Is there justice in this world? A cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of the conceptualisation of ‘justice’

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present article compares the conceptualisation of the Spanish term justicia and the Russian spravedlivost’ with the English justice to determine the contextual uses and specific cultural features of the concept. The data used in the study is taken from three online corpora – British National Corpus, Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), and Russian National Corpus. The investigation proposes the explications of the concept within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework as it offers an effective tool to decompose and specify the linguistic features reflected in the selected languages. The results of the study reveal the main differences and similarities between the three languages and, in sum, prove the relevance of culture-specific semantic analysis of abstract concepts and the use of NSM as a useful tool in cross-cultural studies.