGUIEN someone,

For beautiful1 (seeing) the prototypical opposite is ugly:

Beautiful2 (hearing) also has the prototypical opposite in ugly:

a very beautiful1 woman

stunningly beautiful woman